Broadband, the poor relation among utilities

[Commentary] Broadband Internet is supposed to be a utility — many people even say it’s a human right. But the providers don't see it that way when you move house.

I arrived in my new home a week ago. There was energy and power. The water was flowing. None of these presented any problem whatsoever. It was just a matter of changing the customer names on the accounts and reading the meters. But it was a different matter when it came to communications. The phone was disconnected and there was no prospect of broadband Internet until almost two weeks away. That length of wait to get service delivered does not in my view merit the title of a utility, with its connotations of reliable, always-on provision. What irks me most of all is that I, like a growing number of other people, work from home and the broadband connection is critical for that work. Everyone is up-in-arms when there is so much as a two-hour outage of an online service such as Amazon or Microsoft BPOS. Routinely inflicting two-week outages on economically significant workers like this ought to be a national scandal.