The Comcast/NBCU merger poses a real threat to the future of innovation, competition, and the open Internet. Put simply: size matters. The larger Comcast gets, the more market power it has and the more all other markets that depend on broadband and media will be distorted.

Susan Crawford knows this better than most and explains why everyone should be concerned about it.

As we've harped on time and time again:

The crucial thing to understand is that high-speed Internet access to the home really is a crushingly-expensive natural monopoly service to install. The telephone companies haven’t found a way to make this work, because it’s so much more expensive to dig up the streets to install fiber than it is to upgrade cable electronics to DOCSIS 3.0. So they have backed off. The cable industry has made its investment, and is ready to reap its rewards of scale and high fixed costs - secure in the knowledge that no competition is coming after it, and having divided up the country neatly among its members. Meanwhile, the telcos are steadly losing fistfuls of money.

As Morgan once said of railroads, “The American public seems to be unwilling to admit . . . that it has a choice between regulated legal agreements and unregulated extralegal agreements. We should have cast away more than 50 years ago the impossible doctrine of protection of the public by railway competition.” In the cable world, we are deep into unregulated extralegal agreements, and competition is not going to rescue us.

The longer communities wait to build this important infrastructure, the harder it will be. It is hard to imagine national candidate speaking more stridently about the important of the open Internet than did Obama and even he bowed to the pressure of the private Internet access providers. While we should pressure the federal government to regulate in the public interest, we must take responsibility for our future at the local level with smart investments.

As part of our continuing effort to shed light on the tendency of privately owned telcos and cablecos to consolidate rather than compete, we would like to note comments from Qwest's Chief Financial Officer. Stop the Cap! has the story:

Chief Financial Officer Joe Euteneuer said the time was right for Qwest to sell operations in the north-central and mountain west region because there were too many competitors in the marketplace. Euteneuer said the telecommunications market needs to resemble the cable-TV business, which has been heavily concentrated into two huge powerhouses — Comcast and Time Warner Cable.

So not only do these executives think there is too much competition (find me a subscriber who believes that!), but believes we should have less and less competition moving forward. These folks are incredibly candid about their plans to diminish what little competition exists -- perhaps because the FCC has made it clear that it plans to take no actions to encourage further competition. The National Broadband Plan pretty much ignores this problem, perhaps its biggest failing.

For those of us who care about the future of broadband and the communities that increasingly depend upon it, the spectre of even larger privately-owned incumbent providers (with increasingly distant headquarters) is daunting. Bigger and bigger incumbents mean it is that much harder to build better networks that will compete with them. These massive companies cross-subsidize their operations to dramatically cut rates in newly competitive areas specifically to drive out new competitors (public and private). Larger companies have greater advantages for securing discounts on key inputs, allowing them to offer lower prices than communities are naturally able.

This is yet more evidence that the private-company approach to broadband infrastructure is bankrupt.

If we are destined to have only a few entities owning the networks on which we depend, those entities must be directly accountable to the communities, rather than focused solely on increasing profits every year.

Remember our post that privately owned broadband networks tend toward consolidation? A Wall Street Journal article notes that Verizon CEO Seidenbuerg agrees:

Mr. Seidenberg also had some words for his smaller competitors like Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA, which claim to have their own 4G networks up and running already. He thinks the companies, along with other smaller wireless operators, should join forces. "There are too many players in the industry," he said. "I think it would be healthy if there's more consolidation."

So while most of want more competition (which is to say, actual competition rather than essentially the same limited choices from a few providers), they are working to eliminate the few choices we have.

The same story also peeks into the super fast world of the 4G networks that some would have us believe will obviate the need for a faster, more reliable FTTH connection:

Mr. Shammo said Verizon's 4G network, which is based on technology called Long-Term Evolution, can deliver between 1 and 12 megabits per second of data, allowing for tiered pricing structure similar to home wired Internet service.

Call me crazy, but 4G seems like a step backward for most of us who care about fast broadband.

In North Carolina, Salisbury has launched the state's second FTTH network, as communities continue to build the next-generation broadband infrastructure in which their massive incumbent providers decline to invest. We have offered in-depth coverage of Fibrant as they prepared to launch the new services. As of Tuesday, Nov 2, the network softly launched, which is to say they will slowly ramp up the number of paying customers as they gain experience and confidence. Stop the Cap! also covered the launch with extensive coverage as well as both praise and criticism for Fibrant's approach.

Some of the 115 early, free testers of Fibrant became the first paying customers Monday, with the utility scheduling installations for 200 other residents on a waiting list.

A local group has posted a number of videos about Fibrant, including a recent one that compares Fibrant's speeds to the pathetic offering of Time Warner Cable (see bottom of this post). In a totally unrelated development (or so Time Warner Cable would have us believe), TWC has rapidly increased its broadband tiers in the region. In this, TWC has joined Comcast in downplaying the role competition has in forcing incumbent investment. If you believe TWC, competition plays no role in their investment decisions, a fascinating approach to succeeding in an area they constantly claim is a very competitive market.

The cable giant’s new download speed can reach 50 megabits per second, twice as fast as Fibrant’s 25 Mbps. However Time Warner’s fastest upload speed — 5 Mbps — is still slower than Fibrant’s best upload speed of 25 Mbps and standard upload speed of 15 Mbps. Time Warner is more expensive.

Of course, as the video shows, TWC's actual broadband differs significantly from its advertised speeds. I would like to see a speedtest comparing the new TWC offerings -- though I wonder if they have instituted the...