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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.'"
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.
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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.
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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!