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The Turf Wars Between Phone and Cable
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Time is carrying a story about squabbling between phone and cable companies, now that they're sharing the same 'turf.' While it may sound humorous, it's anything but for customers. Bad blood between the cable providers and the bells has resulted in shoddy work, slapdash repairs, rumours of sabotage, and (of course) higher costs." From the article: "In some cases, cable and phone companies accuse one another of ripping out equipment. In others, wires were reportedly left exposed and ungrounded. Elsewhere, Verizon asserts that dozens of times this year, Comcast and other cable providers ran their wires down phone company pipes instead of installing separate conduits. Verizon said that in one case it sent a letter to Comcast asking that the practice be stopped, but that the paperwork and repairs that followed not only cost hundreds of dollars, but delayed installations for its customers."
Remember, these are the same companies that are running ads claiming that network neutrality is somehow bad for the consumer.
So, over here in the flyover country in a little state called Utah, a bunch of the cities have gotten together and done something great. These cities have decided that letting one company run the phone and another run the cable TV has gone on long enough. They have run their own fiber, and operate it like the roads. Equal access from anyone to anyone. Their website is http://www.utopianet.org/
Now, instead of getting crazy plans with no upload and bad ping times, I have my choice of four different providers for data, three (soon to be four) for voice, and three for video. All running on the same set of community fiber. The data plan I'm on right now is 15mbps SYMMETRIC for around $45/month. Business plans through this same company ( http://www.xmission.com/ ) give you a full 30mbps for $110/month. Oh, and I get a 26ms ping time to google, and 2ms ping time to my ISP.
If you had options like this, you wouldn't need to worry about the net neutrality bills, because if your service provider started degrading service for something you liked, you could just jump ship because there would be plenty of other options for you. You wouldn't be stuck under the iron fist of some "controlled" monopoly.
Seriously, call your city council and ask them why your city isn't this cool yet. I mean, if Utah can do it... what's stopping your state?
I am a cable technician for Comcast, in Maryland.
For over a year now Verizon has been wiring the entire county I work in with their new fiber. Their digging crews have done enormous amounts of damage to our underground lines and continue to do more every day. We have employees who work full time doing nothing but repairing damage from Verizon. Ironically our customers who are upset from the outages caused by Verizon often end up subscribing to their new fiber services as a result of it.
We also have another cable company in our area with lines that run parallel to ours. We rarely ever have problems with that competitor and in some areas we share cable lines to homes or apartments for customers switching between companies.
Don't they still have "private clubs" which can serve pretty much anything they want to (as opposed to weak piss-beer in normal bars)? You just need to pay a $5 or $10 "membership" fee at the door to "join". Not really worse than a cover charge in a bar elsewhere.
-b.
I live in Virginia and have a detached house with a crawl space underneath (not a full basement). The house is 25 years old, so it does not have any Cat-5/UTP wiring and also does not have any "home run" wiring (neither for telephone nor television).
Cox Cable ripped up the Verizon telephone cabling underneath my house when they converted the previous owner from Verizon telephone service (POTS) to Cox telephone service (Voice over HFC, not VoIP). This has forced me to use Cox telephone service, even though it is more expensive than Verizon (until I get a wiring contractor to visit).
What's even more frustrating is that I have FIOS (FTTC) ready at the curb from Verizon, but I can't convert over to that -- because Verizon won't (at any price) repair the telephone wiring underneath
my house.
When I do find a wiring contractor who doesn't think my re-wiring job is "too small", then I'm going to have both Cox's wiring and Verizon's wiring relocated inside my Garage, with my very own patch panel next to them. This way neither provider has any reason to go underneath the house and touch the wiring ever again. Instead, switching providers will just be a matter of switching which service is connected to my patch panel.
A word to the wise, if building a new house, having all the telephone/data/television wiring pulled back in a "home run" to a patch panel and have the various service provider demarc boxes installed next to that patch panel. This should be *inside* the house, so that the bored teenager down the street can't easily mess with your wiring. Although wireless Ethernet is quite popular today, it is still sensible to at least run Category-5 UTP wiring between the patch panel and (each bedroom, study, family room/den) so that you have options later on (e.g. if there are wireless coverage issues, which might happen later on even if it isn't a problem now).
The guy was obviously trespassing. Why didn't you take pictures of him, his truck's license plate, and what he was doing and call the cops? Better yet, depending on the state, you could have conceivably done a citizen's arrest since he was asked to leave twice and didn't. "Officer, I just caught a man attempting to burglarize my home."
I would have also suggested siccing an angry dog on the guy, but he might sue.
-b.
Fact: Once the phone company has installed conduit on someone's property that conduit becomes a "fixture of the property." Like a shed or a building, it belongs to the owner of the property. The only exception is if the phone company requests and receives a right-of-way from the property owner, something which they almost never do when the conduit terminates on the property instead of passing through it.
I carefully researched this a couple years ago when I worked for an ISP and wanted Cox to install fiber for us. Doing it cheaply required using conduit that Bell Atlantic (Verizon) had installed eight years earlier. Cos installed brought the fiber off the poles they both rented from Dominion Power and straight into the conduit system Bell had installed.
The Baby Bells' can complain all they want but its their own shoddy business practices which have left them open to this. Besides, in our case (as in most cases) the Bells' installation cost had long since been paid off by our purchase of Bell services. The conduit was ours. Fair is fair.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
D'j'ever hear of "911"? If somebody's on MY property and doesn't leave the-first-time-asked then _I_ want a cop there to at least have an incident report filed on it.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
When I worked in the US, I had excellent health insurance provided by the university where I worked, yet in the end, the medical care stank compared to what I was used to in Europe.
There is a big difference between "has the best" and "is the best". True, the US has the best hospitals, surgeons etc. But only the wealthiest 10% of the population has access to them. For everyone else, all you get is care that would horrify the typical Swiss or German.