O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay!” Pardon my chortling, but it’s not often that I espy unadulterated good news coming from the General Assembly. According to Jeffrey Kelley at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a bill to encourage cable-TV competition sailed through the Senate Commerce and Labor Committee yesterday in an undisputed decision.
As Kelley explains:
Verizon Communications Inc. is laying a network in more than a dozen states, including Virginia, that will allow the phone giant to provide video and compete with satellite and cable-TV providers. But the New York-based telecommunications company wants to sidestep what it believes is too long a process to gain cable-licensing deals from every city or county it plans to serve.
Real competition is long overdue. Verizon, as I understand it, wants to extend fiber-optic cable directly into the home, at least in selected neighborhoods. That would provide a lot more bandwidth than can be pumped through a coaxial cable.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but the quality of my Comcast, “high speed” Internet access has diminished steadily over the nearly four years that I have been subscribing to it. It still works intermittently as billed, but much of the time it’s no faster than dial-up service. For that I need to pay $49.95 per month (plus taxes)?
Bring it on, Verizon, bring it on!
