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Telecom Rollouts Raise Ire Over Utility Boxes
Anti-Globalism points out this AP story, which notes:
"As cable and phone companies race to upgrade services or offer video for the first time, they're doing it by installing equipment in boxes on lawns, easements and curbs all over American neighborhoods. Telecommunications rollouts have always been messy, but several towns and residents are fighting back with cries of 'Not in my front yard!' AT&T Inc.'s nearly fridge-sized units, which route its new U-verse video product to customers, are drawing particular ire. A few caught fire or even exploded. AT&T said it has fixed that by replacing the units' backup batteries."
A few caught fire or even exploded.
It's obviously the fault of the filesharers. All those bits streaming through the equipment at the same time as video and legitimate Internet usage cause friction, see, and that caused the boxes to catch fire. Yet another arguement against the evil pirates!
Get off my lawn!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Do these nodes etc. not have to go somewhere? Is there any tested way of safely and efficiently burying them or something? Obviously it would cost more. I wonder what customers would rather do, pay more to have them hidden away or complain that they have put up them.
What happened to locating these boxes on the telephone poles themselves?
Who cares how it looks outside. When you have enough Television and a fast enough internet connection you don't need to go outside.
And you'd think AT&T could hire better graffiti artists to decorate the damn things.
At least they're dressing up those dull boxes with some neat designs.
AT&T really has no excuse. Here in Las Vegas there are dozens of cell phone towers that really look like palm trees. All it takes is a little effort to camouflage these boxes and place them with a little more intelligence.
That picture is one ugly job. A little landscaping, fencing, whatever would solve 90% of their problem. Considering how much those boxes cost with their contents you would think a few thousand dollars each for cosmetics would be a drop in the bucket.
A few caught fire or even exploded
This must be the modern equivalent of the flaming bag of dog poop left on a doorstep.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Seems awfully close to the commercials DirecTV has been putting out about the horribly ugly, semi-truck-sized boxes required for cable and fiber-optic connections.
"we want our high speed internet and tv but you can't put the equipment for it HERE!!!"
My rights don't end where your feelings begin.
I don't think these boxes are really a technical necessity. More likely they're used to split out services so that the customer doesn't see it's all just digital data.
...for living in a suburb with no alley ways (aka. backroads)
As someone who just had one of these installed at the end of our block, I can attest to the size and noise of the things. They are about twice the size of a standard telephone box, with a footprint of about 5'x5'x5'. They are actively cooled, so you can always hear the fan churning away. They also have diagnostic leds on the outside, so in the middle of the night, you can still see their ugliness.
Unfortunately, the volume of these things makes it impractical to hang them from a utility pole and the need for maintenance and cooling precludes burying them.
The real shame is that the one in my neighborhood got installed on someone's easement, meaning that she's now responsible for mowing around the damn thing.
People put up with telegraph poles and electricity pylons for the benefits (electric power and telephones). If you want your broadband and services at rock-bottom prices, you can't expect the utilities to shell-out for NIMBY-approved landscaping.
According to the article, only a few boxes are fridge-sized, most are much smaller. Give it a year ot two and they'll be covered in bushes, to disguise the fact that the residents want all the up-to-date services they offer.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
'Not in my front yard!'
N.I.M.F.Y.!
Not quite as exciting as nympho, but then again if they were putting a nympho in my front yard the neighbors might complain. I wonder, could I squeeze that under the code enforcement definition of 'lawn ornamentation' or 'yard decoration?'
Halloween would be easy enough, I'd just refer to the goings on as what happens when a Sasquatch meets a mermaid - I'd even have the external speakers blasting 'Part of Your World' as the neighborhood children walked by, expecting candy but getting the seeds of a million nights of nightmares instead.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
These structures are going to be in place for decades to come.
It certainly costs more to bury them but there's a very good reason that almost every new housing development chooses to bury utilities rather than display them.
In the long run, older neighborhoods will elect to bury the unsightly mess so it doesn't make sense to muck up an existing neighborhood for a short term cost savings.
Community Planning 101
1) Company installs new service in cheapest manner possible (like a big ugly cell tower)
2) Residents notice (OMG! it's a big ugly cell tower)
3) Residents discuss in local government (Fix this shit!)
4) Company updates methods to meet requirements (hides new cell towers inside architecture)
Unfortunately, every local gub'ment has some form of "easement" clause in the title to your property. Initially intended for installation of sidewalks and public utility access corridors, it's being usurped by the private for-profit telecom companies. They've lobbied the city/county officials such that they get treatment like they're a public utility (e.g. universal telephone service, etc.) and then "embrace and extend" that access to the much more lucrative high-speed cable/fiber access. Unfortunately, the telecom companies are notoriously cheap, and wouldn't lift a finger to improve an installation's appearance if it meant spending an additional dollar. After all, they don't benefit from that expense, do they? Consider it part of the "Tragedy of the Commons," only the "commons" has been extended into your front yard.
That is "Not In My BackYard" has become "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody".
It is simply requiring the telcos to bury their nasty shit like any company that respects the neighborhood it does business in. The only reason they dont bury them is because the local zoning lets them save $50k and plop their volkswagon sized garbage at street level.
The telco is *not* going to say "NO FIOS FOR YOU" if the community demanded they bury these turds. They will just jack the price up by $0.01 and amortize the cost over 20 years.
My parents have had one of these things in their backyard right on the property line for at least two decades. Must be a cable box. Anyway, they put up a nice white fence around it and littered the fence with ivy, so it doesn't look like total garbage. Of course, they did it out of their own pockets.
My question is (and I did RTFA...) what legal right does a phone company have to dig up someone's property and put up a huge piece of equipment? As far as I can tell, it sounds like these things are going up on private property. Is there some kind of eminent domain issue at play?
Name...That...Autocomplete!
That should remove it from your lawn rather well.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How many of these allow for easy wiretapping? Vote with your money and avoid AT&T at all costs.
Lamenting the sad state of broadband in the US (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/13/1648211) is a common theme here, so you'd think we'd be gung-ho for any utility to start installing new gear. Instead, we get complaints that the new gear is ugly and that telcos don't want to negotiate a different standard with every little town. I hope we can at least agree that it's logical for the telcos to want one standard per state, at least for the sanity of their installer techs. I'm not objecting to making that standard rigorous, just so long as there's only one of them.
Personal experience, our town (Waltham, MA) was among the first to get FIOS strung up everywhere. It sits on the utility poles, which now carry power, copper, coaxial and fiber. It's not the prettiest set up in the world, but it's really not that bad. I used to live in a suburb that buried all our cables, which was considerably prettier. It also means that they aren't going to get fiber (installation costs aren't justified) and when there was an outage, it took weeks to get it resolved. I much prefer the uglier solution.
"A few caught fire or even exploded."
Sure, AT&T claims it is the back up batteries. How do we know it wasn't the "Not in my front yard" crowd taking matters into their own hands?
This sig cannot be proven true.
For all those who claim that the average American is only an apathetic dreamer who will passively sit back and relent while his basic human rights and freedoms are being slowly dismantled, let this story be a lesson to you.
Fascists take heed. If pushed hard enough, the American citizen will strongly react.
Wasn't this news a couple of years ago?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/18/214215 (http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/u-verse.ars/2)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/11/1436206
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/25/1145216
Easement clause is used in Kansas City by cable, phone, gas and electric companies. They are required to pay an additional fee for digging more than once a year or digging up roads paved less than 1 year. But they seem to find ways around the fee system. In the older neighborhood I live in, they use the excuse of upgrading for the two major hospitals in the area. They have actually damaged sewer pipes, caused driveways and sidewalks to sink to the point of having to be replaced, by the property owners and gotten away with not paying damages. The police are starting to openly complain that the larger boxes are being used by muggers to hide behind contributing to crime in the area. I think it will take the boxes getting vandalized for components to convince the companies to put them underground.
They need service access so they can't be sealed solid - some kind of service hatch/door will be a must. Obviously they'd have seals, but these perish and water will get in.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Paint "Free Copper Wire Inside" on the side of each box.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
I have one of those out front at the main road. It's next to the County's sewerage lift pump, which is in a bigger and noisier rectangular box. It's not so bad if you're in an area that's rural enough that houses aren't right on top of the things.
What puzzles me is the growing size of traffic signal control boxes. Why does it take something with about three vertical feet of 19' rack space for one traffic light? Of course, there's a vision system watching the cameras, a network node, and maybe a UPS in addition to the basic signal controller. But there are enough signal controllers you'd think those components would be more integrated.
I work for a company that builds cell networks for cell providers (such as Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, etc.). We have a right of way, provided by the FCC under the same laws that allow telephone companies to install poles and wires, to put out equipment nearly any where we please. We do try to stay out of the way of residents and maintain a low profile in the city. However, since cell tower location is an important factor in network coverage, some complaints by residents just can't be resolved.
People really want cell phones. They want them to work nearly everywhere with full reception. However, they don't want to see or hear any of the construction or upkeep of the equipment that is required to be placed in their neighborhoods. Obviously, these are conflicting desires. Something has to give.
AT&T probably did a poor job here in the placement of its equipment. But IMHO, most residents are unrealistic when they crave services but are unwilling to deal with the equipment required to run the services.
The marketplace is not very good at assessing declines in safety or reliability. People don't know what they're buying, and the sellers sure aren't going to tell them.
I've talked to half a dozen acquaintances who have been talked into switching off of copper by Verizon or Comcast. No a single one of them was making a free-market decision to trade off reliability in order to get reduced cost.
They had no idea that they weren't getting the kind of service they were used to... service that kept functioning for days, through power outages and the Blizzard of 1979 and the Northeast Power Blackout of 1965.
The communications companies are using small, local backup batteries with limited capacity, only a few hours. On the evidence of the story, they don't have the staff to monitor and maintain thousands of them. Battery explosions are not the best way to find out that batteries need replacement.
Backup batteries should be in a central location, like the dignified brick buildings of the old telephone exchanges, where they can be easily monitored and maintained, and where safety issues won't affect subscribers.
And, frankly, if a central outage takes out a whole town, my guess is that the phone company is more likely to deal with it promptly than if it just affects one neighborhood.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Hey, cable or telco guys! Please install all the dang boxes you want out here so we can get *some* kind of broadband. Those snooty yuppie rich places don't want it, they sayso -> "too ugly" "destroys the oh so darling neighborhood ambiance when we are having our wine and cheese soirées". See? Losers, come out where you'll be appreciated.
Thanks on behalf of the millions of people in the US who live outside the major cities and burbs.
I've worked with many tech folks from (insert name of big telecom company here) ranging from the engineers who architected the systems down to the grunts who actually perform the installation of the hardware on-site. From the top to the bottom, they mostly tend to all operate on the DRGAF (Don't Really Give A F*ck) principle.
Oh, and also anytime their equipment or cabling fails or malfunctions, it's always the end-customers or the customers' equipment at fault. The telecom company's equipment always "tests good from their end", even when smoke is pouring out their fibermux cabinet.
I don't know why people treat things like these utility boxes, utility poles, communications towers, and wind turbines as ugly. I think that they are quite beautiful, mostly because they provide the some of the most visible insights into how our society functions. Particularly so when you're fortunate enough to pass by a box when a technician is working inside of it. They also provide a character to a community that goes beyond the cookie-cutter houses that ravage our neighborhoods from coast to coast, and the immaculately trimmed green of lawns.
Perhaps NIBYism would be less of an issue if people avoided that knee-jerk reaction that anything unfamiliar is ugly. Any form of infrastructure that makes our society works is ugly. After all, NIBYism would then focus on real issues (e.g. health concerns) rather than vanity.
They need service access so they can't be sealed solid - some kind of service hatch/door will be a must. Obviously they'd have seals, but these perish and water will get in.
Gimme a break. The phone companies have been burying copper POTS for 100 years without serious water damage issues. See, the trick is, you don't put the equipment rack directly under the manhole cover, and you include a sump pump. Granted, you clearly couldn't think of that, but I guarantee that AT&T has.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Thanks for the informative post.
> But IMHO, most residents are unrealistic when they crave services but
> are unwilling to deal with the equipment required to run the services
If the people "craving services" were the only ones getting utility boxes in their yard I'd see your point.
But in this case, monopolist carriers are unilaterally selecting random homes to bear the costs of hosting noisy eyesores, regardless of whether the family is their customer, regardless of the will of the neighborhood and local government.
know they'll be using easements to put missle silos under your houses.
Personally, I could go for one of these AT&T thingamabobs in my back yard provided it was built in the back yard and a bit oversize so as to make room for my motorcycles and tools. Hell, I'd be happy to swap cards and keep logs in exchange for the extra air conditioned space with power. Oh, and it needs to have a perpetual beer keg too.
I don't think this is a terribly new practice. My parents live in a 28 year old home and they have a power transformer in a box at the corner of their lot. It's close to the size of a refrigerator, a smallish one on its side, maybe. It's a big, green steel box that sticks out like a sore thumb, except they planted shrubs around it and now you can't see it unless you walk right over there. Generally, I am very suspicious of the dealings that my city has with outside infrastructure providers, housing contractors, etc., because they have in the past had very low standards. However, I think it's not unreasonable to expect a "wart" like this every few houses on the block. I don't think that "sloppiness" is a factor here.
When they built their 2nd house, on an undeveloped lot, the utility company wanted the transformer in the FRONT yard...easy access and everything. She told them flat out, you plant that thing in the front yard, I will plant thick rose bushes around it. They put it in the back yard. When they built their third and last house, the sub division was already done, which meant the transformer was in the front, year the curb. She planted that thing full of rose bushes, and a ton of other plants, which has grown up to pretty much hide it from view. A little planning and you can hide those things from view.
* Charge them rent for the use of your property, sending an invoice monthly. When they don't pay (who knows? a big enough A/P department might), report them to the credit bureaus. When they raise a stink about having to deal with that, offer to sell them the small patch of property for whatever the going rate is per-square-foot in your locale and maybe add a bit of padding for negotiations room.
* Use that spot to build your brand new compost pile. Build a large wooden box big enough to contain the thing, then keep it filled with manure (and when applicable, the 'dog bombs') and your grass clippings. Claim that the heat it generates is perfect for generating high-grade manure, and that you're only recycling otherwise wasted energy.
* Send them a bill for the years (or even decades) of landscaping (even just mowing) you've had to do in the spot the box now occupies. Also send them a bill for any and all landscaping you've done to hide the damned thing.
* Front Yard? Bolt your mailbox to it. Hell, offer to bolt your neighbors' mailboxes to it.
* Plant a tree next to it... the biggest one Home Depot has. The roots will eventually (within a couple of years) destroy the thing from underneath, and most towns now have 'green laws' that prevent a utility from cutting down or even harming the tree. They move, you win.
* Do what I did... buy a house in the back of a "flag lot" (just pick one with enough land around and in it so you don't feel crowded). No utility easements back here, folks. When Verizon showed up to drop in fiber, the only impact I saw was a long, skinny line of spray-paint at the front of the driveway. the neighbor up front OTOH got a shiny new box in his yard (which explains where a lot of these ideas came from).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Where I live I have a choice between Qworst and Comcrap, so I'd gladly take a fridge sized box in order to get something like FOIS.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
"The cheaper it is to install new services, the faster and more widely deployed those services will be. That's just common sense folks!"
A little research into making them smaller would go a long way. Why do these boxes have to be so big anyway? Cable isn't.
Wah, we want 100 mbit fiber at home. Wah Wah the utility box is ugly. Whoever posted this article is a deplorable cry baby.
An enormous telco box with blinking lights ON THE OUTSIDE, sounds totally rad.
Judging by the writing on the boxes in the article, I see they have Mexicans in San Francisco too.
... for war orphans with the orphans still inside, put up a building profaning all that is holy, build a 10,000 watt sound stage blasting abba 24/7 and show movies involving bert and earnie masticating big bird on a projector screen that can be seen from space, I still want my freaking 100Mbps symmetrical fiber connection to my home.
My biggest complaint is against cell towers with blinding strobe lights on top. So bright that you can see them from ten miles away on a sunny day. Two or three of those can kind of ruin an otherwise scenic vista. (I'm looking at you, Michigan.)
The best solution I've seen is to disguise the towers as pine trees. It just takes a few branches, and the technology has been perfected since the 1950's.
It'd be a shame if someone were to accidentally back his car into one of those boxes ... not that I'm advocating such behavior. I'm just sayin ...
NIMBY people are selfish pricks because you know they'll use the service when it's put near someone else's house.
Any time a NIMBY moans about something don't put it near their house but ban them from ever using the service whether it's a cell tower, power lines or these units. If they don't want to look at it then they don't deserve to use it either.
One of our remote offices has a T1 brought in on burried lines, it goes down about an hour after it rains without fail. Why? Because the their is a break in the casing some where and water gets in and shorts it out. That is the telco's theory anyway. We could get it fixed at our cost, but that requires ripping up the parking lot. The building management is not keen on that and it would be big bucks. Burried lines are not always such a good thing.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I live in a community that's been promised DSL for 15 years now and all we can get is plain old service that used to be common 40 years ago. Sadly, a community less than a mile away gets digital services and they're further away from switch than I do. This means I pay minimally triple for internet access (depending on who I choose, unfortunately comcast is the cheapest).
I think that, except in extreme cases, they should worry about upgrading all of us first rather than roll out new services.
yes and they choose to let it flood anyway. We had our entire phone system down for a day because the manhole cover was about 6" underwater.
Fat lot of good THAT did.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Then I hope they have LOTS of insurance if they do that. I'm just saying...
PWTTWIFOVWAATUTS (people who think the world is full of vidiots just like themselves who are anxious to use these services) can F' off.
You people need to see things from the utility's point of view. They're trying to get the service YOU want to you in the most efficient and safe manner. Work with them, not against them.
I'm think more along the lines of weld steel ibeams to the front bumper of an old pickup, "accidentally" run into dozens of these in a single night, and drive off without leaving insurance info. The more conspicuous they make these boxes, the more of an obvious target they are for vandalism. I'm surprised the cable companies haven't thought of that. Of course, if you're going to go that far, I wonder what the black-market value of all the equipment in those cabinets is? Looks like the meth addicts just got a brand new way of financing their habits! And of course, if you pissed off all the residents by installing the boxes in their front yard in the first place, their are going to be real willing to act as volunteer night watchmen for your expensive little abominations...
We all hear endlessly about the health effects of power lines, cell phones, and all other EM radiation. How come nobody has done a "study" on the health effects of these boxes so they have the same restrictions as power lines do today?
You want to put up a new power line? Mostly, unless it is an empty rural area with nothing but farms you can forget about it. An army of people will show up at public hearings to claim how much damage has been caused in their lives because of power lines and the supposed ill effects from them. Cell towers have it almost this bad.
I find it really humorous that Obama's energy plan calls for reworking the electric distribution grid. Sure, sounds good - but has anyone ventured out to a meeting where some local government is providing a forum for the power company's approval process? By the end of the meeting you can assume quite easily that there will be no power line coming anywhere near that community. The "documented" problems caused by power lines are such that nobody is going to allow a new distribution grid to be built.
(of course all the "documentation" is bullshit, but that doesn't seem to affect the process one bit.)
I would LOVE to have access to Verizon FIOS. I HATE being stuck with Comcast. Please, oh please, Verizon, but one of your big ugly boxes in my yard!
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
I live in an area that has had utility boxes on lawns and the likes for decades. This is nothing new, and the complaints sound like mostly just noise made from people who obsess a bit too much about their lawns.
undid moderation. wanted to mod funny but modded informative
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
I live in the Northern 'burbs of IL - we got Uverse up here. Fortunately the 2 VRAD boxes serving my neighborhood are in some locations on the corners of large streets (one borders a golf course, the other a main street that feeds into the highway) - so they don't look too bad in those spots.
But for all the locations in this City (and some others that I've driven through) AT&T has been installing bushes and other landscaping around the boxes... I don't know where they get these things, but they grow up pretty quickly and they hide the boxes well.
All our City did was say to AT&T - hey - you want to put that crap in, fine. But you have to landscape it if you don't want us suing you (and we have a LOT of lawyers up here) - so ATT said "ok"...
I'd be against painting those things with some kind of urban artwork - because while it looks interesting now, after a few years of IL winters, it's going to look like absolute shit - is someone going to repaint it then?
I do agree that the cooling needed for the VRAD boxes is pretty intense - if I had that incessant noise right next to my house, I'd be pissed... I know they plan the placement to maximize coverage - but sometimes they need to take into account the disturbance that they're going to create. It's not like the old days where you slapped a silent box up on a pole or in a bush - now it's a whole 'thing' complete with power meter, noisy AC, and cabinet - they just need to plan differently than they're used to...
What is happening is that over the last, oh say, 30 years the government that once was governing for the people that elected it has now switched to governing for the corporations ... that elected it.
As you do love to consume shit this has gone largely unnoticed. If you are so cowed you allow refrigerator sized boxes on your lawn I'd guess things are gonna change soon. Not in any direction you will enjoy though.
Good Luck Amerika
OK, batteries might be a problem. But most of the other crap can be buried in handholes that are flush with the ground.
This is done frequently in the power biz. All of the junction boxes (both low and high voltage) are watertight. So are distribution transformers, although the cost to excavate a deeper hole for an underground unit sometimes pushes the economics toward padmount units (big steel boxes above ground). The underground transformers actually have a longer life when the vaults flood (which happens frequently in the Pacific Northwet region) due to better cooling.
Have gnu, will travel.
Burying them underground isn't a great solution. The "parkway" (strip of land between the sidewalk and the street) in front of my house has a fairly small above-ground utility box for POTS, and the neighbors have some more of the local POTS equipment underground in their parkway. For years now, the phone company has been struggling with flooding of the underground stuff, which often causes multiple-day service outages. (People worry about the reliability of VOIP, but we have Vonage, and have kept on being able to use our phone during all those POTS outages that affected our neighbors.)
The slashdot summary seems a little misleading when it refers to "lawns." The photo in the article, for instance, shows one that's in a concrete strip between the sidewalk and the street. Granted, I wouldn't want something that huge and graffiti-covered in front of my house.
Find free books.
You people? Just because I'm unwilling to tolerate an unwelcome liability in my front yard doesn't automatically make me the bad guy ... or does it?
I like the "work with them" part, because they're more than willing to work with me, right? See the Tragedy of the Commons link, above. Lemme expand on the details of the problem. First, the easement doesn't relieve me of property ownership. I'm still obligated to maintain the property in the easement, and I'm still taxed on it because I'm the owner. That's a nifty trick the local utilities got enacted - they don't want to pay property tax on the right-of-way, but they want unfettered access. Nice huh? So anyway, I'm not supposed to dig with power tools within 3 feet of the buried utilities, and I'm not supposed to obstruct the meters. I don't really have any objection to the gas or water access, as I use those utilities. However, my tolerance ends there. I do not have a cable subscription (DirecTV, thankyouverymuch.) Consequently, I have no tolerance of Comcast putting an R2D2 in my front yard. Cable TV is not a necessary municipal utility - gas, electric, water, sewer, and to a lesser extent telephone. Locally, the cable TV companies have been granted regional monopolies. Now they're exercising eminent domain and seizing property from me, for which I receive no benefit nor compensation. Why would I tolerate this?
I'd be proud to see this kind of thing installed. Having one would be a tangible symbol of progress, a reminder that we're not all luddites.
How hard would it be to put a box underground, then run flexible cables inside of that, the attach the cables to an inner box with all the service connections, then have that attached to a crank operated riser? (Nothing too fancy either, the screw jack mechanism has been around for years.) The techs can crank the thing up out of the ground to work on it where stuff is easy to get at, but then put the damn thing back out of the way when they're done with it.
Sure, there might be a big ugly access panel on the ground, but it'd be a hell lot more tamper-proof and vandal proof and still less of an eyesore than the current utility boxes.
Mounting these boxes underground would give you a much larger footprint in the ground too. For instance, the boxes we use at the phone company I work for are around 4' cubes. We need access to doors on each side of them. To put them in the ground we'd need 64 sq' of access doors on the ground, instead of the 16 sq' footprint the current boxes have.
It's the tagging (vandalism) that makes the boxes really ugly! Just like dogs marking their hydrants with pee, the gangs have to piss on everything and anything with spray paint!
Instead of getting pissed at AT&T, FIX THE PROBLEM!! Tagging here in Los Angeles is completely out of control-they even came into our fenced back yard and tagged the back wall where our kids' bedroom is! Personally, the thought of gang members on the other side of a window from my young, sleeping children scares the shit out of me!
It's time to get tough with these punks! How about this-take indellible ink and paint a big red "T" atop their forehead!
I think the impediment in this case is selling the service to customers and not that the boxes are an eyesore. If the service doesn't sell well AT&T will probably remove the boxes or upgrade the network to accommodate for smaller boxes. In either case, their PR department will lose. I guess it might end up selling well, but its easy as a virtual monopoly to force upgrades on its customers due to phasing out service. If they were selling enough access as it was, there should be no reason to upgrade right away. IMO, 90% of customers don't want more channels and interactive service. They just want TV to work and give them the channels they want.
A few years back I worked in sales for a large Cable company. They were one of the first to roll out the Microsoft based IPTV service. The marketing people thought it was a great idea and started plugging it away to customers. IMO, whatever market surveys they did were really poorly done. The cable company already had rolled out the Digital terminals and they were selling really well. I didn't even have to try. The company tried to market the IPTV service and people didn't think much of it and were confused. The market was really limited and no one bought it. It was phased out and the company really doesn't talk about it much.
I went on the AT&T site to look at this new and "exciting" feature. It really parallels all the problem employer had with the IPTV rollout. Its okay but I don't think customers will buy it unless they're compelled to by removing older service. I just suggest to people that really hate it to either en mass: 1) Call AT&T, tell them to cancel service unless they remove box. Follow through on cancellation. Local cable company will be more than happy to waive install charges. 2) Don't sign up for it. Make AT&T choke on their piece of buy. They have to throw it up and be made the fool for rolling this out.
Oh, and I dealt a lot with pissed off customers who had much smaller boxes than this AT&T one installed on their property. When it took 4 - 6 months to bury the darn things it usually meant cancellation of service and a claims court judgment in their favor. I dare not ask how much this will cost AT&T.
Perhaps the telcos would have better luck if they provided some compensation to the home owner who gets the box on their front lawn?
If AT&T gave me a free (or greatly reduced rate) on a 20+ Mbps connection, I'd be happy to let them install one of those boxes outside my house.
Well, I might not use natural gas for anything. That doesn't mean I have the right to stop the gas company from burying lines on my property. And wait, you are bitching about one of those cable boxes? The ones that are like the size of a small wastebasket? How much property tax do you pay on 0.5 square feet of your property? Something like 20 cents a year?
I'm not sure where people get this idea that property ownership means you get your own little kingdom where you get to make up the rules. It's not like that.
Also, cable TV is a utility just like all the other ones. Just because you don't subscribe to it doesn't mean it's not useful to others.
This "embrace and extend" strategy was exactly what the city of Geneva, Illinois discovered when AT&T was preparing to bring "Project Lightspeed" (now called U-Verse) to town. Apart from the issue of the ugly boxes, Geneva already had a cable TV franchisee in town. They successfully fought AT&T off.
They also prepared a guide for other towns to use, which was a brilliant move IMO. It's a great read.
http://www.geneva.il.us/att/lightspeed.htm
OK, I read through most of these posts. And it's fairly clear that everyone is taking the Cable companies' views here, so I all ready know how the general community feels here. And you have a right to encourage your town to sue the Telcos to prevent the boxes. In fact, since it's a major election year, I'll bet your town fathers would get all excited if a bunch of you were excited about this.
I use AT&T for my iPhone and I pray every day that I don't have to call their support. They have earned a bad reputation, as have most of the Baby Bells. So I'll bet all of the objections are tied in to a routine knee-jerk hatred of the Bell Companies.
And, for "unsightly," just multiply the satellite antennas all over buildings everywhere. Sure, they're not the size of a refrigerator, but if you sprout multiples on buildings everywhere and especially in high-density areas, you can get all the way over to downright hideous. I would suggest that (in years past) many localities decided that C-Band and the larger K-Band backyard antennas were so unsightly that they passed laws against homeowners having them. I sometimes wonder if cable companies or their employees weren't involved in those town council votes.
So you say you like the Cable companies over the Telcos. Fine. Here's what you do:
Encourage the construction of the "unsightly" Telco boxes. Then, when your town or street is wired up and running, do what I did. Call up your "beloved" Cable company. And tell them line-item for line-item what the Telco's rates are. The Telcos will let you in on this information as soon as they roll out the service (you'll find their offers in the mail and probably on your door). Here's what you will notice: Telcos charge less for television and Internet services. They charge more for telephone services than the Cable companies do. And anyone, whether or not it's Satellite, Cable or Telco will give you an initial discount.
If the Cable Company (that you love so much) is thinking, they'll send you to their "Retention Department." It is after a short discussion with them that I got $20.00 knocked off my cable bill each month for a full year.
And if you never get to your Cable Company's "Retention Department," it's because they have all ready priced themselves below the Telco.
Remember, you need to compare Apples to Apples here. Both the Telcos and the Cable companies are ground-based and they can sell you telephone, television and fast internet, though the Telcos' internet is not usually as fast as the Cable company's.
In the end, it's possible for you and everyone to get a lower rate just because of the competition in the ground-based services. And it's also possible that the differing taxes and regulations will start evening out across the playing field.
Oh, and that "refrigerator?" Looks more beautiful every month I get a discount from my Cable company.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
If they don't want UVerse, I'll take it, hell AT&T can put the box in my backyard for all I care, it'd mean that much less grass to mow.
Qwest can build a 100-story skyscraper in my front yard if it'll get me FTTP sometime before the heat death of the universe.
Purchase more services from AT&T so they can violate my privacy and route my communications to the NSA? Ha! I don't want those perverts G.W. Bush, Alberto Gonzalez and Jonathan Yoo taping my phone, reading my e-mail and tuning into my TV.
U-verse? No thank you AT&T.
From what I have seen of these boxes, they tend to be constructed out of somewhat thick steel. I wouldn't count on your car winning the encounter.
Now, the cable TV boxes on the other hand...
Cable TV is not a utility. It's entertainment. Power, potable water, and sanitary sewer are necessary utilities for an urban and suburban environment. People can function just fine without Cable TV.
And yes, the R2D2 cable TV repeaters deprive me of access to a portion of my front yard, just like the big hulky U-Verse pedestals do. If I choose to put an addition on my house that requires the relocation of my driveway (which, btw, I did seven years ago,) I'm screwed if I can't get the cable company to move the frickin box out of my way. If they elect to tell me to piss off, I don't have much recourse other than to work around the obstruction. In the urban areas, someone wanting to put an extra off-street parking space (which would be a huge benefit in some places,) would be completely screwed if the U-Verse pedestal blocked the only available street access.
The companies derive benefit by exploiting the space to it's maximum potential. The property owner receives zero or negative benefit. Tragedy of the Commons, plain and simple. I don't like having any old company come crap up my property, in a situation where I'm ultimately accountable for said property. The companies are cost-shifting maintenance expense onto me. If the gas company decided to park an accumulator and pumping station in the middle of your front yard, you'd be okay with that? It is, after all, an easement they have rights to.
see:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=651859&cid=24683041
also see:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=562692&cid=23524480
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=573869&cid=23659029
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=563593&cid=23536795
Build a fence around it, lock it up, and charge the utility monthly rights to access it... and offer various tiers of service as well, so they know how it feels!
Kinda' like Wake On LAN (I'm assuming) ;)
You've still got bare metal contact to the network, power or not.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
You're confusing "easement" with "right-of-way". The city (or county or state)does in fact own the right-of-way. You own the easement. That bit of property you maintain next to the road is not yours if it's on the right-of-way. Check the survey you had done when you bought the property. Oh, hey, there's your actual property line! Been there, done that. I work for a utility. Take us to court if you don't believe me.
When corporations are openly more powerful than governments, even when it comes to decisions regarding the use of government-owned property.
This time, Township Supervisor Matt Maloney said residents felt Comcast's boxes were an "intrusion." "They're putting it in without permits," he said. "It is their contention they are not required to do so. It's our contention that they are."
A few years ago Geneva passed a 180-day moratorium that effectively stopped installations of AT&T's U-verse cabinets. The phone company sued Geneva and six other Illinois municipalities for restricting its plans. AT&T claimed it had the right to use public rights of way for its telecom network. Burns said his city merely wanted some say.
Next step is... defense contractors tell the national government when to go to war, and if the president tries to negotiate a peace treaty, they sue the president.
so long as it isnt comcast im sure i and most geeks are willing to settle with exploding refridgerator sized equipment boxes in our front yards for that sweet high bandwidth fiber to the door
now, when my minifridge full of bawls explodes into flames in my basement, ill be the first to report it to slashdot.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Turn it on end and paint a Tardis on it!
Who wouldn't want the Doctor visiting their neighborhood?
-- Terry