This bat-guano crazy idea of Mecklenburg County spending $80 million it does not have to run a cable TV franchise for the former customers of Adelphia in the northern part of the county rumbles on. Now public officials are hiding behind Adelphia’s bankruptcy as a reason to avoid talking about one of the stupidest and, frankly, most immoral ideas to come down the local pike.
What right does the county and the several towns have to give themselves a monopoly franchise in hopes of making monopoly profits off of 16,000 local residents? And that is taking the best argument for this scheme at face value; that somehow the county and towns will make money at it. If they do, it will only be by means of pure extortion. Governments are not private companies and cannot pretend that they are — governments do not go out of business. They cannot.
Besides, the only way this thing makes money is by holding the 16,000 customers hostage and keeping competing services away by using the full weight and power of government. That is because the existing Adelphia plant the government wants to take over is dreck. Junk. Crap. No consumer in their right mind would willingly choose that service, it is at least 5 years behind the tech curve and falling further behind hourly.
Do county and town officials really propose to spend millions more upgrading that plant? If so $80 million is just the tip of the iceberg on cost — and you can forget about profits. Every dime will have to go back into upgrades and that still might not be enough.
Worst of all, Time Warner stands ready to take over the franchise and bring it up to snuff. Why in the world do we need government to do this?
Because, as we’ve noted, this is all about punishing Time Warner for not building a gold-plated data network for the county free of charge.
Make no mistake, any public official who supports this petty and pathetic travesty will come to regret it.
Special bonus challenge for county and town officials: Go ahead and ask your little telecom consultants brokering this deal how much time and money it will take to get the plant you want to buy to be DOCSIS 3.0 compliant, if they even know what that means.
