A northern Kentucky communications industry primer!

A lot of you are probably curious about the complaints I've leveled against communications businesses that serve northern Kentucky. Maybe a few of you don't really care, but I'm gonna clue you in, in the distinctive, biting manner that only I can.

Northern Kentucky, being part of the Cincinnati region, gets its phone service from Cincinnati Bell. I used to work for this corporate giant delivering their phone books, but I've long been a harsh critic of Cincinnati Bellyache's ways. As a monopoly, I feel it's entitled to the same level of criticism as it would be if it was a government agency rather than a business. In the '70s and '80s, Cincinnati Bell conspired with local officials to spy on the phone system in search of "communist" activity. ('60 Minutes' did a report on this scandal in 1989.) I've had problems with the phone company for years, ranging from outages that take days to fix, to charging for services I didn't order, to its refusal to do anything about harassing phone calls I've been receiving since 1984. Cincinnati Bell owns one of the 2 high-speed ISP's available in northern Kentucky.

Insight Communications is the cable TV monopoly in most of northern Kentucky. Insult Communications is the progeny of InterMedia, which in turn was begat by TKR, which itself was previously the hated Storer Cable. I haven't had cable since 1993, but when we had Storer, it was plagued by frequent outages (sometimes days long) and local commercial inserts running over programming. Most strikingly, when we called Storer about the outages, the customer service personnel often cussed us out. (They were particularly fond of words starting with the letter 'F'.) Insight, a direct descendant of Storer, owns the other of the 2 high-speed ISP's available here.

The Cincinnati area was a Johnny-come-lately to the Internet in general. Growth in the Internet locally was blunted in the mid-'90s when local law enforcement crossed state lines to illegally raid several BBS's, accusing them of distributing porn (an allegation that was never proven). One of the members of this task force owned a BBS that offered premium services that competed against one of the BBS's that was raided. As a result of this repressive atmosphere of fear, Cincinnati until the late '90s had only a handful of ISP's while other American cities of its size had dozens. (Because of the growing right-wing extremism, Cincinnati BBS's also featured in 1987 what may be the first cyberbullying attack in history. I know this, because I was on the wrong end of it.)

So that's the story of an industry that has so much potential to make the world a better place but finds its resources squandered in monopolies. Someday maybe it'll improve. Maybe. Hopefully. Oh well, we can dream.