By now many of you have probably seen the articles about a guy, Seth, who bought a home in Kitsap County Washington only to find out that it didn’t have broadband. Seth works from home and needs broadband access. He did his homework first and was told by employees at both the Comcast and Xfinity phone numbers that the address had service previously and that he would be able to get broadband there. Here is Seth’s blog, and as someone who works at home I can certainly feel his pain.

If you work at home then having broadband is no small matter – it’s your lifeline. This is what I find so dreadful about the thousands of rural communities with little or no broadband. The people in those places do not have the same opportunities as the rest of us. It would be an inconvenience to not be able to watch streaming video, but it would be economically devastating if you couldn’t take a good-paying job because you don’t have broadband.

In this case I hope Seth knows a good lawyer, because Comcast directly caused him great financial harm. Multiple Comcast employees told him that the house had service in the past and that he could get broadband there, which turns out to be untrue. Instead, the home had never been served by Comcast and they were going to have to build cable to serve it. As anybody knows who has ever tried to get Comcast to build cable strand, it’s like trying to get water to run uphill.

I have my own similar Comcast story with a happier ending. When I moved to my house in Florida I knew Comcast was all over the neighborhood and my new house even had a Comcast pedestal in the driveway. But it took what felt like 40 calls to Comcast to get them to come out and give me a 40 foot drop wire. We started out with them not knowing if they serve my neighborhood until finally they decided to charge me $150 to verify that I could get service. Even with that it took me over a month from the first call until I had working broadband – and a lot of people are not willing to suffer through that ordeal. I know it soured me on Comcast and no matter what good they ever do for me I will always have in the back of my mind how I had to practically threaten them to get them to give me service.

Over a decade ago when I moved to the Virgin Islands, the first thing on my ‘must have’ list was broadband. Every real estate agent there lied to me and told me that the house I wanted could get DSL from the local telephone company. But luckily I understood that for a home that was 10 miles from the nearest town they were probably wrong. I found through knocking on my potential neighbors’ doors that the only broadband there was wireless, but that it was good enough for my needs (in those days about 2 Mbps download). If I had relied on what the real estate agents all told me, and if there had not been wireless, then I would have been in the same situation as Seth. It turns out that the copper lines at that house were so bad that they couldn’t even support a telephone call let alone broadband.

Seth’s troubles were further multiplied when he found out that he also couldn’t get DSL from CenturyLink. While they served his neighborhood, they had a ‘network exhaust’ situation, meaning that all of the wires in the telco cables are being used. I have lived in such neighborhoods and you have to get on a waiting list to buy a second line or add a burglar alarm. Sadly, there are numerous older neighborhoods where the copper network is totally full. Over the years some pairs of copper go bad and so the inventory of potential working lines slowly drops as the network ages.

The final insult to Seth is that the FCC would have told him he has options there. According to the National Broadband Map, that part of Kitsap County shows 10 options for broadband. That is a phenomenally large number of choices and even includes fiber from the local electric company. Yet none of these options were actually available to Seth.

What Comcast did was negligent by telling him there was broadband available when there wasn’t. But we are now at a time when a house’s value can be drastically affected by lack of access to broadband. I hope this guy sues Comcast and wins, but I also hope that people without broadband keep screaming and make themselves heard. Because for a lot of America, Seth’s story is just another day of normal life for rural America.