Portland Place, a residential street in Silver Spring, is a major battlefield in the fight to control how people connect to the digital world.
Residents are barraged by offers from at least six companies offering combinations of telephone, television and high-speed Internet services. It is one of the most contested areas in the country, where the battle between cable and phone companies has touched off a marketing frenzy to grab each others' customers for the biggest prize of all: high-paying customers signing up for the full package of services.
Many neighborhoods complain of a lack of options, but residents of some communities such as Silver Spring and Falls Church face a bewildering onslaught of marketing and price warfare.
"All those slick mailings," said Kevin Murphy, a resident of Portland Place and a mail carrier who every week delivers two or three brochure advertisements from those companies. "They're heavy."
"It's hand-to-hand combat," said James F. Mooney, chairman of RCN Corp., a cable service provider with 40,000 customers in the Washington area, including Silver Spring, Bethesda, Gaithersburg, Falls Church and Washington, where it employs door-to-door salesmen.
One of those salesmen is Ron Maier, one of RCN's top-selling foot soldiers, who goes out six nights a week to win customers -- ideally with the "triple play" bundle of cable, phone and Internet services.
"Some people say you shouldn't degrade the competition, but I try to get customers dissatisfied with Comcast," said Maier, a 16-year veteran of the cable business.
On a recent sticky 93-degree evening, Maier wiped sweat and swatted mosquitoes, but said conditions were not bad. "Wintertime is tough, when it gets dark at 5:30 or so, and people are too scared to open the door," he said. "I don't go out when it thunderstorms. That's the night I get on the phone."
In addition to Comcast Corp., Maier is up against Verizon Communications Inc., Covad Communications Inc., the Dish Network and DirecTV, and he must make quick work of 75 to 80 homes a night.
Maier quickly sizes up when people are not home, rolls up sheets detailing RCN's pricing -- $97 to $139 a month for the bundle of services -- and sandwiches them in the doors.
He braces for the occasional mishap, such as when a man answered the door in his underwear. He walks through yards to save time. He raps hard on doors with his fist because "lots of times the bells don't work." Another tactic: "One of the things I do, I open up the screen door, so if they open up the door I'm already in their face."
Sometimes, public relations campaigns cross over into corporate mudslinging. Comcast recently blamed its service interruptions in Montgomery County on Verizon network-construction projects cutting its cable lines. Cox has lodged similar complaints against Verizon with the Virginia State Corporation Commission.
