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By Robert Howden, Texans for Economic Progress
Word Count: 592
They were lucky it was three o’clock in the morning. Time Warner cable, that is, was lucky that so few of its customers in the Rio Grande Valley were tuned into ESPNU, which features college sports, at a bit after three on Saturday, May 2nd. That’s because for a few moments the channel switched from showing hard working athletes to heavy breathing porn stars.
The company apologized and blamed it on a technical foul up.
While some might have found this horrific and others, hilarious, it’s an example of the kind of shoddy cable service the residents of many of Texas’ small towns and rural communities get. Although folks in the state’s larger cities enjoy the fruits of competition, where a choice of providers keeps prices down and service quality up, small town and rural Texans are often forced to accept a cable monopoly.
It’s clear the cable companies know this and take advantage of it. According to a recent report from the Federal Communications Commission, when customers have a choice of TV providers their bills are at least 20 percent lower, if not more.
The cable companies, of course, offer excuses. That FCC report points out that cable company package rates have gone up more than 122 percent between 1995 and 2008. The cable companies often say they need to raise rates like this to cover the cost of “network upgrades.” It’s getting old, however. Despite years of claiming that they’re upgrading their networks, many cable companies still provide programming to rural customers in the old-fashioned analog format instead of sending a crisper cleaner digital signal and many still refuse to offer those customers broadband Internet service.
The other excuse is that the poor old cable companies are victims of higher programming costs, which they have to pass along to their customers in order to survive. This excuse ignores the fact that many of these companies either own their own cable networks or they own the companies that provide the programming.
And, when programming disappears, as recently happened in Wichita Falls when the TV Guide channel simply went away, rates don’t go down. Happy to pass along higher costs, the cable companies become quite stingy when it comes to passing along savings.
As Executive Director of Texans for Economic Progress, I meet with citizens all across our state in what we call our Power of Connectivity meetings. At these meetings, high prices and bad service are a constant lament. Customers are willing to pay, but they want to pay a fair price for a decent product.
They also say they’ll pay more if they get more. Broadband Internet service, for example, is taken for granted in places like Houston, Austin, Dallas and San Antonio but in small communities people are forced to continue living with the buzz, click and tortoise-like speed of dial up.
Unfortunately, these days this is more than just annoying, it’s an artificial constraint on economic progress. Business owners, today, need the advantages brought by lightning fast communications in order to remain competitive. Students need a fast Internet as an educational resource. Doctors need it to keep up with the latest in medical science. It’s not a luxury and rural cable monopolies should stop treating it as such.
Small town Texans, just like their big city brethren, deserve the forward thinking solutions that have brought competition and innovation in television entertainment and Internet services. It is far past time for the costly cable monopolies to start caring about their customers and stop standing in the way of progress.
Robert Howden is the Executive Director for Texans for Economic Progress.
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