[MechEStudent]

The important question: How much money was it worth to Comcast?

They have a population of ~136k, comprising 60,503 households. If each currently pays $100/mo for a cable bundle and all abandon them for fiber (a gross over-estimate), that is $72.6 million per year of lost revenue to Comcast.

It is, however, $72.6 million of returned value, or something more than about 10% of the $620M/year total city budget. If my town voted to net-reduce its total burden to me by 10% or so, that would be very appealing. If they only returned half of that, it would still be substantial.

If they dispensed with the "evil" of the regular garbage "fees" and price hikes that modern cable monopolies love, it would be worth 100% of the price.

[gnopgnip]

Each subscriber is worth $1000-$1500 by traditional accounting methods. The number of active accounts could be substantially less than 60k though. Alameda CA is a similar sized city and they had ~15k subscribers when they sold the municipal cable and internet to Comcast for $17 million.

[matt_the_bass]

This is a very interesting way to look at it. The question is how to make “average Joe” understand that logic.