One year after the passage of a law designed to ease the entry into the cable market of competitive providers in Michigan, only 110 of 2,000 communities in the state have a choice of cable providers, according to Multichannel News.
That is to be expected. Cable choice requires construction of brand new networks, not just the granting of a franchise. That takes immense amounts of capital and time, as well. A single new network in a single community can take three years or more to build, if there are no competing demands on construction and installation resources.
And there is history to consider. New video service providers have been attempting to so just this sort of thing for several decades, using a variety of methods, of which the most successful so far has been the use of direct broadcast satellite. There have been scattered regional efforts to duplicate cable networks, but overbuilders have not been notably successful, in large part because it is difficult to justify building a network that gets less than 30 percent penetration, which is what overbuilders largely have been able to attain.
Voice and cable modem services have helped the business case, but overbuilding remains a challenging financial proposition, and few expect widespread new competition in the terrestrial space from any other than incumbent local telephone companies.
The point is that nobody should be surprised nothing much has happened in just a year. New ubiquitous broadband networks take time to build, as well as lots of capital. If it were easy, lots of people would be doing it.
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