Government

Additional Cable, Internet Providers Unlikely in Brick Anytime Soon: Mayor

by
Daniel Nee
April 30, 2026

A Verizon FiOS Truck. (Credit: B2B Media)

Brick Township Mayor Lisa Crate said despite her efforts to attract new telecommunications providers to town, it appears Comcast’s near-monopoly will continue for the foreseeable future.

Responding to a complaint from a resident who spoke at this week’s township council meeting, complaining about sky-high cable bills, Crate said she had been in contact with Verizon to request it expand the footprint of its FiOS fiber-to-the-home network to the entire town. The response was not what she had hoped for.

“I have reached out to them on multiple occasions to see if they could expand FiOS to more locations in Brick,” said Crate. “The last response I had from them was that they were not interested in doing that.”

Verizon has slowed its rollout of FiOS – a fiber optic-driven service that provides high-speed internet and television service to residential and commercial customers – nationally as the company has signaled it sees its future in wireless products that have the potential to deliver more bandwidth, separate from wired networks. Verizon was mandated by the state to provide service in Toms River under an agreement in which all county seats were to be wired for FiOS, and a portion of the Toms River network was extended into the southern portion of Brick in the early 2000s. With the exception of Lavallette and a small number of blocks in Seaside Heights, no other Ocean County communities ever obtained access to the service. In Brick, the only wired cable provider remains Comcast.

While Comcast maintains a franchise agreement with Brick to allow its service to be deployed in town, there are often misconceptions that lead to the belief that this means other providers are barred from operating in the township. Any provider is eligible to forge its own franchise agreement in town, however it is exceedingly rare for providers to do so because of the high cost of physically running wires throughout the township. Brick’s suburban layout, with no high-rise buildings and a business community that does not include tech firms or corporate headquarters, have led companies to determine it would be unlikely to recoup their investment in wiring the township, specialists have told Shorebeat over the years.

Crate added this week that the addition of FiOS might not be a magic answer to high cable bills in the first place.

“We are not against reaching out to other cable companies in order to ask if they would expand into Brick to try to break up the monopoly to a degree,” she said. “Unfortunately, my parents live in Jackson and they started out with FiOS at a decent price, and then they jacked it up. I think with every cable company – their job is to get you in at a low price and jack it up as it goes, but I would love to have more competition here in Brick.”

Comcast cable box. (Photo: Daniel Nee)

The cable television market in the United States peaked in 2018, according to data from IBIS World, a market research firm, at 93,400,000 subscribers. By the end of 2024, that number had dropped to 66,100,000 subscribers and was continuing to steadily decline. While it is unlikely that additional cable television providers will ever deploy networks in Brick, there remains an off chance that a startup firm could choose to deploy an internet-only network that would attract those who use over-the-top service such as YouTube TV to stream television programming.

“We’re hopeful that someone else will want to come here, but they have to want to come here,” Crate said, pledging to continue to reach out to telecom providers that might have an interest in establishing a presence in town.