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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
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&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.
What happened to locating these boxes on the telephone poles themselves?
Some neighborhoods...my old one, for instance, have no telephone poles. Everything is underground.
I could argue they don't have to exist at all. Shouldn't the people who live in the community have some say whether not these services are installed? I'm appalled that states are caving in to lobbying from the Cable and Telecom industry and taking away local control over these agreements. In Massachusetts, Verizon has been complaining that it's too expensive to negotiate with each town individually. I'm a fan of FIOS, but I still think the proper response is 'tough shit'.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
"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 want a 4'x4'x2' box suspended from the telephone pole over my head. If it falls off it could kill someone.
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
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.
And the pole itself falling would bounce off someones head with no damage?
If they don't exist, then you don't get the fast-speed services, right? So on one hand you have in the US bitching about the fact their internet sucks, and then you have them bitching when companies build the infrastructure to give them faster internet...?
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.
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.
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.
Paint "Free Copper Wire Inside" on the side of each box.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
And then you get this. Yep, that's a knockoff of the Washington Monument. Compare it to this or this, which are at least architecturally interesting towers (move up and down the highway to get an idea of their appearance from several angles). At least the latter two aren't godawful monstrosities.
Yep. Bouncing off someones head would inflict little or no damage to a telegraph pole
Maybe something like painting the utility boxes to make them be more like art than the boring single white/gray color they have.
Example 1: City of Surrey, BC
Example 2: San Diego
And don't forget that many towns do have local artists. Using the utility boxes for nice art (work-safe imagery only please!) would be something that can take the edge of people and make them forget to be annoyed by the item itself.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
So you've never been to Japan...
In some towns you can barely see the sky between the wires. And it's not for earthquake reason. It's just because of the cost. Some forward thinking towns are now requiring all new wire to be buried. Make more sense against typhoon, safer in case of earthquakes (no fallen power wires) and you can see the sky.
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.
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.
I live in Canada where practically everyone has high-speed access and I've never seen such huge pieces of equipment, anywhere.
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.
* 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?
Yep. The first one was actually placed by a church as part of their "getting the word out" I thought.
They just sold the interior out to make some money.
Any idea when the latter two were installed? I always wondered about those two.
import system.cool.Sig;
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.
This must be a flatlander problem... around these parts, cell "towers" are often on sides of buildings or tiny towers on the sides of mountains. Of course, we do have the ugly-ass "tree" towers.
this is my sig
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 ...
They don't like to bury them for several reasons. I've seen an underground telephone "splice" get flooded and knock out a large chunk of businesses before they could get it pumped out and fixed.
In many towns you see small green boxes jut out of the lawn near the curb, those are also splices.
Also for the larger equipment where it's more than just a splice, it's a bigger deal if it gets wet, and you have to be able to get at it for maintenance. A proper vault in the ground for such a thing would add a lot to the cost.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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Is this an internal contradiction or two warring camps?
The geek may be bitching about access to fiber. His dad may have been the guy who pissed off his neighbors when he installed a 16 foot BUD in the eighties.
You can grow weary and wary of the way tech defines and transforms a landscape.
The high tension lines that bisects an old-growth forest.
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?
And just how do you propose to get the backup power from the CO to the boxes? The reason you can locate the backup batteries in the CO on a copper plant is because copper can conduct electricity. I'll give you a couple fiber jumpers, a deep cycle battery, and a piece of equipment, and you go right ahead and show me how to power that equipment across the fiber. If you want fiber, you'll have to deal with locally placed battery backup.
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.
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.
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.