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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."
This reminds me of when telecom was deregulated... Here in Boston with the transient student population - telephone, and DSL services are installed and uninstalled rather frequently. I heard so many stories of various telecoms just nipping and ripping cabling from competitors. As soon as you got DSL, your downstairs neighbor was out of luck - and when their repair person showed up - bam he'd just rip your cables and hook his customer back up. Covad, Concentric, Verizon, all of them constantly shooting each other in the feet. Right now we have RCN and Comcast for cable choices - and they do the same thing to each other.
I can't wait for it to start between them and the telco providers. It will be so much "better". Competition is good. Competition without oversight and some rules to limit bad behaviour sucks. And this is all about getting rid of the oversight - let the market regulate itself my ass.
-b.
Support wimax as much as possible-it works, and it is cheap enough to let the mom and pops ISPs in and hits that last mile for you folks rural and in the burbs. Sign up, show enthusiasm, get the costs down more. I couldn't get broadband from either the local telco nor cable, nor were they planning on it anytime this century near as I could see-they didn't care about my cash they could have, all I heard from them is a hearty FU. I got direct from the landline guy from hellsouth-they will NEVER run good enough copper out to folks unless they are ORDERED to by the government. And the cable doofuses-same deal, unless you get stuck in some new expensive gated community or something, they don't give a crap either. Then wimax hit this area, WHAM, I was on that baby (and the tower is around 10 miles or so away!) and I am now quite the loyal customer. Couldn't sign up fast enough.
I had to read that twice... 'flyover' means 'overpass' outside of America, so you gave me an interesting mental image of Utah.
...where an engineering contrator of some sort was walking around my property looking for something and my wife asked him what he was doing. He claimed that we had placed a work order with the cable company to do some digging in our yard and he was marking out the cables by spray painting on the grass. My wife informed him that this was not correct and we had done no such thing and asked him to leave. He walked back to his truck and my wife thought the incident was over. A minute or so later he was walking around our backyard again and my wife informed me of what had transpired and I walked out to talk to the guy. He told me basically the same thing and I again, in no uncertain terms, explained to him that we had done no such thing and that I wanted to see a copy of his work order. Suddenly he became terse and slightly agitated and started complaining that he was just marking the ground where the cables lay. I explained to him that if I wanted my grass painted day-glo orange, I would do it myself and re-iterated that I wanted him to leave and that I expected him to respect my request. He said he would do so and sort of apologized for the 'confusion' and started to leave. I walked back into my house and was going into the kitchen and along the way checking that he was leaving. I didn't see him at his truck so I (starting to get a little pissed off now) quickly exited the house by the back door to see what he was doing and found him standing next to my DSL line (BellSouth has it going up the side of the house to a hole in the roof where the DSL line enters and is terminated with an RJ-45.) I asked him what the hell he was doing but he was walking quickly back to his truck. I didn't see any obvious signs of him doing anything; however, when I went back in the house my wife reported that the phones no longer worked. I went back out and found that this guy had pulled the base phone line connection down enough from the small housing next to my other meters to interrupt the phone connections.
I didn't know if he was just screwing with me for telling him to beat it or not, so I called the cable company and asked them about this and they professed total ignorance. I had the company info off the side of the guys truck and called another day (in order to speak to someone else because I actually have the local cable office number [a nightmare to obtain in and of itself]) to see if they used this company and it turns out they do.
The guy had confirmed the address and name on the address so he didn't have a typo on his work order (which I never got to see), but it was a weird experience...
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with a QWest installer a few months ago at a location that used to be serviced solely be Cox Cable. MAN you should see th shit written on the wall about each others mothers, race and personal hygiene! I've seen nicer biker bar bathrooms!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Hey! Don't blame the companies alone. Much of the garbage is caused by different government regulators. There's thee .pdf for years. I've been told that public utility commissions have drawn the lines (occasionally) to have family members not be a long distance call.
FCC, DOJ, and the worst is the State Utility Commissions. I've seen lata maps like this http://www.puc.state.oh.us/pucogis/statemap/lata_
Recently PUCs have been afraid they were losing their power with more and more IP services being offered. Cost effective equipment exists that provides both IP and voice abilities. PUCs have tried to rule that if the equipment is combined, then they regulate both types of services.
The big companies are partially to blame - no big company deals with change very well - but the government isn't your friend either. A suspicious eye is a good idea.
Some of the other providers will block things, but XMission doesn't block anything. Well, I believe they block port 25 outbound to anything other than their mail server if you get any abuse complaints, but other than that I have not noticed anything.
I run my own email server (with greylisting), a web server which I have both my personal site and do demos for clients. A few of them have remarked on how fast my demo server is. The only limit I have is a 100GB/month total transfer limit. Another one of the providers is cheaper and may do some blocking and only allows for 5GB/month transfer.
See, having the choice gives you power. Had I wanted a slightly slower, and slightly cheaper account, I could have gotten it at the expense of a smaller transfer limit and some port blocking. I decided to go the slightly more expensive route (I think it's about $5 more a month) and get everything that I wanted.