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FCC To End Exclusive Cable For Apartments
spiffyman writes "The New York Times is reporting that on Wednesday the FCC will end exclusive contracts to provide cable service to apartment buildings. Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin is quoted as saying that cable prices have risen 'about 93 percent in the last 10 years' and that the FCC hopes to see more competition out of this move. This is a step in the right direction. In my apartment, for example, I have (dead) outlets for one cable company but am forced to go with the higher-priced firm. Moves like this will help those who live in areas where competition — even minimal competition — exists. The article also discusses the impact this may have on low- to middle-income families, who disproportionately live in apartment complexes."
Across the road is the company I've wanted. They have excellent packages at good prices, but the one for my block has poorer packages and a poor reputation for service. I'm hoping this means both can compete, along with AT&T, for my block of flats, which should give me better options and service. Though I still smell a fish. There's been competition between cable and satellite for years, but prices are still rather steep.
Cable is such a swindle I haven't give it much thought. The FCC screws up often enough, it's about time they did something right.
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Um, not like I want to defend cable companies and their pricing, but "93% in 10 years" is to my mind an inflammatory way of saying "an average of 6.7% per year over the last 10 years." Given that overall the consumer price index has averaged about a 3% increase per year over that period, cable prices are bad, but not as bad as the quote makes it sound. Then again, entire industries (credit cards, for example) owe their existence due to people's inability to compute compounded interest, so perhaps the wording should be no surprise.
But there are a few problems:
1: Areas where these limitations are in effect typically have low competition anyway, due to the stranglehold the dominant company has in the area.
2: Getting landlords and property managers to figure out how to work out the details between different cable/satellite/phone companies will be a comedy of errors at best.
3: Landlords/property managers will come up with (or be told by the existing contracted company) bull such as "You're not allowed to do that because they have to run more wires through the wall" or "You can't do that because you'd have to mount an ugly satellite dish on the exterior of the building" (even if not true).
It's a step in the right direction, though I think they should simply ban the bundling of these services to your rental agreement entirely. Having a choice is one thing, but getting the money back (because you're opting out of the bundled service) is another. How will you know that the $50 you get back on rent every month is accurate?
Since 1996, apartment dwellers have had the right to have a dish installed in an unobtrusive manner. The law trumps all lease agreements and landlord's rules. In my old apartment, it seemed like every other apartment had one installed, either on a pole in the back of a 1st floor unit or on the balcony of a 2nd floor unit.
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This is a joke. I live in MD near Washington DC and live in an apt complex (I can feel the weird stockers already!). This will do nothing to help the problem. In the handful of places that have more then one cable option fab for them, but almost everywhere in the US the county signs an exclusive deal with the cable people... Not the apt owners.
Until the FCC does something to make it faster for cable peoples to get into an area and makes it so the county can't sign an exclusive deal... Well lets just say I won't be holding my breath.
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I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
Ending these exclusive contracts is a good idea and I'm glad the FTC is doing this. The only problem is I don't see this really having an impact on Cable prices. The problem is a vast majority of people still won't have a choice since cable companies already divide up local areas.
For example the apartment I live in doesn't have an exclusive contract but the ONLY company I can get cable with is Comcast. Same thing is true at my Parent's house and they live 2000 miles away in another state. We won't see cable prices decrease until we start to see multiple cable companies competing for business in the same city. The large cable operators would rather just divide up the country into local monopolies than actually compete on price.
My parents service is another good example of how these companies work. Their cable company Time Warner decided to trade their city for another city with Comcast. Out went their former internet service and in came Comcast with the exact same package only $20 more, with P2P throttling. Their city doesn't have an exclusive franchise agreement with any cable company, and any company would be welcome to come in and establish a second franchise. No one wants to bother since they can all make more being little local monopolies sucking their customers dry.
The problem with cable/satellite is not the lack of competition by service providers (though I'm not thrilled by that). The big problem is the lack of competition by content providers.
Back in the 80s, anybody with an uplink could start a cable channel. They still can, but they have no hope of finding any local cable companies to carry them. All their bandwidth is used up by big media companies who have gamed the system so that cable companies have to carry all kinds of crap, and pay premium prices for it. Until that changes, you'll be shelling out.
Or you could just do without. I mean, it's only TV.
What are low-income families doing with cable anyway? I don't mean to sound like Scrooge, but it pisses me off when an elementary school kid shows up at school without a coat in the dead of winter because his parents "can't afford one," but they sure can afford to pay the cable bill every month. /rant
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
I sure got jerked around by the ISP that had an exclusive deal at my apartment in college. The first year the deal was with a company that couldn't keep the connection up reliably and had very little bandwidth. Then that company went out of business and they went with the local cable company that most people in town were reasonably happy with (Insight Broadband in Champaign). But since they had an exclusive deal on the building they put the screws to us: charged us $20/month per person (I had two roommates, so combined we paid twice as much as we would have normally) and, even worse, put us behind NAT. Yes, that's right, the whole fucking building behind one IP address. I wrote a letter to them (the gist of it being, "If you don't give me an IP address it's not Internet service, it's web'n'email service, which is not what I signed up for"). They didn't even respond.
I blame myself for the first year... I really should have read more closely and figured out whether the company was any good. The second year I really got blindsided, though... the landlord thought the price was $20/mo. for the three of us and didn't find out otherwise until after we'd signed the lease and made our first payment towards Internet service... the NAT thing I didn't know until I booted my computer and saw the dhclient spew scroll by. Ten-dot... hey!
Except if you live here.
We moved in thinking "Hey...what a deal. Cat5 in the walls...great!"
Until we found we couldn't get Cable internet...from anyone. We were forced into the pre-bundled ATT Home Entertainment (and let me tell you, their billing group provided HOURS of entertainment with double-billing, etc.)
The max DSL speed at the property? 256k. And that was on the blink 2-3x a month.
You could get any DirecTV package you wanted...as long as you didn't want to use a DVR or get any of the sports packages.
The phone service...well, it was analog phone, and they couldn't even get that to work well. And a phone line was required in order to use the alarm system and DirecTV pay-per-view.
This ruling DOESN'T affect properties like One Pearl Place - so get it in writing ahead of time. While we paid $100/mo. for our craptastic bundle, the people across the street - fifty feet away - were getting Comcast (and all that entails...like 6Mb peak speeds) along with more and better channels that worked with their DVRs for $70.00 a month.
Nice step forward. Now take the other step - make ANY exclusive Internet/TV/Phone deals illegal.
I think you missed the point completely.
Internet != basic need. Kids who are hungry, or cold in the winter without appropriate clothing, but who's parents pay for high speed internets rather than a coat are the issue. Not poor people having internet.
What's the status of Over-the-Air Broadcast TV? Is that still available? I have cable but I am moving soon and I don't want to sign up for cable but would be happy to get the basic 5 or 6 channels that are supposed to be free. Do the rabbit ears still do the trick? Will I need to upgrade to a "digital broadcast" receiver when the government cuts off the broadcast of TV (which I think is scheduled for 2008)?
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I work for an ISP (Webpass) that does this exclusively-- we bring a T3-speed (or higher) connection into an apartment or condo building and share it with the residents. We come across all kinds of nonsense with [insert national cable company conglomerate here]. They take up entire backboards in telecom closets. They take our equipment off the wall and leave it dangling. They lock up everyone's termination lines in a box to keep out competition. They pull in-use (and marked) pairs off of phone boards to bring in their crappy phone service. I could rant on and on.
All in all, they suck. We've come across a lot of building managers who actually refuse to let them into a building, due to some dispute. Sometimes they charge up to $30,000 to come into a building, and then demand an exclusive contract. It would be good to see some more healthy competition to keep these bastards from monopolizing.
If the poor are so important to you, pay for their upkeep out of your own pocket, and stop trying to reach into mine.
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What's the status of Over-the-Air Broadcast TV? Is that still available?
Yes. Analog up to 2012 and digital thereafter.
Do the rabbit ears still do the trick?
Depends how close you live to the stations, but I'm sure it still works as well as it ever did. If it's a long-term situation a permanent antenna is always an option too.
Will I need to upgrade to a "digital broadcast" receiver when the government cuts off the broadcast of TV (which I think is scheduled for 2008)?
I think that was originally scheduled for 2009 but the broadcasters don't have their acts together, so that was recently pushed back to 2012 if I recall. By then high-def TVs with internal tuners will probably be nearly ubiquitous. Eventually they are supposed to switch, but they keep pushing it back, so I wouldn't bet on them switching by 2012.