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Prying Open the Cable Market
garzpacho writes "In an interview, FCC chief Brian Martin discusses his efforts to make it easier for new entrants--especially telecoms-- to compete with traditional cable and satellite companies in delivering video services. The focus of this effort seems to be in addressing local franchising authorities' current bias towards incumbents. He also talks about current congressional efforts to enact national franchise legislation."
Who owns the physical media in the ground.
Get paid to code OSS
I already hate their phone service enough! I don't want them encroaching on my television. At least maybe we'll get the cable and satelitte companies to start offering local and long distance packages in all markets.
Then we can have a competitive playing field.
PimpMyMazda.com - Crazy mods to a 2002 Mazda Protege DX.
does permitting cable companies to become monopolies and not resell use of the cable or poles equal encouraging competition? Or eliminating the restrictions on phone companies? or any other losening of restrictions the FCC has done?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Can someone tell me why a network cable at a retail store cost two to three times as much as you would pay at an online store? The retail prices for a commodity item like network cables is bad enough that making your own would be cheaper. Damn cable monopolies.
He wants to allow the telcos, a demonstratively corrupt group of companies, access to traditional cable services?
And this benefits the average customers...how exactly?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Good idea, Comrade.
A New Jersey legislature committee OKed a bill (to go to the next step) which allows Verizon to bypass the local municipality for cable TV franchise. They have to put in fiber and be done with the fiber in any one town within six years of starting.
... or to make it cheaper for them to lay the fiber in the first place (by not charging them for street repair for example.)
Here's a news article that explains recent developments in New Jersey. http://www.freepress.net/news/14460
I was surprised to read that it includes a tax on existing cable customers (essentially driving up their costs) that is used for "property tax relief" and supplying TV services to senior citizens.
It isn't hard to imagine that another bill grants Verizon tax relief in the towns where they provide service to compensate them for the fiber construction
Generally speaking, I have a (little-L) libertarian ideology about most issues. Even so, I can see that infrastructure is one of the (few) things that ought to be handled by the government.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
My experience (in central Iowa) is that the cable companies have been upgrading their systems for the last 5-7 years. They're spending millions and millions to upgrade their own networks. They've obviously been planning on offering new services (cable modems, VOD, more channels, more ppv, hdtv, VOIP, ...) for quite some time.
Why haven't the telecoms be doing the same? Why didn't they push this issue earlier? As far as I can tell, Verizon is the only telco that is really serious about upgrading and using fiber to the doorstep.
Nick
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The 'benefit' of a National Franchise is that is would allow companies to cherry pick the areas within a city the server. None of this providing service to the entire city crap...
BZZZZZ
The amount of cable/fiber for public telecom infrastructure is vanishingly small. What the public gave is the right to exclusively lay cable to provide a particular service (telephone or cable originally). Initially for cable this was a reasonable deal as installing a municipal cable system was something that operators were reluctant to do if there was good reception.
The problem is we are still operating on agreements that were negotiated when there was no such thing as premium cable, and often were made by bought and paid for politicians.
My own feeling is that anyone should be able to offer cable service to a neighborhood if they can post a bond and meet basic operating competencies for a public utility. Same goes for phone.
Every penny of that copper belongs to the public if it was laid under an exclusive franchise. Those who live by regulation, die by it. If they have infringed on the publics' right to free competition, they have obligations to that public. Every penny they invest comes from your loss of price competition.
There are two ways to fix the problem. You let others compete or you limit profits as a fixed proportion of investment. As new technologies emerge and the price of telco installation falls, I'm leaning more towards the free for all.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The head of the FCC is Kevin Martin. Brian is his evil twin.
http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/martin/
Many people are totally ditching their landlines in favor of VoIP over cable broadband. Dialtone is such a commodity now it fills me with glee. No doubt this is troubling to the bells, so they decide to fight back against the cable offerings by running TV over their copper.
This can only lead to more commoditized TV, which can only mean one day we'll be downloading/streaming your shows from web sites on our own schedule.
Telco and cable company at each other's throats? I can hardly wait.
The amount of cable/fiber for public telecom infrastructure is vanishingly small. should read as cable/fiber laid at public expense
Last time I checked, most cable co's do infact own their lines. They laid the media in the ground based being given the local 'monopoly' on video service.
This isn't about sharing those lines, it's about phone co's using their networks to supply video.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
There is a huge trend right now in cable mergers where even the _existing_ Cable franchises are being gobbled up by the top ~3 players. In satellite there are even fewer players and the barrier to entry is even higher.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Rejoice fellow geeks, for our day of reckoning is finally upon is. Let us, the great pale masses, rise up now to claim that which is ours! Death to the capitalist pigs! Viva le resistance!
I implore everyone reading this to begin purchasing as much gasoline and orange juice concentrate as budgets will afford. If they won't give it to us peacefully, we will burn them to the fucking ground.
If any of you are questioned by the authorities, simply explain that, unless you are left alone immediately, you will unleash waves of mysterious and powerful hackers against them; evil hackers who will steal visa cards, send unpleasant emails, and even go so far as to destroy any electrical appliance within a 50-mile radius.
Am I kidding? Probably.
Then again, maybe some "revolution for the hell of it" is just what this country needs.
Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
Opening up all those networks sounds like a great idea until you realize that it'll drive all the smaller players out of the business entirely. The big players can always undercut the smaller players on price, or offer MORE features for the same price. Always. Economies of scale and all that.
If the FCC mandates that cable providers open up their lines to other providers, then at some point we'll ALL be paying AT&T for our phone/TV/internet service. Didn't we break them up 20 years ago?
Unbelievable isn't it? You and I don't think it's a good idea to let Ma Bell extend their regulated reach. It would be fine if everyone was free to compete, but they are not. The crooks are about to be rewarded.
The FCC has this strange idea that all you need is two companies to service all your communication needs. Really. The FCC thinks that all you need is one phone company and one cable company each offering the same services. They probably continue this line of though with some kind of bogus economies of scale argument, where Ma Bell and her copper wires everywhere is still a good idea, sixty years after such technology has been obsoleted. In any case, that's what all of these telco mergers have come from. Oh yeah, you only need one radio station and one newspaper. This is going to work about as well as "competition" in the oil industry.
It only makes really sense when you consider the federal government's current hunger for control and eavesdropping. They can more easily bully around one or two of their own creatures than they can a free market. Uncle Sam wants your email, your browsing, your TV watching, your library records, what you buy, every fucking total information awareness thing you can think of. A few pigs are going to get very rich helping them out. The rest of us are going to suffer stagnant networks and an utter lack of privacy. You are not even going to be able to begin to compete when the Carnivore system is complete.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
More like buy them out. There is no competition, nor will there be. This will just bring about more mergers. FTA: "And he has green-lighted the historic mergers of two Baby Bells, SBC Communications and Verizon Communications, with their onetime long-distance rivals." It is delusional to believe that this do anything to bring about better service and prices, or to allow any newcomers who don't "play ball". ATT&C (American Telephone, Telegraph, and Cable) will be the new name.
What?
Here in Israel the major cable company pretty much does it all.
You have phone, TV and Internet all going over the same fiber.
I really think the old Telecom/Cable/ISP distinctions are becoming anachronistic, it's all bits over fiber after all.
The FCC was originally created to prevent chaos, and he's doing just the opposite.
1. Have the government install it [by it I mean fibre or pipe to door] and companies are taxed, e.g. 1% or something to support it
... hmmm 800kbit modem vs. 9.6kbit cell ... hmm ... which costs more...
2. Have one company install pipe, own it, do whatever it wants
3. Realize that the CUSTOMERS are paying for the pipe and ultimately they should have a say on how they use it [e.g. comcast could stop screwing vonage users for instance]
I mean they put a coax from the box to my house once, like five years ago. Why would [or should] I pay a monthly fee for what amounts to 20 minutes of time and five dollars worth of cable?
As for the miles and miles of cable that joins up the infrastructure I'd like to think that decades of paying stupidly high charges would have covered that.
The problem is they say "the cable is worth 389 million" so every year they tell the customer they have to recoup that when the cable has long since been bought and paid for.
Now on the other hand if we just had the government maintain it and fairly lease it out to bidders [that being the gotcha] we wouldn't have these problems. As for the "let capitalism run its course" folk look where we are at now.
Why can I send 20 gigs of data ten thousand miles for 30$/month when I can't make a phone call [which is scratchy and all] overseas for anything less than 3 dollars a minute [on my cell].
Telcos and the like can shove their heads up their collective asses.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
There's little reason for a telecom to uprade it's infrastructure. If they do, they have to give away access to competitors. Cable companies have no such restrictions.
I think you mean Kevin Martin.
Much cheaper than getting fiber into everyone's house, which has to be layed down, burried, and junctioned at fiber termination devices.
The problem with TV run by the Feds is that it conforms to their (FCC) standards (e.g., no howard stern), while LOCAL cable conforms to local communinity standards and isn't under the control of the FCC.
This is among other things an attempt to regulate speach on TV which the FCC can't do on cable (today).
Since TV can already come in via the Internet (video.google & iTunes, etc.), the Air and via Cable and via the phone system (via DSL), i'm not sure that there is a market failure here.
I repeat, this seems more like an an attempt to regulate speach on TV which the FCC can't do on cable (today).
http://www.hawknest.com/
Then Verizon is the only bunch of lames. There's no need for this whatsoever. You can get at least a gigabit over copper these days, and probably more. I doubt you can get that much on coax, but you can certainly get over 100Mbps, which frankly suits the home user just fine. I know they have these fancy gig and now even some ten gig fiber connections some places in Japan, but they're shared anyway, so except in special situations (like on the incredibly rare occasion you're just about the only one using traffic) you're not going to get anything near either of those speeds. By the time enough bandwidth is lying around for that, fiber will probably be a hell of a lot cheaper and there will be good reason to use it. I am a fan of fiber for certain reasons, not least of which is that it's not susceptible to noise, but it has lots of drawbacks as well, many of which are related to cable termination.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Can anyone explain to me how a company such as Surewest is able to run fiber through certain parts of a city that is primarily dominated by AT&T and Comcast? Maybe there is some unique situation here, but one would think that it might become more common, atleast in California. They have already committed to spending a lot of money on expanding their network, and they have a long ways to go, but as it is, they have about 20,000 customers and their service is available to approximately 80,000 homes. They just started offering HD service over their IPTV network.
:-)
I also like reading about how they are using Cisco 4500/6500 switches to bring access to their customers.. 100Mbps with ability to upgrade to 1Gbps to every home
It's Kevin Martin.
.)
(and thank GOD its not Michael Powell . .
I like the idea of mandating unrestricted access to municiple areas by competing companies. Right now only one cable company can do business in certain areas because of a deal with that city, and the city bars anyone else from coming in...unless they are satelite TV. More competition between cable TV services in the same area will lead to lower prices. Right now most cable companies can charge whatever they want because there aren't very many other options except for Direct TV, and we know how underhanded cable companies can be towards the satelite companies.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
You can get at least a gigabit over copper these days, and probably more.
Not over thousands of feet of POTS-grade copper. The telcos are sweating just to get ~24Mbps over existing wiring.
For must of the last century, the Bell System was the incumbent for the bulk of the USA. I didn't see them encouraging encroachment on their turf during that period. In fact, they had to be forced to allow the cable firms to hang cable from their poles. What resistance they get they deserve.
While that's true, I still don't think the solution is fiber to the curb, at least not yet. You can get pretty decent run lengths at 100Mbps (more than enough for almost any purpose - major webservers belong in colocation facilities anyway) and fiber has dramatically higher installation costs than copper. When fiber comes down even more than it already has, especially if they can come up with some fiber that cleans itself up somehow when you cut it, my opinion will change.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, I know a lot of that copper is put there at the expense of private corporations, and that is a whole different argument. But a sizeable amount of the media in the ground is put there by municipalities or state or even in some cases federal funding. Taxpayers allow it because, frankly, it makes our lives easier no matter who owns it.
How much is a "sizable amount"? How much media was paid for with taxpayer funds?
Can you be seized if you received federal student grants at one point in time?
Trends:
Corps get tax breaks to build infrastructure, then use this infrastructure to kill off competition, lockin customers, and illegally raise their new found monopoly prices.
Sometimes customers revolt. Sometimes they look for alternatives. Usually they baah like sheep.
Government lets this happen.
Media promotes it.
Eventually you're left with only a few services to choose from, most of which suck and are fundamentally pro-business/anti-consumer, and an uneducated population that's blissful to consume all remaining resources until there's nothing left.
I honestly believe the only way to fix this system is to let it collapse under its own weight.
Why keep fighting it? Let them win. Let them own the lines we paid for. Let them charge us whatever they want. Let them build the most protected DRM system ever.
I don't care.
Just let me smoke my weed, if Freedom is really what you stand for.
Internet delivered in hot piping straight to your home.
But here we're in a race to the bottom, and we'll spend twenty years talking about letting a provider be a carrier for both signal and content, instead of doing something about it.
Inaction may not get things done, but when your political masters don't want real competition in a classic market capitalist form to exist, you say what you have to in order to ensure that such actual reforms never see the light of day.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
good point, I was reading a print copy of the Wall Street Journal in which they pointed out that the FCC in the Bush regime years has done more to encourage mergers, and stifle real capitalist competition, than any prior FCC.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you do some research, you will find that it is more profitable in the long run to deploy fiber instead of copper. Right now it might be cheaper to run copper, but that is quickly changing. If a company looks at their return on investment, there is really no reason to go with copper if you are in the position of having to lay out new infrastructure. You can easily find many websites that will lay out the pros and cons of using fiber vs copper.. here is a fairly good one.
Personally, I don't think the FCC should have even gotten involved. After I RTFA, it seems like a few big-dollar lobbyist went and bitched that the phone companies had requested a local franchise to deliver TV service, and the local governing boards said, "No, we already have a provider here."
Boo-hoo.
Government for the people, and by the people was working, then the feds decided to step in and bow to the corporate pressure of the Bells. Do we really need a national franchise for the telcos to enter the video market? Of course not.
In the interest of fairness, if the FCC wants to tear down the barriers of franchising to new competition to the incumbent video carrier, that's fine. In that case they should also eliminate the requirements for new voice and data providers, especially in cases where the incumbent telco is out of compliance with the law. Case in point: I work for a cable company in Nebraska, and we are ready to launch VOIP service. We have fiber installed to 10 area towns, providing the backbone for a true high-speed data network, as well as digital TV service. However, since Qwest is 10 years behind in installing E911 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E911) in our rural towns, we cannot (under current FCC regulation) launch VOIP.
What exempts the incumbent Telco from the law? Money. They simply pay their non-compliance fine every year, because its cheaper than actually upgrading. I wonder: if some lawyer's grandma has a heart attack and dies because Qwest doesn't have E911...will they upgrade, or just pay that settlement as well?
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
it's called EVDO and I get 2M up and down using my cellphone as a modem in Lansing, MI. OK, Lansing is Butfuk Africa, but Alltel is rolling it out everywhere in the next year, and VeriSlime is waking up. It runs at about 200k where EVDO ain't.
It's really good.
The government should NOT be interfering in the marketplace like this. Why?
It's real simple.
Problems are caused because the government cannot act and respond to market changes (ie; technology) as well as the private sector can. And when the gov interferes in the private sector and begins to regulate it, and then technology changes, all of the sudden we have outdated laws and "programs" that are causing a loss of money, and are obsolete.
Governmental regulation fouls up the free market almost always. Look at the airlines. Look at the phone companies. Look at modern day broadcast radio. Look at many other entities you think are monolopies, and chances are they only have a monolopy because of some sort governmental intervention in the marketplace.
Government should be limited and the markets should be free so as long as one is not anti-competitive and as long as one is also not trampling on the rights of another.
Libertas in infinitum
Actually, the law was changed so that telcos don't have to share fiber lines. That's why Verizon is putting in fiber and ripping out copper wherever they go. Once you have FIOS, you can never switch to Speakeasy, Earthlink, AOL, Yahoo, etc.
Yeah,
Guess who owns dem dar ground holding up yer poles?
You don't like it, you can take your copper back!
Oh well, at least it looks like they are fighting amongst themselves for now.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Just let me smoke my weed, if Freedom is really what you stand for.
Amen, brother *fires it up*
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
This poster has a point. The easements are easily worth... oh, I would guess 100.. times as much as the cables actually laid. Those easements aren't privately owned, generally. There was a certain telecoms company founded in the 90's on this principle, rather brilliantly. The VC bought a railroad, of all things. Why? Because of the easements. Easy way to lay down your own national network between most major point A's and B's that people cared about...
C//
Do you see a conection to him wanting to give in and you wanting to fire up?
I'm not sure but I think there is a trend here. everyone i know that smoke weed say it is better then beer because it mellows you out. Beer they say fires you up and people want to fight. This might eb going outside the physical real too.
"give away" is just a little exaggeration, don't you think?
Weed, depending upon my mood before getting stoned, can make me want to fight. Witness some of the crazed comments I've posted here on /.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Since Comcast and others want to act like a fully deregulated entity, I would like to see congress do so. But to do that, the company should be willing to break into 2 parts.
What do you bet that comcast and others will not go for this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
These new telcos don't want to play by the existing rules, and it will SLASH local PEG.
Local PEG == Public (like live music or other unique events) Educational, and Monitoring our fucking Government TV)
http://www.mnn.org/saveaccess/
Anyway... ALL the Comments ARE bullshit!
Fuck the Diebold Electronic Voting Machines, (Mainstream media won't cover it!) only the underground sledgehammers will fix our country now!!!
You keep digging when your already in a DEEP ASS HOLE!
Fuck all!
Obviously, the CEO of Verizon disagrees with you. He was on Charlie Rose the other night talking about this issue. The way Verizon sees it, they could run fiber to the neighborhood like their competitors and have enough capacity for existing technologies, or they could run fiber to the premises and have suitable bandwidth for future technologies. There is more to this than internet connectivity. They are after the broadcast TV, VOD, and VoIP markets too. VoIP in particular worries them, it competes with their core business. This is also the first time I have seen any service provider admit that customers have an interest in uploading to the Internet just as fast as they download.
As far as cost, fiber is roughly the same to run as copper. The providers aren't real concerned about the cost of repairing cable cuts, those get paid for by the poor sucker who ran the backhoe without calling to get the underground lines marked first. So the real issue is whether to use existing copper or pull new fiber. Verizon is focusing on higher density areas and supporting 14-18 million households in 3 years.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
This misnamed "prying open" republican assault on local control over the public commons, ignores vital first amendment issues. Currently there are hundreds of public access tv stations giving the folks without big time media connections a chance to get ideas out to the millions of faces watching cable tv. Unless this vital production capability is preserved and expanded, the only media on tv will be controlled by huge corporations and governments. Our democracy depends on viable "wild" voices and images. While the world wide web provides a commons that is still a bit wild, cable still reaches many houses without internet access. Cable franchise revenue is an important source of local town revenue all accross america. This initiative to control cable at a national or state level is just another case of big corporations buying legislation that will reduce their costs, and cost many of us our thin lifeline access to the public commons. Big corporations want to control content.
Most scientists/doctors say alcohol is more dangerous then "weed" (causes more fights and half of all killing is under alcohol influence) but they still wouldn't recommend either to be legal for consumption.
"Weed" causes cravings and can make you slow in the head. Yes I experienced this first-hand with a friend of mine. We challenged him to lay off the "weed" (marihuana) for two months and he just "no way!" and he was acting a lot slower then when he didn't smoke that stuff.
So please don't be cool and promote weed.
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
Yes, I know a lot of that copper is put there at the expense of private corporations, and that is a whole different argument.
Such as still being burdened with a tax to pay for the Spanish-American War?
If I really am talking out of my ass...explain it to me with respect so I'll at least pull my ears out to listen.
most cable co's do infact own their lines.
Then why am I paying their taxes every month if it's theirs. They may "own" access currently, but that is a result of a regulated monopoly with restricted access to publicly owned easements. Try running your own cable down the road and see how far you get before yu're told you can't.
If I really am talking out of my ass...explain it to me with respect so I'll at least pull my ears out to listen.
Why haven't the telecoms be doing the same? Why didn't they push this issue earlier?
Because the telecoms operate in a way where they won't ever invest anything unless they can get regulations passed that make it super attractive for them. Instead of investing money and marketing a desired product, they whine and stamp their feet about rules that allow competition.
Now they're on a push to do away with local franchising rules so they can enter the CATV market. Again they're complaining about lack of fairness, when in reality what they're pushing for is special treatment. "We're Ma Bell, and we don't have time to mess about with all of the local franchise rules that all the cable companies work within, so those rules should go away."