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Time Warner Wins Ohio-Wide Cable Franchise
An anonymous reader writes "Time Warner Cable has received a state-wide franchise agreement in Ohio. Time Warner's agreement covers 260 communities in 60 of Ohio's 88 counties, for 10 years. AT&T was the first to earn a state-wide franchise contract, after a law was passed in September that allowed operators to negotiate a single state-wide agreement. In the past operators negotiated franchise agreements at the local level."
I think you're onto something here. Rhode Island passed something similar in the past year allowing Verizon to sell FiOS statewide without having to negotiate with each little town. What was happening before was Verizon would have to go kiss every little town selectman's ass handing over fist-fulls of money at a time just to have permission to offer FiOS tv and internet in their town. Negotiations were taking over a year in some instances and ended with Verizon handing over millions of dollars just to be able to offer people faster internet access.
In that instance individual town licenses were a barrier to competition, not an encouragement for it. Somehow the state senators and reps in RI grew big enough balls to tell their local piddly town governments to screw off and they just gave Verizon a state-wide license. Result? Statewide fios deployment in RI.
Verizon's looking to do the same thing right now in Massachusetts. Each town wanted a bigger bribe than the last just to be able to offer fiber optic internet service to the residents. So this past summer, fed up with greedy local governments, Verizon pulled out of all local negotiations in progress and has announced they won't be applying for anymore. They want a state-wide license like time-warner just got here in Ohio and like Verizon already has in RI. Until they get it, no more fios expansion to any new towns in Mass.
There, so now that that's out there now try and tell me how a state-wide franchise is going to hold back progress any more than the old town-by-town franchise scheme. I know Telco companies aren't the epitome of business ethics and they could be upgrading their networks a lot faster but these local town governments aren't exactly making it easy.