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Testimony of Gary Massaglia, Comcast Field Hearing – Arkansas Broadband August 28, 2007 Thank you Mr. Chairman. My name is Gary Massaglia and I’m the Vice President and General Manager for Comcast’s cable operations in Arkansas. We serve approximately 90,000 customers in the Little Rock and West Memphis areas of the State.
My comments today will focus primarily on our experience in offering Broadband to our central Arkansas customers. Comcast has invested approximately $60 million dollars in private capital without any government incentives to prepare our network to offer our customers the variety of products and services made capable by a complete Broadband network. This includes a $6 million dollar state of the art technical center currently being built in Little Rock. We’ve done this because there is a customer demand in the communities and the neighborhoods we serve. And because of this investment, all of our customers have access to a myriad of products including: - Over 250 all digital video channels; multiple High Definition channels with plans to offer many more as quality HD channels become available; over 8,000 different On Demand programs available for our customers to choose what they want to watch, when they want it and start and stop the programs at their convenience.
- Also, as a result of our Broadband network, Comcast customers can experience the best the Internet has to offer. We offer speeds up to 12Mbps and a very video rich and easy to navigate Comcast portal.
- What’s interesting to think about is that just over ten years ago, most Americans used dial-up access to the Internet and paid expensive per minute charges for service and received what today would be considered incredibly slow speed and very little content.
- This same network allows Comcast to offer an alternative to local exchange phone service, delivering real facilities based choice to consumers. Comcast offers our Arkansas customers a digital voice service with a broad array of features and capabilities at very competitive prices.
We have invested significantly to bring facilities-based telephone competition to Arkansas and we are very pleased to state that our products and services; digital video, high speed Internet and our phone service are available to 100% of the homes we pass here in central Arkansas. Not one neighborhood is excluded. Thank you and I will be pleased to answer any questions.
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