It's Com-monopolistic!

Those of us who live in the Denver area (and perhaps beyond) have been bombarded for at least a year with advertising literature trumpeting Comcast's "incredible" triple play. For a year, you can subscribe to cable, high-speed Internet, and digital voice (Internet telephone) for $99 per month, or the equivalent of $33 per service.

It's, as Comcast puts it, "Comcastic!".

Not exactly. After a year, costs rise considerably, to about $130 per month.

And what about those of us who aren't really interested in cable, but want high-speed Internet for a reasonable price? By reasonable, I mean something between $20 to $30 a month.

For us, the most "Comcastic" it gets is $29.99 for three months, with the price going to $44-$50 per month after that. What a steal! Not in the traditional sense, though; it's Comcast robbing the consumer, not the consumer getting a steal of a deal.

Unfortunately, for some of us, Comcastic is the only option. Qwest, which offers DSL for $26.95 per month in the Denver metro area, doesn't service our neighborhood. Several calls to Qwest have only yielded a "we'll let you know when we service your area" answer.

Personally, I have a strong suspicion that the neighborhood on the other side of Meadow Hills Golf Course -- where homes sell from between $750,000 to $1.3 million, as opposed to $200,000 to $250,000 -- is serviced by Qwest. Qwest has most likely decided it's just not worth its time to challenge the Comcastically Com-monopolistic high-speed Internet stranglehold in our neighborhood.

Out of principle (and, admittedly because I have "free" dial-up through the University of Denver) we continue to go with glacial Internet while Comcast continues to gouge customers in our neighborhood.

This, according to a recent Pew survey numbers, puts us among the roughly 30 percent of people with home Internet access who are still dialing up. Many of the rest are paying outrageous amounts of money for high-speed Internet with little to no choice on how they can get onto the Information Superhighway at the "break-neck" speeds we've been promised.

So much for the wonders of the American free-market, which, more often than not ends up morphing into an oligopoly or monopoly.

I tried to convince a couple Denver Post reporters that it would be interesting and worthwhile to do a story on who in the Denver area has a choice in terms of high-speed Internet, who is actually on the Internet, not on the Internet, and how much Denver Metro consumers pay, on average, for Internet service per year. However, my e-mails were met with nothing but "e-silence."

Meanwhile, The Denver Post Business Section bursts with stories celebrating the wonders of the high-speed Internet age, with no stories on that most basic of all issues -- access and cost of (high speed Internet) access.

(Another interesting story would be one that looks at the ways in which Internet sites have essentially written off those of us with glacial Internet. My wife tells me that Capital One credit card's online payment site is essentially impossible to access with our dial-up service right now).