Opinion
Chelsea has one cable company licensed to serve the whole city, and most people in Chelsea have had the same experience with it. You call. You get a recording, then a chatbot, then a hold, then a transfer, then a ticket number. Then nothing happens. When something finally does get fixed, it is often because a city councilor picked up the phone. That is not customer service. It is a monopoly behaving like one.
For the first time in a decade, the city has leverage. Comcast’s license is up for renewal, and the city is holding a public hearing on November 18 and a survey through November 30 to build the record it will negotiate from. If the room is empty, Comcast signs the same deal and the next chance comes around 2036. If the room is full, the city can ask for more, and it can start the work of bringing in a second provider.
What Chelsea is living with
Three things come up again and again when residents talk about cable and internet here.
- Reaching a person is close to impossible, and when you do, the call too often ends without a result. Outages get a text that says “we are aware.”
- The wires. Walk any block in Chelsea and look up: sagging coaxial lines, abandoned drops hanging from poles, coils left on fences and siding after a technician leaves. Nobody comes back to clean them up.
- The escalation path runs through City Hall. Residents who cannot get an answer call their councilor, and the councilor calls a company contact, and then the truck shows up. A city councilor should not be the help desk for a $200-a-month bill.
None of that is in the city’s survey. The ten questions on the form ask how you rate the picture and the customer service, how much television you watch and whether you use the public access channel. They do not ask about outages, wiring, internet speed or whether you would switch. So the survey is the start, not the end. The comment email and the hearing are where the real record gets made.
Competition is already next door
Astound Broadband, the company that used to be RCN, lists Everett and Revere among the cities it serves. Revere is renewing franchises with both Comcast and RCN this fall, and ran focus groups in September to prepare. Chelsea borders both cities and has neither. Verizon agreed in 2016 to wire Boston with Fios fiber; availability trackers show it at some Chelsea addresses, not the city as a whole.
Federal law does not let a city hand out an exclusive cable license, and it does not let a city force a company to build. What a city can do is make itself worth building in. It can write the Comcast renewal so that nothing in it discourages a second license. It can set pole, conduit and permitting terms that a newcomer can live with. It can ask Astound and Verizon, in writing and in public, to apply. Everett and Revere got a second company. There is no reason Chelsea, denser than either, should be the gap on the map.
What to do before November 18
- Fill out the survey. It takes three minutes and it counts heads.
- Put the rest in writing to [email protected]: the dates you called, the ticket numbers, how long the outage lasted, the wires on your pole. Photos help. Written comments become part of the file.
- File a complaint with the state Department of Telecommunications and Cable, 1-800-392-6066 or [email protected], for anything Comcast never resolved. Complaints on file with the state are the kind of evidence a city can cite at the table.
- Come to City Hall, 500 Broadway, Room 305, at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 18, and say it out loud. Room 305 is not streamed. Being there is the only way to be in the record.
- Ask your councilor to put a second provider on the council agenda and to say so at the hearing.
A full room on November 18 costs nothing, and it is the one thing Comcast cannot put on hold.