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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.
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?
Kind of reminds me of when I was a cable guy for Comcast. We would constantly be replacing lines and equipment that Knology (the other cable company in this area) would rip out when they ran their stuff. It just kinda went back and forth like the for a few years. Last I heard, they were still doing it.
-b.
Are cable and phone companies forming gangs or something?
East Coast Cable don't take no shit from West Coast Bell! Word up!
[News later that day...]
"Notorious B.E.L.L. was found with all their wires cut this morning as phone and cable gang wars heat up."
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
...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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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.
And this is all about getting rid of the oversight - let the market regulate itself my ass.
Let's face it. The FCC has made it easy for incumbents to keep new competitors out. So now we have incumbents fighting each other with dirty tricks, because they know consumers have no choices but the incumbents. Talk about a recipie for failure. Our broadband choices suck ass, and the providers take turns screwing customers.
Belief that an unregulated market will cure all evils is a belief that long-coddled Baby Bells and cable companies will suddenly embrace open, honest competition. They're like rich kids, born with silver spoons in their mouths, crying about equal opportunity. It's disgusting.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Perhaps you've heard of this little place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon.
http://www.boeing.com/ids/a_to_z.html looks like a lot of pork (IE government subsidies) to me.
I get your point, but don't think for a second that the US is not funding R&D for Boeing. And they are using money confiscated from me to remain the "world's policemen," even though most of the world didn't ask us in the first place.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
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.