Cable Has to Tell Its Story Better, Britt Says
The cable industry needs to do a better job claiming responsibility for the birth of broadband services in the U.S., said Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt at the University of Colorado in Boulder. And cable operators need to get through to emergency management personnel that they provide critical communications infrastructure during disasters, he said at a Silicon Flatirons event Monday. Britt joins other executives over the years including then-NCTA President Kyle McSlarrow, now at Comcast, in saying the industry must do more to fight misconceptions it’s anti-consumer (CD Sept 8/08 p8).
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In many cases, an antiquated view of the cable industry exists that paints cable operators as monopolists that do nothing but raise prices, leaving it to others to push the technological envelope, Britt said. “What we read about is ‘Google is building a one-gig fiber network in Kansas City, and these cable guys are stuck in the 1970s.'” That narrative ignores the role cable operators played in creating the residential broadband industry and the consistent increases in speed and service it has introduced since, he said. Time Warner Cable now competes with Google in limited parts of the Kansas City area, where the Internet company is selling a superfast broadband service.
Cable “really brought broadband to America, and we don’t talk about that enough,” Britt said. “The telephone companies did not do residential broadband for a number of years after we did.” The entire broadband industry may not have come into existence without the efforts of cable operators, he said. He said cable’s earliest broadband products happened almost by fluke.
Cable operators had built two-way capabilities into their networks with an eye toward expanding video services, Britt said. “Some people from Intel came to see us probably in about 1993 and said ‘you know, with your cable plant you could offer high speed access to the Internet,'” he said. “I was in this meeting, and I literally said: ‘What’s the Internet?'"
Time Warner Cable would like to see less inertia around telecom policy, Britt said. He complained that the cable industry is still largely living with rules adopted in 1992, despite huge changes to the industry in the past 20 years. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said last week that the 1992 Cable Act needs updating (CD Feb 8 p1).
Another area where inertia is working against the cable industry is in emergency management, Britt said. “It’s been a bit of a fight for us to be perceived in the same category as the telephone companies” during emergencies, he said. Phone companies are often invited into municipal emergency preparedness meetings, but cities and counties have tended to forget about cable operators, Britt said. He said that when Hurricane Rita hit Texas in 2005, local authorities confiscated Time Warner Cable’s gasoline, “not recognizing that we're providing last-ditch communications to people.”