Slashdot Mirror
The Battle Over AT&T's Fiber Rollout
Tyler Too writes "AT&T is facing heated opposition from some communities where it wants to deploy its U-Verse fiber network. Ars Technica has a feature looking at the situation in the suburbs of Chicago. 'Legal uncertainty is the rule when it comes to IPTV deployments by telecommunications companies. Neither Congress nor the FCC [has] weighed in on whether services like U-verse require their operators to take out a cable franchise from cities, and no federal judge has issued a definitive ruling.' It's not just Chicago, either: 'With AT&T set to upgrade its infrastructure to support U-verse across its wide service area, this is a battle that could play out in thousands of communities across the country over the next few years.'"
We're not moving away from net neutrality... We never had net neutrality. Neither from the providers, nor from the government.
Here is a case (and the same thing is happening with Verizon's FiOS) where a company has wires in place, and is sending data, but the local government won't let them send certain data (digitally encoded TV shows) without giving the municipality a cut of their total revenue. It's ridiculous. Worse, this cut of the money is passed directly on to consumers, but most consumers (voters) don't realize that their local government gets between three and six percent of the local cable TV revenues. It's a huge tax that people don't know is there, and that's why they are surprised when their local government doesn't allow a new competitor into the market. Well here's the reason: It's so the town/city continues to get a fat check every month.
http://comunidad.muchoviaje.com/cs/photos/dan/pic
That's all over the country. And they can't change it now because it costs a lot of money and the company is not interested in fixing that.
It's not as simple as that, though. The article details a possible legal loophole problem when it comes to IPTV. Since cable TV uses an actual cable line, then it's easy to enforce the law where necessary. AT&T's U-Verse, using IPTV, works differently in that it's "cable but not cable".
The Ars article has all the details, including the metal giant that they called 52B. It stands around 5ft tall, 4ft deep, and is about 2ft wide. It is big. AT&T wants to build and deploy those boxes wherever they please. Part of the problem is that these so-called tele-comm upgrade is also going to provide video services (like cable). Using IPTV as part of the legal loophole, AT&T wants to put a bunch of these boxes scattered across the towns that they're trying to roll fiber out to. These deployment also affect a section of a town. So unlike a cable TV deployment, service is available to the area where it is immediately available instead to every home in the town.
Both the suburban communities and AT&T are stuck. Yes, competition is good. We all want a choice. But in legal terms, both sides are stuck and AT&T isn't all that lenient when it comes to what they provide as services.
* AT&T claims it is not cable and that it's all telecomms.
* If AT&T deploys, the town is likely to be sued by Comcast and the state DA, citing violation of two laws.
* If AT&T cannot deploy, the town is sued citing support for monopolies and anti-competitive acts.
AT&T doesn't want a build-out, which would guarantee the service is provided to every house/building in that town within a limited time period. AT&T also refuses to provide a structured layout plan of where they wish to deploy these 52B boxes (for all we know, it might end up in someone's front yard 5ft from the house). The people in some of these towns do not want that. They also do not want a single corporate entity to be the only choice they have for broadband and cable tv services. So the question continues to remain: Where do you stand?
~ Old Warriors Society
AT&T and other phone providers don't seem to NEED a new "franchise agreement" from any local government because they pretty much already HAVE one and have had it ever since copper wires were laid in.
We're talking about a video franchise agreement. Since AT&T was not previously selling video services, they don't have one.