Why we can’t have nice things

Subtitle: How we get nice things and then they make them too expensive.

Recently contractors for Comcast/Xfinity have been all over Louisville drilling holes along the utility easement to lay conduit for fiber optic cabling for Internet and cable. The city has a brief here on the project which is supposed to be complete by the end of October 2018. Bad news if you are a customer in the service area, the city release says:

Comcast customers will experience an outage from 30 minutes to 6 hours with the typical outage being 2 ½ hours. Any outages for this kind of scheduled work is typically done between 7:00 AM and 4:00 PM.

The full Comcast Q&A/FAQ is here.

Once the conduit/piping was laid at my house along the outside of back fence, things went quiet. Then today there were literally 15 trucks outside and across the street while they had a team meeting.

If you are stuck with little more than dial-up modem Internet speed, either because of cost, or because a faster service is not available to you, no doubt you’d think this is great. I already have CenturyLink 1Gbps fiber service, and this will likely be very good in the short term as competition drives down prices.

In the long term, this isn’t good news. The only winners will be Comcast.

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