These guys haven’t strung a single cable yet and they are already in trouble. Trying to provide legacy video and voice at this point in time will be a huge waste of both capital and bandwidth. Yes these services will bring in some short term cash flow (which will look good to the bean counters doing the financing), but in the end the company will be nothing more than just another community CATV provider trying to compete against giants like Comcast and TW. It will get crushed.

I watched this play out 15 years ago in my community with this company http://www.hbci.com/. It was the same song and dance. They were going to string fiber all across town and provide cheap, super fast Internet to everyone. Then they got distracted when someone decided they needed to provide video and voice as well in order to compete. They ended up burning through millions building a CATV and telephone system and completely ignored Internet service.

Not only didn’t they invest any money into the ISP end of their business, over 95% of the available bandwidth was taken up by shopping channels. The end result was obscenely slow and unreliable Internet service. It eventually become so bad that I had to sign up for DSL service from my local phone company.

Even more frustrating is knowing how much opportunity was likely lost for my community. Amazingly this company began just before the dot com boom took off. The cheap, fast Internet that was originally promised could have been a huge resource for many local entrepreneurs. We will never know how many promising new companies could have been built and how many good jobs our young people lost in pursuit of a few more TV channels.

Perhaps Ansboury knows of some secret new technology that will make things different this time around, but I doubt it. In my opinion the only way this new company will be able to compete with the Comcast’s and TW’s of the world is by becoming exactly what those companies don’t want to be – a dumb pipe. It should concentrate on providing Internet service as fast and cheap as possible in as many ways that they can think of. Not only will the company at least have a chance to turn a profit, its services could be a huge boon to the communities it serves.