Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
I work for a cable company. Television signal and advanced services (VOD, PPV, High Speed Internet) are all distributed from the headend (Our satellite base station). There is really nothing to be gained by sharing the lines from a services standpoint, as the incumbant is already trying to build service capacity/line quality so we can compete with telcos in the telephony field and high speed internet. The reason CATV companies are pushing for this is that the bandwidth required for these services are very cheap and represent a high yield of return. I cannot see how the price would improve by sub leasing the lines either, as the incumbent pays Franchise fees to the local municipality for the privelage of doing business in the area, these fees would also be passed along and the equipment/manpower utilized would likely be the same techs/contractors who are accustomed to working for a certain wage. I could be wrong and I am not in the business aspect, so I dont know what our markup is.
Beware the fury of a patient man
- John Dryden
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
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.
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
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.
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.
TWC Digital Phone, Vonage, Lingo, and cell phone services are already giving them a rough ride. Why else do you think (telcoms) they want to prioritize the IP packets?
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.