Twenty-two years ago, he launched his own business, Lamont Digital Systems, with the backing of investors. It is a niche business, providing cable television service for college campuses and gated communities.

"I tell the story wherever I go. It's key to who I am and what I am about and how I look at the world. If you are an entrepreneur in business, you're probably a progressive in politics," Lamont said. "You want to solve problems."

Are you wondering about those "gated communities"? I know I am.

Information about the operations known as GateHouse Networks is completely absent from the Lamont Digital website; it only gives information about the Campus TeleVideo operations. Interviewed in January by the Connecticut website The 40-Year Plan, Lamont explained his role at Lamont Digital thusly:

Chief cook and bottle washer. I thought that college campuses were poorly served by big cable tv operators. Universities wanted to use cable for more than just entertainment. We said "Hey look, there's 1,000 different channels via satellite, many foreign languages, some distance learning, some of the likes of which get on traditional cable. You decide what is right fore your campus." We allowed them to customize a service. We have been doing that for 20 years.

Not a word exists about GateHouse Networks, which, as reported in this 2002 article from Communications Today, is (or was) the Lamont Digital division for "planned communities." It says:

Sprint [FON] announced Friday that it has agreed to market GateHouse Networks video services in conjunction with Sprint's voice and data communications to residential developments in its local telecommunications territory, which has over 8 million access lines in 18 states.

GateHouse, a division of Greenwich, Conn.-based Lamont Digital Systems, builds and operates advanced fiber to the home cable television systems, offering broadband services to planned communities.

The only analysis I found online about Lamont's business background came from a U.S. Army officer named Diggs at his blog 4 Mile Creek. Diggs picked up on the same implications of GateHouse that I did:

Ned Lamont is the perfect Limousine Liberal. Born into wealth, schooled at Phillips Exeter, Harvard and Yale, he’s now rolling in dough thanks to the protected structure of our public frequencies; the 21st century iteration of the steel/bank/railroad monopolies of the 1800s. In fact, one of the subsidiaries of his business, Lamont Digital Systems, is Gatehouse Networks (GHN), created in early 2000 to focus on the fast growing residential gated community market. How nice. His company is protected in its market by monopoly laws designed to make companies rich off of our monthly bills, and his main focus appears to be bringing that protected market into the further protection of gated communities that most Americans can’t even imagine living in.

One final oddity about GateHouse: mention of it has vanished from the Lamont Digital website. Google the name and pages mentioning GateHouse on the Lamont Digital site produce a "sorry, the page you requested was not found on our server" message. Similarly, www.gatehousenetworks.com no longer exists.

It could be Lamont Digital sold GateHouse, or closed it, or something else. I couldn't find any articles explaining its current operations.

There's a big, juicy story about Lamont Digital Systems just waiting for an enterprising reporter to sink his teeth into it. Nobody's touched this angle on Lamont, a major oversight by the state and national press. If I've missed a story on the Lamont's entrepreneurial side, by all means let me know and I'll discuss it. But at dozens of links, similar offhand remarks pop up over and over about Lamont Digital, as if Lamont's corporate life before his insurgent run for the Senate says nothing about the man. That's a lazy press in (in)action.

Perhaps a young and hungry reporter could ask some questions of the campaign about the mystery of the missing division and about Lamont Digital in general: how it treats its employees, how it acquires new accounts, how it competes against larger cable operators, the programming it offers, expansion plans, and the value universities gain from its services. I'd also ask a question like, "Please explain the relationship between progressive Democratic values and providing communication services to gated communities."

The answer is out there.