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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.'"
Because you think your internet communications are safe passing through the other providers? how quaint...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It is this kind of legal wrangling that goes on endlessly. Sure, if everything in the entire country was controlled by The Government there would be fewer people to sue over stuff like this. But I hardly think that would be a solution most people would find acceptable in the end. Like many things, it sounds good until you find out the details.
OK, so there should be competitive entities. Well, if you are going to spend a billion or so dollars you need to mitigate every risk, right? Unfortunately, the lawyers have set things up such that one risk that is very difficult to mitigate is someone else suing you over some perceived wrong. And yes, trying to run a fiber link is going to distrupt many businesses and push a few under. When those entities have been forced to jump through other legal hurdles to combat all the NIMBY lawsuits and "beautification" lawsuits (you know, those wires are really ugly...) and endless other lawsuits a lot of people feel very justified in suing over what will essentially put them out of business.
Sure, it is just the changing face of technology. But cable TV has been over-regulated in most US cities for so long that it is going to be a real battle to convince those owners that they bought nothing with all of their franchise fees, taxes, and public meetings.
This is just another example of the government protecting monopolies. Cable rates are outrageous primarily because we have few if any choices (around me, it's Comcast or DishTV or stuck with Antenna). We'd all be better off if the FCC would just allow some good old fashioned competition. Let more cable, phone, broadband, and internet companies offer cable-like options for consumers and the product and/or price will almost certainly improve.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
A little competition doesn't harm anyone. There was only one broadband (ADSL) provider here in my country (the largest monopoly). They charged whatever they wanted. One day they went too far (the infamous 4GB cap and $20 for the extra GB or fraction). What happened? Cable modem operators started operating in cities where they didn't provide service, with double the speed and no limits.
So, Telecom Argentina had to do something to keep their customers: They increased the speed 5x, kept the same price, and removed all kind of caps. That's just capitalism and competition in action. Yes, local cable operators want to "protect their investment", but most of these did that investment 10 years ago, and want to keep earning money without investing in newer stuff. So they go through the legal way in order to stop competition (or to buy a few more months). But, well, sooner or later they either do some spending or competition will eat them. It's just the way it is. It's everyting america stands for, right? Capitalism.
For those who don't want to RTFA, it's the usual mix of local politics, coupled with the regulatory snafu that's arising from the ever-decreasing "difference" between phone and cable companies.
Basically the phone company is doing a significant fiber upgrade, and trying to slip the whole "we're going to be doing tv soon" idea under the radar of the local people, who've already signed one of those craptastic cable monopoly agreements with comcast...The upgrade also includes large beige junction boxes, which is causing the predictable uproar among the affluent, yard-obsessed yuppies who live in the suburb in question. To add insult to injury, the community just got over a nasty fight with SBC (now part of Verizon), over doing fiber-to-the-house on their own initiative.
It's all a load of crap at this point anyway. The damn regulation we're using to play phone and cable companies off against each other is hilariously dated, especially since they're all sending the same damn bits, and mostly sending them over the same damn wires!
We need a simple law to force wire sharing (so we don't end up with five times the amount of bandwidth we need going into every damn neighborhood), and maybe a standard connector for data cables, and we need to step back, and let them fight it out to the death. Forcing those jokers to compete is the only way we'll get decent service for a decent price.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
Mostly they run fiber near your house, and then send everything the rest of the way on their antiquated copper network. The whole bit in the article is talking about an attempt by AT&T to try to run fiber closer to your house, and how it's flopping for 'em. I wish they'd just do the real deal as well, or do something what the water companies do: run fiber near someone, and let them pay if they want to hook on.
For a real, high band fiber connection, I'd be willing to put in some change, and I doubt I'm the only one.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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. It seems pointless, and fairly stupid actually, to demand that a change in the physical media from copper to fiber would demand some new operating agreement, oversight and (ahem) ***FRANCHISE FEES** with the local government. What we're talking about here is a change in content, not a change in the nature of the communications infrastructure. The local telcos have already had the rights to go bury copper cable all over suburbia, the fact that the new physical medium MIGHT be used to carry some new content is pretty much irrelevant, any more than the fact that phone lines could carry voice *but also* carry fax required any interaction with localities.
The issue is more likely that Comcast doesn't want the competition, never mind that they already HAVE it from systems that don't involve physical right-of-way, i.e., DirecTV.
Unrelated question, and obvious attempt to stir up conspiracy hounds: does anyone know if Comcast is subtly or overtly behind efforts to ban or restrict satellite dishes? Seems like there was a move in Boston to ban visible satellite dishes, largely in violation of FCC regs that don't generally permit localities to do so.
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Rotate the pod, please, HAL....
Perhaps this is a bit off-topic, but I really think this story is an excellent example of the high quality journalism that is popping up at arstechnica. This is a very real issue that may well effect a huge number of people and it's good to see an informed, well written bit of investigative journalism coming from a new(ish) source. (read: not the old-media). Bravo to all the folks over at Arstechnica!
well, or do something what the water companies do: run fiber near someone, and let them pay if they want to hook on.
Does your water company seriously do that? In my town, they wanted to run water to the middle of town to promote denser development. I have a nice little private well and live along the way, and they not only forced me to pay the $5K hookup charge to this new (totally uneeded) line, but also to pay for the pipe running out in the middle of the road, and to take on a monthly fee even though I already have a source of water. On top of it, they copied their work elsewhere in the area and didn't take care in repaving over the trench, so now the road is crap to drive on as well (some genius decided right where your left tires go was a nice place to put a bumpy strip over the pipe). I suppose I could have it worse; rather than pay the subscription+zero volume for the capped off pipe in the basement, an uncle of mine out in Washington State is actually prohibited from using water other than city water. This includes rainwater cisterns, for when there's a storm and the crap public water stops.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Well, they do it here. Of course, our local water utility is semi-privatized...The city spun them off about 50 years ago, so they don't have access to imminent domain and have to play by the rules.
I'd kinda be interested to see how something like that would work out for fiber...Clearly don't want the federal government involved in it because they'll screw it up, but at the same time, the private companies will do what's best for themselves and to hell with the consumers.
In the article, the locals had attempted to do FTTP previously, and been intimidated out of it by SBC...They ran some seriously abusive push polls, "Do you want your tax dollars paying for your neighbor to get porn?" and "How many schools do you think will close because tax payers won't support both the school referendum and the fiber referendum?" and the local government caved. Still, local service utility co-ops work pretty well for this sort of thing. Too bad we don't see more of that.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'm an IT manager for a new Public Access entity in Nevada, and let me tell you something - it's a well-spent few thousand dollars per town. As recently as nine months ago, I didn't think public access was an important thing at all but that changed once I saw just how many people really rely on PEG (Public, Education, Government) access channels for a lot of local information and content. You don't watch public access, but grandma does and she's not exactly wired in with DSL nine times out of ten. As we're starting from the ground up, I have a pretty clear insight as to just how much this kind of operation can cost and how much it costs to maintain it and though I can't give you our budget numbers (we haven't had them approved yet, that happens this weekend) I can tell you that our program is going to be running on a shoestring compared to others that get far more than a million dollars per year in operating expenses and have accumulated hundreds of thousands in (highly depreciated) equipment.
Also keep in mind that the money that funds public access is considered part of the cable company's fee structure, and on the proposed agreement for our city (up for voting this week) it comes out to fifteen cents per monthly bill in charges that actually go to funding capital improvements and buildout to our Public Access program.
Now, what do communities get from public access?
In our city, we don't have network affiliates of our own, so our public access is the only way for people to see a community bulletin board and community events videos from groups like the Chamber of Commerce, Boys and Girls Clubs, local youth sports, and of course all sorts of religious content for those people so inclined. In addition, we also broadcast city government meetings live and in reruns so city residents can stay informed even with just the most basic cable account.
Most PEG programs are non-profits under a 501(c)3 so we're not in it for the money.
Also, from the examples given in your posting I'd have to say you really don't know much about just what communities use PEG channels for. There may be cases where "townies" get a power trip, but for every case where someone's lawn is regulated to 1.75" (which is more of a homeowner's association nightmare than a local legislative one) you'll get ten major ones such as regulations on billboards and new building developments that actually draw huge crowds of interested viewers both on television and in the hearing room.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Verizon's FIOS is fully CableCard and digital-tuner compatible, meaning your new TV (or new Media Center PC w/tuner card, TiVo, etc) doesn't need anything new or fancy to access the coax running out of the converter. IPTV is *NOT* compatible, and requires device lock-in with conversion boxes.
I can find precious little on the lo-layer specifications of FiOS, however, it appears to be IPTV. They may build in the converter box to the outside of the house to convert it back to something that "old" boxes can recognize, but from what I can tell, from the head end to the home, it is all IP. It sounds to me like the "we aren't a cellular company" chant from them being a cellular company but trying to get their cellular service to be called something else for differentiation. Just because they complain they they aren't "cellular" doesn't mean that they are, in fact, not cellular. Just because they make up some FiOS name for their particular IPTV product does not make it anything other than IPTV.
Learn to love Alaska
Only a very few of the first 70 posts show any understanding at all of what's involved. I live in the western Chicago suburbs. Here's the deal.
1) AT&T wants to deploy fiber which will carry the triple play everyone's been drooling over for the last 10 years: Video, Phone, and Internet on one bill.
2) Comcast just got done with a very expensive infrastructure buildout in the last 3-4 years in my city, so that their network could deliver triple play services. Before that, large parts of the city could get NO broadband service at all, except from some (necessarily expensive) wireless ISP's that sprang up or $125+/mo IDSL at a whopping 144 kbps.
3) Comcast, by the franchise agreement, must serve all homes in the city or none. It's the ONLY consumer-friendly provision of the franchise agreement, IMO. So they were required to run the upgraded infrastructure to ALL parts of the city. We have an older downtown full of lower-income, mostly Hispanic residents, and newer, higher-income subdivisions. Guess which residents are very profitable to serve? Guess which residents would be left in the digital dark ages if Comcast weren't bound by the franchise agreement?
4) AT&T wants it both ways. They want to compete with Comcast. But they refuse to be bound by the ONLY consumer-friendly part of the franchise agreement -- serve everyone, or serve no one.
5) They also claim the right to drop their ugly green boxes wherever they want. Comcast doesn't get to do that.
Comcast sucks -- it's expensive, and their internet service blows compared to top-of-the-line DSL, let alone FIOS. But at least everyone can get service, and at least there aren't butt-ugly 5' dark-green steel cubes for Comcast all over the place. AT&T is fighting in court for the right not to serve everyone, and to put their butt-ugly, way too big green boxes wherever they want.
The moral of the story: Not all super-highspeed-broadband rollouts are good. Some of us here don't want AT&T ramming their accountant-driven priorities down our communities' throats because it's for our own good. "Our" own good is defined as "any household that is most likely to be most profitable for AT&T, and to hell with the rest. Oh yeah, and aren't those 5' dark green steel cubes really attractive?"
doctorcisco
The entire point of a franchise agreement is equal coverage for all residents of a town. Here's the deal: if cable companies want to sell into a city or town, they must meet certain service and coverage requirements. Without these franchise agreements, these new fiber services will only be deployed to rich towns (or rich PARTS of towns).
Look at the FIOS roll-out. Verizon says they are not equipped to handle "multi-dwelling" units. So they deploy FIOS to single family properties. If you live in an apartment or town-house - too bad. They can do this because most towns stupidly think it is a "data" service, and do not require a TV franchise.
I have standard copper pairs and coax cable in my townhome, why would a strand of fiber be more difficult to install than either of those?
I'll tell you why. Single-family properties tend to be owned by people with more money than those who own/rent townhomes and apartments, so Verizon uses the excuse that "multi-dwelling" units are too difficult to deploy.
I hate all these companies. They will only deploy service to rich people where they can make HUGE margins and screw all the rest.
We need municipal fiber and we need it now.
-ted
I can tell you that AT&T's position is pretty goofy. As the former SBC in the area, their fear campaign against community-based broadband was pretty brutal. They bombed the mailboxes with little flyers like here and really soured me more on the company. Now they come around and claim that we need the exact service they were shooting down last year. Sheesh. Those boxes are also pretty huge.