Unreasonable pole attachment rates and demands may be among the single biggest threat to our business. As a small operator dependent on pole attachments to serve my customers, the electric cooperatives take advantage of their market power by forcing me to comply with their onerous pole attachment rules. Their demands are so outrageous that we won't deploy service to some households in our communities, even though we'd like to expand our service area. Worse yet, some coops contract out the management of their pole attachments to firms that charge even higher rates, and provide even less service.

~Tom Early, Alabama Broadband, LLC

With the upcoming round of retransmission consent negotiations, we know that we'll be forced to pay fees to broadcasters for the first time, and unfortunately our customers will have to foot the bill. As a small cable operator, programming is our already largest expense by far, and we simply cannot absorb any more increases in our carriage fees.

~David Shipley, Business Manager

In my markets, small cable operators are paying more than double the amount of money in retransmission consent fees than some of the largest operators for the same signals.  Until 2005 this was not an issue, but now the broadcasters are demanding ever exorbitant prices to carry their stations.  I've never been forced to raise customer rates because of broadcast carriage fee increases, but now I have a station seeking a 567 percent increase, and I don't see how I can avoid hiking them for my customers, or dropping these stations that differentiate us from our competition, thereby denying us the only slight competitive advantage we have.

~Jim Beattie - Manager