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."

Comments

It all boils down to:

[Beatbyte]

Who owns the physical media in the ground.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:So, we seize it for the public good.

[Crashmarik]

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.