I was involved in bring cable to New Prague many years ago. In addition to granting the city one or more channels for their own use (it costs the cable company little or nothing to do this), the cable service provider normally pays the city a franchise fee. It's probably listed seperatly on your monthly bill. It may also pay a fee for use of any utility poles that it uses for it's cabling throughout the city. Larry -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Curtis Griesel Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 11:10 AM To: TCLUG List Subject: Re: [tclug-list] comcast strikes another We can't get DSL in my area of Bloomington because the phone infrastructure is too old. Comcast has a monopoly on broadband service, and residential service starts at $60 per month. Of course this is not all Comcast's fault, the city council could take a little leadership on broadband access for Bloomington. But I suspect the city is in cahoots with Comcast because they get their community-access cable services and infrastructure from Comcast. I wonder what other benefits the council gets from Comcast that they make us continue to pay Comcast $60 per month for their marginal internet services, but that's the state of affairs right now. Curtis On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Justin Krejci <jus at krytosvirus.com> wrote: > I believe that they lie to customers about their policies. They offer a > service that they do not provide. They also increased my monthly fees > quite massively in the past few years. Maybe the service got faster, but > I didn't care. I'd rather have it slower and pay less, but they didnt' > ask. So of course I am seeking other providers. DSL - slower but cheaper plus you have a wider choice of ISP in most areas. _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20090210/2fc1cb6f/attachment.htm