Comcast XFINITY → Baltimore is officially fed up with Comcast

Comcast has the lowest customer satisfaction rating of any ISP in the United States and now it’s exhausted the patience of an entire city. The Baltimore Business Journal reports that Baltimore’s city government is hiring “a broadband Internet consultant that would help the city develop a plan for expanding Internet service provider options for businesses and residents.”

»bgr.com/2013/08/15/balti ··· natives/

and

»arstechnica.com/informat ··· n-fiber/

That should be interesting.

"In the short-term, we’re going to do a study. In the medium run, we’re going to try to renegotiate the cable franchise agreement. In the longer run we want to make it more profitable for providers to come in here and offer the expanded service.”

Yeah... that sounds like a whole lot of nothing.

So Baltimore having been avoided (diss'ed according to yesterday's news page) by FiOS and then by Google as "undesirable to service" now chooses to attack the one major provider that does offer true broadband speeds, for following the terms of a binding agreement the city itself negotiated and signed?
I guess Baltimore must be rolling in money to consider risking 10's of millions on their own muni-fi network (which have historically, been a failures even before completion.)
Or perhaps the strategy is to commit many millions of bonding authority and then hope Google will buy the hardware and rights for $1 leaving the citizens to pay the debt?

For those wondering about the "monopoly" franchise agreement Comcast FORCED on Baltimore.
a brief summary
»articles.baltimoresun.co ··· greement

key points
Non-exclusive franchise rights, any other provider could overbuild.
Instead of collecting 5% of comcast profits, the county instead choose to have comcast build them a fiber network and television studios/systems for county use worth $6 million by county estimates,
with the hope of replacing a $1.3 million a year telephone contract with Verizon using the FREE fiber

So Baltimore used comcast to dump an expensive Verizon contract, and now having received every benefit it could from the agreed upon contract NOW wants
mo' money, mo' money, mo' money, mo' money, mo' money.

As a former Baltimore resident, that is the who city to a T.