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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."
I live in an area outside of the city. Until recently, the only available ISPs were long distance Dial-Up ISPs. The local Telco has been hesitant to provide new services to customers. They have refused to repair their lines that are so noisy that Dial-UP connections get dropped. They rolled out ADSL service recently, but the service is unreliable and you can't download anything faster than 12 KB/second. This makes downloading a Linux distribution take a very long tie and require frequent use of wget'c -c parameter. They claim that Verizon's outages are to blame for their frequent down times. Adelphia (now Time Warner) began offering service here. Their service is much faster, however, the service can have downtimes that last several days. When I ask for an ETA on the repair, they often tell me that they don't know when they will be able to get someone out to start working on the problems. Reliability doesn't seem to be very high on these companies' list of priorities.
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