[VitaBene]

Originally Posted by brk-lnt

First off, if your service or reception is lousy, you should be calling their customer service department and reporting the issue. The cable companies are required to ensure that the signal reaching your house meets certain signal strength and picture quality parameters. They are not required to compensate for old/crappy cable, amps, splitters, etc that you may have inside the house affecting the signal.

If you are experiencing service interruptions, you should be filing for outage credits, and requesting that they repair the cable/equipment feeding your house.

In many situations, the cable companies are basically "middlemen". For a portion of the channels they provide THEY pay a fee to the provider. It is possible that the premium content providers (ESPN, etc.) are responsible for at least a portion of the rate increases.

How do you expect the town to send them a message that there will be competition? You most likely barely have enough subscribers to support 1 cable operator. I doubt a second operator is going to come along and invest millions in overbuilding the network so that they can get 1/2 of an unprofitable market.

BRK,

Didn't some telecom act or another allow others to use the transmission lines of the existing provider as those lines had been paid by the subscribers? I remeber something along those lines, I will have to do some digging on line.