A massive customer swap between Charter Communications and Comcast will hit Harvard this summer when the town’s longstanding license with Charter is transferred to cable giant Comcast, the largest cable provider in the country.
Town Administrator Tim Bragan announced the pending switch at this week’s meeting of the selectmen. The swap has been approved by the boards of both companies. Charter customers in Harvard, he said, will be notified of the change, and public hearings will be scheduled. Bragan said that the town’s Charter representative had told him he could expect to receive transfer documents within the next couple of weeks.
Part of a larger deal
The 1.6 million swap of customers is part of a pending Comcast-Time Warner merger. Over the previous year, Charter had been pursuing Time Warner Cable in a bid to become the country’s second-largest cable television provider. But then Comcast came up with a winning $45 billion offer and is now seeking regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The customer swap is part of a deal with Charter that is expected to help gain the approval of federal regulators. For Comcast, the transfer consolidates its presence in the region, where it provides cable, phone and internet service to the neighboring towns of Ayer, Boxborough, and Littleton.
While Bragan said he believed the transfer would go through whether the merger is approved or not, a joint Charter-Comcast April 28 press release warns that all transfers “are subject to a number of conditions, including the closing of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.”
In the meantime, Bragan said, the town is continuing to negotiate with Charter, whose Harvard license is up for renewal this year. If and when Comcast takes control, they will be obliged to honor whatever agreement is in place at the time of the transfer.
“I expect the process will go quite well,” said Bragan, who says he has overseen two such transfers during his career as a town administrator.
