The California Public Utilities Commission won’t jump the gun and give Comcast permission to compete directly with the Ponderosa Telephone Company. At least not yet. Comcast has to first explain why past CPUC decisions don’t apply to its request for permission to offer telephone service in Tesoro Viejo, an upscale master planned community of 5,200 homes in Madera County. Among other things, those rules protect highly subsidised rural telephone companies from competitors that want to cherry pick affluent customers in densely populated exurban developments, and ignore people in poorer and more sparsely populated communities.
The CPUC has been thinking about changing those rules for the past twelve years, with no decision yet on the horizon. It’s the normal course of business for the commission, which considers these kinds of issues in excruciating detail via an adversarial process that includes anyone with an interest in the outcome. It doesn’t happen quickly.
In a ruling last week, commissioner Liane Randolph rejected Comcast’s request for an immediate exception to current policy, saying that questions about why those rules do or don’t apply have to be answered first. That means considering a study of rural broadband and telephone competition completed last year, and a 2014 CPUC decision that concluded that companies like Comcast…
…may tend to serve only small portions of any of the [rural telco] service areas with high quality, high reliable voice service and…may be likely to “cherry pick” business customers rather than serve significant portions of rural service territories, particularly customers whose cost to serve is high.
That’s exactly what Comcast proposes to do in Madera County. It’s been clear that its ambitions are limited to the newly built homes, and that it does not plan to offer service to homes and businesses in the surrounding area. Ponderosa’s service territory includes traditional foothill ranch lands and remote Sierra Nevada towns, as well as new and wealthier exurbs.
Comcast and Ponderosa have two weeks to answer Randolph’s questions.
Collected documents regarding Comcast’s expansion into Ponderosa’s territory are here.