Is Philly Full Of Slowskys?

Woo-hoo! The Philadelphia Business Journal reports Comcast is doubling its internet speeds! Finally, the company’s Internet service will… oh.

Comcast is offering the higher speeds to customers in its Willow Grove, Lower Merion, Bucks and Chester counties and Cherry Hill, N.J., systems.

Thanks, guys. It’s not like your headquarters is here or anything.

(It’s not all bad news. Supposedly, we’ll have the faster speeds by the end of the year.)

Comcast increases Internet speeds [PBJ]

City Council Approves FiOS

Hot diggity! Today City Council gave final approval to a 15-year franchise to Verizon for its FiOS TV service.

Here’s my favorite part of Catherine Lucey’s Clout post on the decision:

Councilman Bill Green had proposed adding an amendment to make the company pay more for public-access programming. But he withdrew those plans today after Mayor Nutter resolved the issue with local public access advocates.

Hey, know what we should do before making Verizon pay more for public-access programming? GET PUBLIC-ACCESS PROGRAMMING!

Council Gives Final Approval To Verizon FiOS Franchise [Clout]

Anonymous Comcast Employee Likes Job

Since every crackpot can now have a blog and be a “self-publisher,” there are plenty of people who spend their time obsessively chronicling the mundane details of a corporation or city (see: Philadelphia Will Do). Comcast is a popular target nowadays — aw, it’s the little local media company that could grow into a giant corporation — and has its own followers, which is cool and all.

Philly, Inc., though, points us to comcastrocks dot blogspot dot come, which is apparently a random Internet employee blogging in the name of the company. Since the company’s forayed into the field of astroturfing didn’t go so well last time, is this another attempt at gaining some Internet credibilkity? (Whatever that means.) The scoop: The writer of ComcastMustDie.com says it’s real.

And, the highlight of the so far three posts:

Life is so short and we have to realize that there are more important things for all of us to be working on. Comcast is a corporation that is bigger and more powerful than most of us. So why try to take it down and or bash there employees. There are other options we may not like then but they do exist.And for all of the employees that hate your job:QUIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She makes a good point: Life is more important than hating Comcast, though not by much.

comcast rocks dot blogspot dot com

Incredibly, Comcast To Get Less Sucky

The era of the awful Comcast/Motorola DVR box may finally be coming to an end. (Well, until Comcast figures out a way to weasel out it or something.) Not only is the second generation of CableCARD — which will allow you to get the program guide and on-demand without a set-top box — coming out next year but Comcast is being forced to not force we customers to use their hardware. (Ha! Now you know how it feels.)

Jonathan Takiff in the Daily News:

But starting next year, these wrongs will be righted. The foot-dragging, tech-testing wing of the cable industry, Cable Labs, has finally standardized a two-way interactive CableCARD. Several hardware companies at CES - including Panasonic, Samsung and LG Electronics - showed prototypes that will work with it.

Adding fuel to the fire, the Federal Communications Commission last week reiterated its order that change-resistant, Philly-based cable giant Comcast must “unlock” the set-top-box security used throughout its systems.

The end result is that cable customers will soon have a broad assortment of feature-rich, CableCard-ready video products they can buy at retail stores or online. They’ll no longer be stuck with the cable provider’s limited selection of rental equipment.

2008 can’t come fast enough.

Jonathan Takiff | The stuff we saw at CES that you’ll really want [Daily News]

The $100,000 pyramid of competition

We all have our own personal love-hate affair with Comcast. For one, it’s a large company and it decided to stay in Philly when it could have left (yay jobs!) and the new DVR service is pretty damn good and they’ve actually improved customer service in the last few years. But, of course, cable service is soon going to be about $750 a month and, hey, they’re Comcast.

For most of us, there’s not really a choice. You could go with a dish, but without cable you can’t get local sports (okay, not a problem for some) and cable is what we grew up with, and goddammit, we’re not going to change! And so we all have whatever provider is in our area, which is Comcast for most of us. (I pity you Urban Cableworks customers. Even Comcast’s on-screen menu is easier to navigate.)

One community in Bucks County, though, is offering a competitor to Comcast cable. The board of the borough of Hulmeville — population 893 (no, really) — voted Monday night to allow Verizon to set up fiber-optic cable services for its customers.

Verizon promises 330 digital cable channels. No word if they’ll have Comcast SportsNet, but take a guess. The board signed a 15-year agreement with the phone company and will get five percent of gross revenues. Comcast gave Hulmeville $37,500 last year.

Competition is good, right? But, uhm, Verizon? If its cable service is anything like its wireless telephone operation, be ready to spend a lot of time with channels randomly dropping out. And how many, exactly, of the 339 households in Hulmeville (also true) are going to get Verizon cable service? Will there be a customer base of three in the town? Four, maybe?

Verizon brings cable competition to borough [BCCT]
Hulmeville, Pennsylvania [Wikipedia]