Likewise — and people often miss this angle — Comcast is a bit of an upstart itself in comparison to the two major incumbents, AT&T and Verizon. The two basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access, and they are using all their political power to prevent Comcast from becoming large enough to challenge them as a National last-mile telecom (they currently only offer service in something like 40% of the households in the US).
The prime case-in-point is the TimeWarner Cable merger that was scuttled — such a merger would have made Comcast effectively national, and a serious competitor to the old Bells. Meanwhile AT&T purchased DirecTV less than a year later (a deal worth more than the TWC acquisition in both dollars and customers) and the whole thing got rushed through quickly.
Do you think we would still have wired home Internet connections without Comcast? I know they’re a terrible company to be a customer of (what telecom isn’t though?) but when you look at the larger picture, they’re constantly stymied by the FCC from getting “too big” — meanwhile, their two biggest competitors are 2-4x larger on a revenue basis. Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a heartbeat if Comcast weren’t around driving demand for it — the way Comcast’s tech architecture works makes it cheaper for them to serve the residential market than AT&T or Verizon will ever be able to do with wired connections.
> The two basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access
This is obviously not true since neither Verizon nor AT&T operate hardline access nationwide. Even if you mean copper phone wires specifically, you're leaving out CenturyLink.
Copper phone lines are of course the slowest last mile hardlines. Coax is far superior, and cable ISPs are growing relative to DSL--where the choices are Comcast vs Verizon DSL (for example), Comcast has higher market share.
Verizon FiOS competes directly with Comcast, but is offered in only about 20 metropolitan areas--and even then, incompletely. (FiOS is available in DC but not in Alexandria, which is right across the river.) Verizon stopped growing their FiOS footprint years ago.
> Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a heartbeat if Comcast weren’t around driving demand for it
Verizon and AT&T (and CenturyLink) are required by law to provide residential telephone landlines to anyone who asks for it. What does that have to do with last-mile broadband?
This is nonsense. Comcast used to be AT&T Broadband in my region and they are the sole provider of broadband access in my entire region of the Midwest outside of major metros. They have something like 1/3 of all broadband customers, that’s an upstart? What they actually are is a combination of pieces of smaller companies, some of their assets being made up of the “baby-bells” that the behemoths have re-acquired over the years.
The prime case-in-point is the TimeWarner Cable merger that was scuttled — such a merger would have made Comcast effectively national, and a serious competitor to the old Bells. Meanwhile AT&T purchased DirecTV less than a year later (a deal worth more than the TWC acquisition in both dollars and customers) and the whole thing got rushed through quickly.
Do you think we would still have wired home Internet connections without Comcast? I know they’re a terrible company to be a customer of (what telecom isn’t though?) but when you look at the larger picture, they’re constantly stymied by the FCC from getting “too big” — meanwhile, their two biggest competitors are 2-4x larger on a revenue basis. Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a heartbeat if Comcast weren’t around driving demand for it — the way Comcast’s tech architecture works makes it cheaper for them to serve the residential market than AT&T or Verizon will ever be able to do with wired connections.