FCC Kills Build-out Requirements for Telecoms

Frankencelery writes "In a 3-2 vote, the FCC has altered cable franchising laws in the U.S. to the advantage of AT&T and Verizon. 'The FCC order imposes a 90-day limit on local communities' franchising decisions, but, more importantly, does away with build-out requirements. Those requirements generally insist that companies offer service to all the residents in the town, rather than cherry-picking the profitable areas.' Good news for the telecoms, but bad for cities who want a say in the fiber deployments."

Comments

Re:This is not for AT&T

[Anonymous Coward]

> > In which case they make larger profits.
>
> Which is bad how, exactly?

At the expense of equal access, public infrastructure, and realistic phone rates to go along with those benefits.

Or, was there an upside to corruption that we weren't aware of? Enlighten us how buying off greedy politicians is so great.

That's alot of power / control

[It's Atomic]

I'm not from around your neck of the woods, and honestly couldn't tell you if the decision was a good or a bad one. Nor do I understand the consequences or background to the situation, even after RTFAs.

The very fact that the decision had to be made leads me to believe there are communities, cities, populaces with many thousands if not millions of people who want a say in how their town is serviced by a telecommunications company. Some kind of kickback, like a swimming pool, or some franchise fees.

To my naive way of thinking, it seems incredible that 5 (3-2) people can veto the decision making process / power of entire cities or possibly even states, throughout the entire country.

It also seems kind of wrong. Power, corruption, ultimate power, you know, that kind of wrong.

Re:That's alot of power / control

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

To my naive way of thinking, it seems incredible that 5 (3-2) people can veto the decision making process / power of entire cities or possibly even states, throughout the entire country.

Look pal, a modern economy needs efficient, lean companies squeezing every last drop out of their emloyees and resources so CEOs can be amply rewarded for growth at any cost. How are our companies supposed to remain lean if they have to go chasing 30, 40 500 or 5000 or whatever other communistic amount of regulartory board members so they can be given their brown paper envelopes containing unmarked used dollar bills?

No, I say. No. What we need is a small manageable amount of bribable individuals so companies can spend less resources on bribery, and more on running their business more efficiently.... into the ground. The current number is great. Sometimes you don't even have to pay them. You can just bombard them with marketers, PR guys, dime a dozen scientists and regatta parties and they mostly just end up actually believing what you say. Great stuff.

Good for small telco's too

[zaaj]

In my area, there's an ISP that's also a CLEC (Competing Local Exchange Carrier - they offer dialtone). They're building out fiber to buildings for Ethernet and telephony services, and would like to get into video (TV) but since they're a small company, they just can't do it if they're going to be required to build-out to the non-profitable areas. It's not just a matter of raising prices for everyone to subsidize the sparsely-populated areas, it's a matter of not having the access to the capital required to do such a build-out in the first place. That, and the "densely populated" areas around here are not big enough to make the subsidization idea feasable even if the build-out could be done.

Here's another perspective - the telco's are only offering DSL in specific areas - sure it's probably primarily for technical reasons - certain radius from the CO for DSL to work, but if they can "cherry pick" for DSL, why not the rest of the services they offer.

On the other hand, arguments about large numbers of rural residents not having phone or electric sevice now if the build-out requirements were never in place are hard to ignore, and high-speed internet is being considered a basic necessity by more and more people as time goes on. Perhaps the FCC doesn't agree about that, or perhaps they figure having wide-spread fiber deployments at all would be a better starting point to eventually get fiber to rural areas than if fiber wasn't in the city/town at all.

OK, forget about the slums.

[brennanw]

Think instead of remote rural communities where the cost of setting up the infrastructure is too high for big companies to want to bother when they can spend all their time making money off of cities.

Rural communities already went through this with cable tv -- cable companies wouldn't put down the cable because it was too far away, and then when some communities tried to go with satellite TV instead the cable companies got a COURT ORDER forbidding them to do so because the cable companies had exclusive agreements with the states.

Profit is made off of these services because the companies that sell them want the services to be *indespensible*. Trying to market a service as indespensible while refusing to provide it to certain segments of society does not make for a healthy society.

So in answer to the question:

And just why should we want companies to have to market in areas where there are small / no profits to be made?

When a company decides to claim a monopoly on a service (and when you purchase a franchise from a community or state government you generally wind up having a monopoly in that area) then they have a responsibility to make that service available to all citizens. A monopoly is a different beast from standard business practices, because there are no other choices to make.