John Frick
If you live in a part of South Carolina with a large population, there’s a pretty good chance you have used a cable company for entertainment or internet. It’s also likely you have waited on the phone to schedule a service call, which wasn’t available for a week, only to leave work to go home and wait even longer for the cable guy to show. If you live in a less populated rural area, however, you are likely still waiting for the opportunity to wait on the cable guy.
If big cable companies have their way, rural South Carolinians will have to wait even longer to get the high-speed internet they need. In a column published recently, the state’s cable industry described “an unbalanced set of rules [that] allow electric cooperatives ... to charge excessive rates for access” to their poles as the “greatest obstacles” to deploying broadband in rural areas.
In reality, the greatest obstacle has been cable company resistance to extending internet access to rural areas because they could not make enough money in sparsely populated areas. When some electric cooperatives—and the federal government—got interested in doing the job (as they did for rural electrification in the first half of the 1900s), Big Cable and their powerful lobby began to pay attention. Now they’re fighting to make some rural South Carolinians pay extra for a service they might not receive and to make many rural residents wait even longer for high-speed internet.
The cable industry is blaming others for their failure to serve even though electric cooperatives voluntarily agreed to the same pole construction guidelines that govern every regulated pole owner in the nation. Last September’s Broadband Accessibility Act requires pole attachment rates be “just, reasonable and nondiscriminatory,” a standard to which, again, electric cooperatives agreed.
Why would the cable industry criticize electric cooperatives in an attempt to get something they already have? I think they want to distract South Carolinians from their efforts to undermine competition in rural areas they have thus far declined to serve.
Last year, the Federal Communications Commission created a competition to fund high-speed internet access to unserved parts of our state. To win, bidders had to request the smallest amount of federal funding. In many areas where electric cooperatives competed for the funding, the cable company known as Charter claimed to be able to deliver internet access for as little as a penny of federal funding for each dollar it would cost. Charter won around 90% of all the money awarded in South Carolina, effectively eliminating a significant portion of available federal assistance in the process.
It’s fine to bid low when it keeps government costs down, but not if the amount bid is insufficient to do the job. And it is just plain wrong to do that if the cable company expects electric cooperative consumers, many of whom won’t have access to the service, to bail them out for bidding too low.
After the funding competition, Charter actively worked to keep competitors from accessing other sources of state and federal money in areas where Charter was awarded funds. They did this even though they have not formally committed to serve all of those areas and would have no obligation to do so until eight years after they receive the money. With the assistance of other state or federal dollars, some of the areas could be served by Charter’s competitors within two years, but Charter wants them to be considered already served even though high-speed internet isn’t available there now and won’t be for some time.
In effect, if you live in an unserved rural area, Charter would rather you wait even longer to get high-speed internet than to have a competitor serve you sooner.
Unserved South Carolinians are tired of waiting on the cable guys. Electric cooperatives think they have waited long enough and shouldn’t pay extra to boost the profits of big cable companies for services they may or may not provide. Co-ops worked with legislators to get the Broadband Accessibility Act introduced even before the pandemic. Co-ops will continue to fight to get rural South Carolinians the same high-speed internet access enjoyed by their friends in town.
John Frick is the vice president for government relations at The Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina.