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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Convince an ISP To Bury Cable In Your Neighborhood?
EmagGeek writes "I live in a semi-rural micropolitan area that generally has good access choices for high speed Internet. However, there are holes in the coverage in our area, and I live in one of them. There is infrastructure nearby, but because our subdivision covenants require all utilities to be underground, telecoms won't even consider upgrading to modern technology. The result is that we're all stuck with legacy DSL (which AT&T has happily re-branded as U-Verse even though it isn't) as our only choice for wireline access. There is a competing cable company in the area, also with infrastructure nearby, but similarly they are reluctant to even discuss burying new cable in our 22-home subdivision. Has anyone been in this same predicament and been able to convince a nearby ISP to run new lines? If so, how did you do it? Our neighborhood association could really use some pointers on this because we hit a new brick wall with every new approach we try — stopping just short of burying our own cable and hoping they'll at least be willing to run a line to the pole at the end of the street and drop it into our box."
Money
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Unless the municipality requires them to, they won't. Time Warner in Kansas City is required to support all of KC. Other ISPs that came in later (AT&T, Google, etc...) don't have such a requirement.
You've got a 22 home sub, and everyone wants better Internet run. Change the covenants, if that's what it takes, sounds like you have the support. It sounds like there's already coax - it's not clear why a cable ISP couldn't run high speed service over that, or why you think they would need new cable.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Really, it's the only way. Pay them to do the work. It will cost you at least $3-5K per household.
The only alternative is to go to your locality's cable commission, and find out if/when the cable provider's license is up for renewal. Make 100% coverage a non-negotiable requirement for renewal.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
You could get your subdivision covenants changed to not require all utilities to be underground. Worth weighing the costs of each approach (both monetary and non-monetary).
Your 22 houses represent a very, very small market to the carriers, and your neighborhood decided to be cute and require all utilities be underground... Guess what, your 22 possible customers are too few to interest any carrier in even submitting paperwork to bury cables.
Can you even guarantee that all 22 houses will buy into whatever carrier you can convince to serve your neighborhood?
You should have buried the cables when you built the neighborhood, then you'd have a fighting chance to convince a carrier to serve your neighborhood.
Ken
Are there no wimax solutions available? Wouldn't a hspa+ / LTe / 4g solution be much more cost efficient?
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It's really expensive to bury lines, something like 10x the cost of above ground lines in some cases. The only way you're gonna get them to do it is if your neighborhood ponies up the money. The other alternative is to change the C&Rs to allow above ground, and even then they'll only do it if they're gonna make more money than what it costs.
stopping just short of burying our own cable and hoping they'll at least be willing to run a line to the pole at the end of the street and drop it into our box.
Well, if you want it badly enough, then that may be pretty much what you have to do (or at least bear the cost of it). You're dealing with a for-profit company, not a charity, so from a business perspective why would they spend the money when they have no hope of making enough to cover it in the foreseeable future?
They should have buried conduit, pulling fiber/cable is cheep digging holes not so much.
No sir I dont like it.
I 'accidentally' 'broke' the existing POTS lines!
Perhaps you have been too quick to dismiss DSL. I assume that currently your DSLAM is not very close to the neighborhood and therefore AT&T can only offer the slower DSL speeds. Perhaps you can convince AT&T to install a fiber fed DSLAM near the border of your neighborhood. If there is fiber in the area this can be done without digging up your neighborhood. With current DSL technology (VDSL2) they could offer much higher speeds (up to 100 Mbit down, but more likely 20-40 Mbit). This can be done over your existing neighborhood phone wires as long as the distance to the DSLAM is fairly short. However, your neighborhood still might not be big enough to make a good case. At the very least you would have to get a significant number of your neighbors to commit to buy a high rate DSL service. Are there other nearby neighborhoods that could benefit? That might increase the chances of it happening. I'm not saying that there is a high probability that you can convince AT&T to do this, but you should at least consider all your options.
There are two options HOAs can access high speed Internet or other telecom services.
Option 1: Poll your neighbors and determine who will sign up for what services if they where available. Write down their contact info, what services they want and take it to a local telco office. Tell them you want to speak with a business sales rep. Tell them your need and provide a copy of the document. They should be able to justify the build-out based on the number of signed service agreements. The standard ROI is two years. So your neighbors will have to be okay with the services they receive for at least two years. This has been numerous times with multiple carriers. So if you get push back from the sales rep speak to their manager. Trust me, they want to make the sale!
Option 2: Install it yourself then contact the provider for bulk services. In bulk arraignments the savings is sufficient to payoff the build-out within 18-24 months if you farmed out the build and maintenance. ROI is much less if you do it yourself. I have some MDU properties with 100/50Mbps service out to each apartment.
~^\-/^|-|^\-/^~ May the force be with me!
Use WISP technology. And before you say our covenant won't allow antennas....
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-reception-devices-rule
This is actually a real solution. Internet access is important nowadays. People move for a lot less, like to appear to have better life to their family or get their children into what looks to be a better school.
One would think that for someone who views reliable and fast internet access as an important factor in quality of life, moving to get better internet would be up with those reasons to move in terms of importance.
(I live what I preach. I moved into the house that gets 21mbps connection on ADSL2+ which theoretically maxes out on 24mpbs back when adsl2+ was newest of the new in internet over POTS lines).
Our Telcom told me they would put fiber up to me if I paid for it. A mile and a half. I put in 12 pair phone underground wire laid on top of the ground inside 1" black plastic water line 25 years ago and it has lasted well. This was back before DSL when we had 14Kbaud modems or so - ripping faster than the old 300baud modems which were definitely better than throwing rocks or smoke signals. :)
I'm trying to get them to just let me run the fiber through my existing 1" water line pipes which has plenty of bandwidth. :)
1 Consider getting enough neighbors to split the cost (depends on what the cost is of course). 2 Wait until somebody else pays to get it closer to your area. 3 Get them to give a credit (50% in my case) for future service of the money paid to bring the cable in. Have them agree that's transferable to subsequent owners if the cost is high enough to bother with. 4 Look at alternatives - satelite internet (slow and VERY laggy but otherwise usable, can't do online gaming though). - cell phone data plan (low data caps, good for gaming, drops off sometimes).
As long as the local electricity is provided by a Coop you should be able to get it. You might have to get all your neighbors to sign up as well but you get a Gig fiber connection to your house( called an ONT ) and you pay for whatever bandwidth they decide to sell. Usually 10, 25, 50 and 100 megabit business service. It works really good.
You say your electricity comes from a local monopoly like Consumers Energy, well I guess you will have to wait 2 decades and they might have it, they are just a little behind and have NO incentive to provide extra services to have happy customers.
Your Average Joe
Put together a Home Owners Association and collect dues. Use the money collected to pay for moving the utilities underground. Or, you may be able to get your city to bond the project. This would mean higher property taxes, at least in your area.
With a 22 home subdivision, there is no way it is going to pay for the utility Companies to do this on their own.
I work for a phone company. The only way to do it is pay for it yourself. Which is actually an option. We get businesses that will move into an area and want larger data-pipes and they just end up paying to have the cable laid. I think though, that after you get the estimates on the costs, you'll quickly realize why they have no desire to upgrade your trunking. It's upwards of a million dollars a mile... then take the number of people in your neighborhood, multiply that times what you pay per month, then divide the cost of laying the cable by that, and I bet you're looking at 40yrs before it pays itself off. By then there will be a new technology that you'll be bitching at them for not installing.
Someone wanted a subsivisiion to look a very specific way (no overhead cables) and didnt plan things out?
When the subidvision is being built laying underground cable is still expensive, but a lot cheaper then when the area is built out.
What exactly is a "a semi-rural micropolitan area"?
A place where "hipsters" live? Oh, i dont live in a subdivision like you do, i live in a "a semi-rural micropolitan area"
Perhaps you could clarify about being restricted from putting up an antenna:
http://www.arrl.org/restrictive-antenna-ordinances
Are you being prevented from putting up an antenna by ordinance or by covenants?
And can't get shit beyond "1.5" at my house. It wasn't even half that speed when I tried it.
The problem usually isn't getting 76% to agree, it's getting 76% to care enough to show up to the meeting and vote at all. Most homeowners don't go to HOA/COA meetings and in terms of changing covenants, an abstention is usually treated as a no vote.
The only way AT&T will upgrade your service is if they think someone else will install better/faster/cheaper/service. Make them think that and your problem is solved.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Franchises such as cable providers are required to pull lines to all people is a territory. In exchange for being the only cable company, the cable company is typically required to provide services to everyone regardless of the cost.
The HOA's burial requirement nullifies this by eliminating the public right of way from inside their development. A covenant development falls outside the franchise, and in general: the HOA will have to make a deal with the utility, and pay the utility for the installation of the lines, unless the government intervenes, and restructures the development to allow for a public right of way (Including, the ability for the utilities to install poles).
For all the comments about "underground is more expensive" does that really hold true if OP's neighborhood requiring all underground utilities doesn't have poles to string wire on ? I think you might end up having to get your neighborhood together as an organized group. You might be able to swing it if you could get a significant portion of the residents to pay for home-to-telecom cabinet condiuts out of their own pocket (like the resident owns the side-sewer hookup and paid for it with construction costs) but it's probably going to be a lot fewer residents than you imagine willing to do so.
I've heard that $1M/mile number thrown around, but in the context of putting all utilities underground. Most of that cost is for the electric lines that probably have to be put in deeper with a backhoe. When they put in the FiOS lines in our neighborhood, they used the same equipment that they would use to put in a sprinkler system. The conduit is probably two feet down. Probably the most expensive part was repaving where they had to cut through sidewalks and driveways.
What exactly is a "a semi-rural micropolitan area"?
"a micropolitan area is a geographic entity used for statistical purposes based on counties and county-equivalents"
So basically, a subdivision in an unicorporated area of a county. Some place that interesting enough for him to live, but not a sufficient source of sales tax revenue for the area to have been finger-annexed by a municipality so they can collect sales tax from there.
Basically: suburbia, or as the communications industry has been calling it since the 1980's "The last mile", which is a place no one spends on infrastructure because the population density isn't high enough that the economic benefit outweighs the cost of investing in said infrastructure.
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To the OP: Get your neighborhood association together and vote out the restrictive covenants on overhead wires. Alternately, move to a coverage area. Alternately, get your PUC to extend the tariff radius so that you're inside instead of outside.
I lived in an area technically in Silicon Valley for a very long time where the tariffs put my residence 50 feet too far from the LATE for them to offer me high speed internet; even though I would likely still get full data rate, they were unwilling to sell the service to me due to the penalties for offering me a tariffed service, and then being unable to deliver the tariffed data rate by even 1%.
Also: If you bury your own fiber, expect to be sued for offering a competing service; in general, anyone with a big infrastructure investment won't let a local entity go into competition with them, even if the alternative is that you don't get service because their idea of competition is larger than their idea of economically viable service area.
I had one critical advantage. Our HOA board members were being complete dicks about the clause in question(*) - so much so that the management company (a third party paid by the HOA to run things in accordance with state law) was sympathetic to me, a new home owner, and advised me on the exact process for changing the covenant.
With their advice, my wife and I created a one-page proxy form which we took door-to-door and got our neighbors to sign, one at a time. It took a month, but we eventually got proxies from just over 75% of the owners.
(*) I have since learned that this is pretty much the natural state of all HOA board members.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
A ways back when I was still living with my parents, a neighbor moved in & was getting really excited about trying to get cable (TV) into the neighborhood. A main line passed by our street with a dozen houses on it. Not sure what all he did, but ended up getting the cable company to agree to put it in. The deal was he had to get a certain number of houses (half maybe) to cough up a couple hundred bucks & agree to some relatively normal 1 or 2 year commitment. He did & we ended up getting cable a little while later. A few years after I moved out the cable company ended up getting bought out & offering Internet access (don't remember if it was in that order, it was a good number of years ago). Basically you have to make it worth their while. Find out what their current rates are & see if you can get a significant number of your neighbors to promise to commit to a 1 or 2 year plan if the company will put in the new cable plant. That might get their attention. The cost of cable/wire is pretty cheap to the cost of labor & right of way issues. You might want to try & get fibre rather than coax put in.
You guys are going to have to do this yourself as no ISP will take an interest in your small neighborhood.
You might want to try reading this case study.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/p...
It covers the hurdles a small rural town went through in order to build their own municipal network.
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
The *only* way where you can get away with changing the CC&R's without 100% of the lot owners agreeing to it is *if* the existing CC&R's have a way to edit them that doesn't require everybody to agree.
It's not going to happen in this case, but there are at least two other ways to change a covenant without the agreement of all or any property owners:
* Invalidate the section you want removed by statute
* Invalidate the section you want removed by court action
Unless the proponent of the change is politically connected, the first is a non-starter.
Unless the proponent of the change is legally correct AND has deep enough pockets to file suit and see it through the appeals process, the second is a non-starter.
Some 20th-century examples of both are the Congressional actions and federal-court cases in the Civil-Rights Era (roughly the 1950s to the 1970s) that removed race-based deed restrictions from properties all across America.
But back to the topic at hand: I agree with you: As for getting the "no above ground utilities" deed restrictions changed by passing a city ordinance or state law or getting a court to invalidate it, "good luck with that," 'cause it ain't gonna happen.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The deed restrictions may read something like "Must be a member of the HOA" AND "must abide by these other deed restrictions like no above-ground utilities."
Even if the HOA is dissolved, the remaining deed restrictions remain in force, and the property owners of the properties that were in the now-defunct HOA may still have standing to take you to court to enforce them. I say "may" - if the HOA extended over a mile in width, the guy a mile away from you may not have standing if your violating the covenant doesn't affect his enjoyment of his property or the value of the property. But your next-door neighbor and the guy down the block almost certainly would have a valid claim.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
And put up wireless gear. Ubiquiti AirFiber gives you 774Mbps FULL DUPLEX transport at 4 miles LINE OF SIGHT for $3000. Rocket M5 Titanium and NanoBeam M5 give you an easy 150Mbps half-duplex.
Create a community that owns the fiber and puts it down. Offer access to the ISPs to the dark fibers and tell them that here you have the fibers, now just connect us at this central point.
Just make the correct contracts and it should work out. That strategy has been used elsewhere in the world.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.