Broadband Battlefield? Befuddling.

There's a bit of buzz right now in my industry regarding the battle brewing between Verizon and Cablevision on Long Island. Verizon is testing its FIOS service in a few communities out here, and Cablevision has just announced that it will begin offering Optimum Online at speeds up to 50 Mbps download. Quite a few industry analysts are calling Long Island the first major LEC/MSO broadband battlefield.

Are we supposed to be thrilled by the prospect of having Verizon and Cablevision competing for our business? At first glance, it seems great, but lets take a closer look.

If you are a Cablevision customer in need of assistance with any of its TV, Internet or telephone services, you can call customer service. First, use your telephone keypad to enter your telephone number so Cablevision can identify you. Not so bad, right? Think again. Once you have entered your phone number, you are immediately dropped into a swirling quagmire of interactive voice response lunacy from which there is no escape. You can't hit zero to get an operator. You can't call back and hope that a live person picks up the phone. They wont. Instead, you MUST spend 10 minutes talking to Cablevision's automated troubleshooting system.

A robotic female voice will ask you questions, and will make you do all the usual front-line troubleshooting tasks. You have no choice. You WILL talk to her, and you will like it, dammit.

Make sure your TV is tuned to channel 3
Make sure your cable box is turned on
Try rebooting your cable modem (make sure you wait 90 seconds before turning it back on)
Be sure all your cordless phones are unplugged
Hop on one foot and hum the keyboard break from "All of My Love"

You've done all that and it still doesn't work? Now wait on hold for 15 minutes due to what appears to be a perpetual state of "higher than expected call volume". While you wait, listen to the recording try to sell you more Cablevision stuff.

When a carbon-based life form actually picks up your call, you start the whole process again as they must "confirm your name, address and phone number" before proceeding. Why the hell did I enter my phone number at the begining of the call, then? Wait? Did I do that? Its been so long now. Who was President when I started this call?

OK, all my information has been confirmed, so lets get on to solving my problem. WHAT? Why is this person asking me all the same questions that the robot chick voice forced me to answer 20 minutes ago? Now why is this person telling me to do the exact same things that the robot chick told me to do 10 minutes ago? Hello? Is this thing on?

Lets just say that if you drive past my house you'll see a shiny new satellite dish on my roof. Sure, the TV might fade out in bad weather and DirecTV doesn't offer any viable Internet service, but at least I got to take some swipe at Cablevision. Its the least I could do.

Shall we talk about Verizon - the company with guaranteed profits that takes a hit on Wall Street when it earns ONLY $4.4 billion in the third quarter? I could go on for another hour about the Verizon service and support nightmare, but why bother? We all know the stories.

The bottom line is that the FCC and the state public service commisions have rolled over and allowed both the telcos and cable companies to run completely roughshod over the Telecom Act of 1996. At this point, hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying over 10 years have helped the telcos to dismantle the Act and the cable companies to escape federal and state regulation. What was supposed to benefit consumers with a wide variety of competing service providers was nothing but a bonanza for lobbyists and small bump in the road for our friendly neighborhood duopolies.

Enormous companies that long ago ceased to be customer-friendly are now our only choices when it comes to telecommunication services.

Excuse me if I don't jump up and down with glee over the prospect of having a choice of exactly two service providers - Verizon and Cablevision.