At the recent Kentlands meeting with the Mayor and Council members and staff, I pointed out that Cable TV Montgomery had unburied cable lines lying across Treehaven Street, as well as on sidewalks and picket fences. (Residents of the street have called Cable TV a number of times, but the company ignored them.) I was told to bring this up at the scheduled City hearing on on cable TV providers, which I considered kind of a brush off. I subsequently sent an email to City Manager David Humpton. I mentioned that the City might have a lawsuit on their hands if someone ever tripped on the wires and sustained injuries. This email did the trick, because within days the wires were gone.

The message: an indiviudal can make a difference in an issuse of this nature. My scorecard for the City:

D minus for oversight on Cable TV Montgomery. A plus for responsiveness to a citizen's complaint.

By the way, our family gave up on cable TV after months of poor reception, unreturned calls from customer service, and no shows by technicians scheduled for home appointments.

We now have Direct TV. Despite some trade-offs, satellite TV provides superior picture and souund quality and customer service for a lower monthly fee.

-- Bob Mauri (newurban@erols.com), March 06, 2000

Answers

My experiences with CaTVM parallel Bob's. The company's endemic ignorance makes me wonder how they can come close to making a profit. Of course, being a de facto monopoly and charging rates with 100-plus percent margins probably helps ...

Most recent CaTVM anecdote: Seeking an alternative to 56KB modem service, I tried to investigate the details of cable modem service advertised on CaTVM's website. I sent an e-mail. No answer. Another e-mail. Same result. I called and left a voice mail message. Surprise -- no callback. Hmmm. Maybe DSL is the answer.

Back to Bob's comment. If you walk the alleys of Kentlands, you can find numerous examples of unburied coaxial cable that one can presume is the responsibility of CaTVM. If the City is only concerned with cable on ground over which it has jurisdiction, so be it (I think the City has a more wide-ranging public safety responsibility, but I'm just a taxpayer). However, the community does, or should, have an interest, since most of the exposed cable is on common area land (i.e., "outside the fences"). Liability might start with CaTVM, but I can guess that it might not stop there.

-- David Fetzer (dfetzer@his.com), March 07, 2000.

We have also seen an incredible decline in service from CableTV Montgomery. After an incredible run-around we were finally able to get a service person to come check why we had such lousy service after they went to fiberoptic. They were able to make it a lot better but there are still channels that are awful....

We considered directtv but we have tv's in 4 differnt rooms. That would be very costly to run to each of the rooms....Actually, whenever CableTV Montgomvery gets around to offering the digital boxes, they are planning to charge $10 a room. Who are they kidding?

Does anyone have any idea what's happening to Starpower?

-- Tom Marchessault (tmarches@juno.com), March 10, 2000.