Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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?
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?