Editorial: AS I SEE IT

Anyone can understand the City Council's frustration with hearing customer complaints about their cable operator. The thing is, no matter where you go in this country, such complaints are reasonable and not unique. No matter what or how many cable providers are in town.

No matter where you go in this nation you will hear cable customers complain about poor customer service, high and escalating rates and fees, the lack channel choices, and so forth. It is easy to dream that some competition will bring relief. People are screaming for competition. Competition would be great, but thanks to cable and telecom deregulation, competition is dwindling. The cost has been devastating to communities.

Expressed in the Cable act 1984, thanks to the wisdom of visionary leaders in Congress, the regulated local franchise environment provides the ground work to ensure a strategic opportunity for local communities to meet their own unique need.

Since telecommunication lobbyist managed to relax cable regulations of the '84 Cable Act the chances for competition dwindled considerably. Today we are down to a small handful of companies compared to more than 60 companies twenty years ago. We may be headed for nearly a duopoly at best.

Worcester's cry for competition, may reap only an exchange of one monopoly for another. Recent de-regulatory efforts, at the Fed and State level, has demonstrated no substantial benefit for consumers, communities or municipalities.

It seems leaders are blind to the special interest of the telecommunication giants. There seems to be little to no cost/risk analysis associated with the false promises of telecommunication deregulation.

Here's one example of the failure of good cost/risk decision making (Michigan):

Testifying before the U.S House committee on Commerce and Energy on January 29^th , Annie Folger, Mid-Peninsula Community Media Center, describes how AT&T's U-Verse “PEG platform” is an inferior technology which is only applied to PEG Access. Folger states, “The U-Verse PEG system is sub-par, low in resolution, cumbersome and PEG channels are confined to a separate system inferior to commercial channels on AT&T system in virtually every way that matters to a viewer”. (That sounds familiar.) Folger continued, “AT&T system will not pass through closed captioning on the PEG channels, making educational programming to hearing impaired impossible, DVR's cannot record PEG, it takes 45-90 seconds to load the channel, Channels are very hard to find, no second audio program, the PEG channels have 25% as much resolution, Have smaller picture, Picture stutters when used for sports dance or motion.”

Our leaders have to nip this in the bud. Citizens need to engage and participate in local media with the ability to express their unique interest and cultures, sharing neighborly perspectives, information, and local issues. We need congressional and local government assurance that Public Access media needs are protected for the long term. Check out the following PEG issues.

The Alliance for Community Media has documented the impact of cable deregulation in detail http://www.saveaccess.org/node/2109

The above, gives an indication of just how much state cable franchising have departed from the Federal protections previously in place since 1984. Sadly, this list will grow as more state cable franchise go into effect and new changes become apparent.

Call your Representative today. Tell them to support long term assurances for continued growth for our PEG channels:

Ed Markey
202-225-2836 202-225-5288 781-396-2900

James McGovern
(202) 225-6101 (508) 831-7356

City Manager Michael O'Brien
(508) 799-1175 citymanager@ci.worcester.ma.us

Mayor Konstantina Lukes 508-799-1153 mayor@ci.worcester.ma.us