Ocean Shores City Administrator Scott Andersen’s announcement about the impending arrival of Comcast at the Jan. 27 city council meeting barely made a ripple.

“Everything always comes in waves, it comes in pairs, we are very close to signing a franchise agreement, we’re in the final process of it with Comcast, who also wants to come in and lay its own fiber down and offer people cable [TV] as opposed to just the internet access that’s being operated by [Ripple Fiber],” Andersen said. “I suspect that document will be done and signed within the next 20 days or so. Everyone now suddenly wants to come into Ocean Shores and lay their own cable down. The good news is it will offer for our consumers a lot of choice and a lot of variety in what kind of package they want, what kind of cable services they want. The bad news is it means we may have two companies sort of working in our right-of-way around the same time.”

Currently, Coast Communications is the only cable TV and internet service provider in the city of Ocean Shores and isheadquartered across the street from North Beach Jr/Sr High School. Ripple Fiber, which merged with Hyper Fiber, recently began construction to lay fiber optic cable for its high speed internet service. The company is looking for space to lease for a local office. As for Comcast, there is an Xfinity Store by Comcast located at 1163 E Wishkah Street in Aberdeen.

According to Ocean Shores Mayor Frank Elduen, the arrival of Comcast and Ripple Fiber will foster competition in the marketplace, which will ultimately be good for the residents of the seaside town.

“I think it just gives the public more options, more choices, and I think all that’s good for the public,” Elduen said. “Should be good competition amongst the three, and the population that lives here should be the benefactor of that. They can pick what they want to do. We have a lot of people who work from home here and that will be a real benefit to them.”

Andersen added that having increased internet speeds will also benefit emergency management services.

“It shows you that Ocean Shores is growing and people are willing to make those kind of investments here, but it’s also things like people working from home, it makes it a more viable option to telecommute,” Andersen. “Also, for the south fire station and a number of other things, we’re gonna have fiber optic that’ll be available to our first responders.”

All three providers offer a variety of packages at different price points giving the residents of Ocean Shores more options for internet service, television and telephone than ever before.