The FCC granted two petitions from Comcast Wednesday to...
The FCC granted two petitions from Comcast Wednesday to be excluded from municipal rate-setting for basic-video and some other prices in several Minnesota communities. One petition requested deregulation in nine communities, the other in six. In both Media Bureau petitions,…
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Comcast cited video competition from DirecTV and Dish Network. Objections were filed to both petitions by local regulators: The Ramsey/Washington Counties Suburban Cable Communications Commission to the first, and the North Metro Telecommunications Commission to the second. The orders said that both regulators challenged the way Comcast’s numerical data showing households using competing services was derived, but their objections were rejected by the bureau. However, Comcast did withdraw its petitions for some of the communities where it had originally applied for an effective competition ruling, reducing one petition from nine to six and the other from six to five. The deregulation orders will affect just under of 55,000 households in the towns of Grant, Lake Elmo, North St. Paul, Oakdale, Vadnais Heights, Blaine, Centerville, Circle Pines, Ham Lake, Lino Lakes and Spring Lake Park. Time Warner Cable meanwhile petitioned for a similar bureau finding in 21 New York communities, in filings posted in FCC docket 12-1 (http://bit.ly/Y4UgXU). The petition cited video competition from DirecTV, Dish Network and Verizon. The proposed deregulation would affect about 105,000 households total in the towns of Baldwinsville, Camillus, Cicero, Clay, DeRuyter, East Syracuse, Fayetteville, Geddes, Granby, Hannibal, Liverpool, Lysander, New Haven, North Syracuse, Port Byron, Salina, Schroeppel, Solvay, Van Buren, Volney and Walcott.