[bobwaycott]

Here in Chattanooga, EPB were the first in the US (even received NYT recognition for it) to deliver gigabit service to residential customers. Pricing is definitely competitive, and unlike Comcast, et al., it doesn't change every six months. A couple months ago, every customer had their data speeds doubled without an increase in monthly cost. I now pay my same $70/mo for 50Mbps, but receive 100Mbps. Comcast wants me to shell out $90/mo for this for the first six months. Three years ago, 50Mbps service from EPB cost $140/mo. It's now half that price for twice the speed, and nobody here deals with throttling or data caps or any of that crap.

I know a lot of people at EPB personally, and even used to work there myself. There is nobody who wants to be inefficient, underperforming, or go-with-the-lowest-bidder types. I've experienced this as a department manager and as an external vendor. I've seen projects lost to higher bidders. I've seen those higher bidders take way longer to deliver than they promised. I've seen low-bid projects succeed wildly (and even built several of them or managed them myself). Maybe EPB is a rarity of trying to do things right. Everyone I know in the company is focused entirely on the goal of trying to take care of the city/county and beat the pants off of Comcast. And they've had to deal with court battles with Comcast throughout the process of building up a great service for the community.

Capitalism is a shitty answer for every problem. Sometimes capitalism is just an excuse to fuck everyone over. In contrast, I like knowing that every time I call up customer service, I get a local person who I know is making a decent living wage, even for operating phones; those higher up are paid very competitive salaries for their position; the company employs every employee full-time and offers them what may be the best benefits and liberal vacation time of any company I know of in the area. I'm not an employee there anymore (was a vendor, became an employee, went back to being a vendor), but I think it'd pretty much take a complete loss of vision and a drastic change to abysmal service and performance before anyone in this community would want to see EPB replaced by yet another private enterprise, capitalism, and going back to the days of dealing with Comcast.