 Is Comcast the KING?A recent article by Daniel Roth in one of my favorite magazines, WIRED, quotes Comcast CEO Brian Roberts declaring, “DSL is the new dialup,” a thing of the past, SLOW. Currently, broadband connections to the internet can be broken down into 3 types: Cable Modems (53%), DSL (40%) and other (7%). And it seems that Comcast is leading the way in terms of control of the market with 14.7 million broadband customers. By the end of 2007, 22% of every dollar spent on broadband in the US went directly to Comcast. And what’s even worse is that there seems to be a magical thinking that competition will solve all the problems down the road
in terms of innovation, finding new fast, reliable ways to connect to the internet.
Two companies are diligently working to catch up. Verizon has spent $20 billion to create Fios, while AT&T has spent $8 billion to create a fiber network U-verse. Together these new technologies only cover 20% of the country with analysts projecting that they will basically stall out at 40% penetration of the US. So who seems to be the King?
Comcast seems to be thinking big these days. About the same time Hulu.com rolled out streaming video of TV shows and movies, Comcast launched their own version called Fancast.com as well as a new open software for interactive digital cable called Tru2way which works with iPhone-like third party apps. Roberts also promises amazing customer service and the roll out of Docsis 3.0 which is a new internet high speed service that they project will exceed 100 megabytes per second. For those of you who don't know what that means, lets just say the internet police will have to start giving speeding tickets if that kind of speed can be achieved sitting on your couch! 
However, it seems Comcast has created a bad reputation over the past few years with some of its subscribers. In October of 2007 AP released an article with a headline "Comcast Actively Hinders Subscribers’ File-sharing Traffic.” This puts them at the center of network neutrality issues and questions whether they are attempting to discriminate between different kinds of traffic and favoring their own products over that of other companies.
Does this mean that suddenly your internet viewing choices could be controlled by one very large and very dominant company in the market? Well let's not go that far, but Bill Gates did invest $1 billion in Comcast, if that tells you where he is placing his bets. And in the Wired article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying, "Comcast has become our top partner, or close to it."
In August of 2008, the FCC came out with a 67 page report stating that Comcast had lied about its actions, schemed to prevent oversight, confused customers, and put the future of Net-based innovation at risk. "In layman's terms, Comcast opens its customers' mail because it wants to deliver mail not based on the address or type of stamp on the envelope but on the type of letter contained therein," the FCC wrote. After that, Comcast stated that they would cap bandwidth use at 250 gigabytes per month, well over the average amount one could use in a month. They were not fined.
The new President, Barack Obama, is aware of the situation and his advisers have stated that the company's moves were "obviously deceitful" and equated Comcast's actions against peer-to-peer file sharing with those carried out by the Net sensors in China.
Still, with the highest proposed cap (Time Warner and ATT are testing a range of 5GB-150GB caps) and a new commitment to transparency (company engineers actually answering questions on message boards) Comcast may yet be the innovator that successfully navigates the issues of net neutrality.
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