No competitors will move in and try for a piece of that consumer pie.
A few questions:
1. Why haven't they already? There are a lot of people who are already pissed about the service they're getting. We'd have switched if there were any other option. We regularly get stations where the color goes out, the picture gets staticky, closed captions are garbled or non-existent and Comcast has done nothing to fix this, insisting it's our television's fault. (It happens in every room in the house, without and without cable boxes. 5 different televisions with the same issues means the problem is not on our end.)
2. Is my understanding true, that competitors either need to get state/city approval to wire the area or they need to re-sell existing infastructure? If so, what's to keep Comcast, or whoever owns the cable, from forcing resellers to follow the same restrictions on P2P, VOIP, streaming video, gaming, etc.?
This isn't a case where just any competitor can lease a building and start selling their product. This is a utility, a part of city infrastructure. I'm not sure how it's regulated, but I'm sure it takes more than finding an empty building and signing a lease to set up shop providing a true alternative to existing internet services.