Susan,

I read your article with interest, as well as the CTC report you linked to, and I have a few comments.

The first and most glaring is that no mention (or comparison) is made to other areas in CT that are white majority. Instead, the report and you focus on a few minority customers in predominantly minority areas.

While I have no doubt that poorer areas have fewer customers able to afford higher cost broadband, that does not necessarily track that the situation is racially based or biased. I would be willing to bet that Macy’s does not have stores in those neighborhoods either, simply from a lack of profitability. You cannot demand that a company lose money or wait years if not decades to earn a profit off of their work.

The report and your article would be more persuasive if research had shown that some lily white area with similar numbers and types of businesses had not been quoted those same prices and impediments. Investigating for example if X street in Y city had 20 merchants each willing to shoulder a percentage of costs for the structural work needed so they could be early adopters would be more convincing than vague insinuations about racism and inequality.

In the past years I have purchased Fiber, OC48 and T1 connections for businesses in areas where Telco’s did not have an abundance of customers, and it is always expensive and on a higher scale than some of the prices quoted. The costs of digging in new lines, permits to tear up streets, and gaining access rights are extremely prohibitive in any market, and the Telco’s and providers are in business to make money.

Different states, counties and cities have different laws concerning who can operate broadband facilities, much like they do for electricity, water, and other utilities. Some of those laws prevent the city, county, or state from providing competition to the market. This can create some absurdities and increased costs to different localities that might better benefit from that public entity entering the utility market for their area.

Conversely doing so adds to local government costs and responsibility. The entity becomes required to subsidize that service even if it does not make enough to cover expenses. To be frank keeping up with current technologies and keeping them in good repair is an expense most local governments cannot shoulder without significant tax increases.

While I applaud your seeming intent on bringing this to the public forum for discussion, I question your intimation that it is racism instead of business costs that drives these decisions. You have done little to advance the conversation in that direction but have implied some scurrilous motivations that are very objectionable.