These guys are the only industry I know where they promote use of the service and then restrict how much you can use. Silly, really.

Only Verizon seems to have fully understood the game–first fiber to the home wins.

(Back in my Metromedia Fiber days, there were plenty of stories about Verizon techs sabotaging other carriers’ fiber runs in NY subway conduits. I suspect they weren’t the only ones who got “careless” with other people’s cables.)

Until we can open up the local franchises to competition though, we’ll still be at the mercy of the cable companies. In Alameda, they have a government run cable provider that competes with Comcast and not only do they not throttle, but they charge less than Comcast as well. In fact, because of the competition, Comcast offers a package that is $10 less per month, then the rest of the Bay Area.

It was pretty cool while I lived there and I got to know a lot of the Alameda employees. They told me there was real bad blood over their competition and that Comcast tech guys would slash their cables all the time. I think Comcast even had to pay a fine because they slammed about 10% of Alameda’s customers during the summer that I lived there. One day I’m supporting the local government and the next, I was receiving Comcast cable without every giving any authorization. At first I thought Alameda went under and sold it off to Comcast. It was really bizarre when it happened, I went bonkers.

Even with Alameda’s unthrottled bit-torrenting, it still wasn’t as cool as when I lived at Zooomr’s HQ’s for three months and got to tap into fiber for the first time. Not only could I download large files in nothing flat, but when I seeded my own videos on Bit Torrent, they spread like wildfire. I’ve never gotten that kind of exposure with cable or DSL. I’d pay twice what I’m paying to get access to fiber now, but Comcast locked the rest of the Bay Area into an exclusive deal, so that the local governments could solve short term budget problems.