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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
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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.
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.
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.
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.