Cities Comcast is Leaving Say Company Providing Few Answers

Comcast is looking for any sort of good promotion these days. When they aren't throwing pizza parties to promote their product or dealing with fallout from their security system being terrible, they are continuing to finish near last in customer satisfaction surveys.

Now, Comcast is taking heat for their decision to abandon Detroit and a number of other Midwest cities. Comcast is leaving these cities so that they can get below a 30 percent market share of US pay-TV homes, a requirement set by federal regulators if Comcast wants their acquisition of Time Warner Cable to be approved.

Those in Detroit, Minneapolis and elsewhere will become customers of GreatLand Connections Inc. GreatLand is a spin-off of Comcast customers to a company run and partially owned by Charter Communications.

In order for GreatLand to take the place of Comcast in a number of cities, those city councils must approve a new franchise agreement with GreatLand. Both Comcast and Charter are telling cities that they do not have that long to approve those franchise agreements with mid-December deadlines.

But a number of cities are telling the companies that they simply don’t have the information to make such a decision to approve a franchise agreement. In fact, very little is known other than GreatLand starting with close to $8 billion in debt.

One city administrator claimed that “answers have been inadequate at best and mostly not forthcoming." An executive director for another city’s county commission group claims that “ Comcast hasn’t provided adequate information about GreatLand, and there’s nobody to talk to at the new company ." One elected trustee from another city bluntly said that "We don't have the answers we need."

People in Detroit should be sad to see Comcast leave. In 2006, Comcast & AT&T pushed through deregulation laws which allowed Comcast to get out of hundreds of franchise deals with local governments. Let’s look at some of the highlights of Comcast’s time while operating in and around Detroit:

• Comcast celebrated the first anniversary of cable deregulation by raising the price of its cheapest cable package by 25% in many communities; rates for other service tiers jumped between 9%-25%.

• Comcast removed the high majority of local service stations for people to visit around the state for customer service.

• Comcast fought cities around the state to get out of previously agreed-upon franchise agreements that mandated Comcast support local TV channels.

• After Comcast finished dead last in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, Comcast successfully pushed through more deregulation laws which stripped cities to regulate minimum customer service standards for its residents.

• A spokesman for a group led by Comcast justified all of these anti-consumer moves by claiming, " that's what the market wants ."