The Battle Over AT&T's Fiber Rollout 121
Tyler Too writes "AT&T is facing heated opposition from some communities where it wants to deploy its U-Verse fiber network. Ars Technica has a feature looking at the situation in the suburbs of Chicago. 'Legal uncertainty is the rule when it comes to IPTV deployments by telecommunications companies. Neither Congress nor the FCC [has] weighed in on whether services like U-verse require their operators to take out a cable franchise from cities, and no federal judge has issued a definitive ruling.' It's not just Chicago, either: 'With AT&T set to upgrade its infrastructure to support U-verse across its wide service area, this is a battle that could play out in thousands of communities across the country over the next few years.'"
Re:Fuck AT&T (Score:3, Insightful)
FCC supporting monopolies again (Score:5, Insightful)
Yadda yadda (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically the phone company is doing a significant fiber upgrade, and trying to slip the whole "we're going to be doing tv soon" idea under the radar of the local people, who've already signed one of those craptastic cable monopoly agreements with comcast...The upgrade also includes large beige junction boxes, which is causing the predictable uproar among the affluent, yard-obsessed yuppies who live in the suburb in question. To add insult to injury, the community just got over a nasty fight with SBC (now part of Verizon), over doing fiber-to-the-house on their own initiative.
It's all a load of crap at this point anyway. The damn regulation we're using to play phone and cable companies off against each other is hilariously dated, especially since they're all sending the same damn bits, and mostly sending them over the same damn wires!
We need a simple law to force wire sharing (so we don't end up with five times the amount of bandwidth we need going into every damn neighborhood), and maybe a standard connector for data cables, and we need to step back, and let them fight it out to the death. Forcing those jokers to compete is the only way we'll get decent service for a decent price.
Re:And you wonder why US is behind on broadband? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I just want some fiber (Score:3, Insightful)
For a real, high band fiber connection, I'd be willing to put in some change, and I doubt I'm the only one.
Re:FCC supporting monopolies again (Score:5, Insightful)
Arstechnica: New Media, Good Ol' Journalism... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I just want some fiber (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd kinda be interested to see how something like that would work out for fiber...Clearly don't want the federal government involved in it because they'll screw it up, but at the same time, the private companies will do what's best for themselves and to hell with the consumers.
In the article, the locals had attempted to do FTTP previously, and been intimidated out of it by SBC...They ran some seriously abusive push polls, "Do you want your tax dollars paying for your neighbor to get porn?" and "How many schools do you think will close because tax payers won't support both the school referendum and the fiber referendum?" and the local government caved. Still, local service utility co-ops work pretty well for this sort of thing. Too bad we don't see more of that.
Re:FCC supporting monopolies again (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it atrocious that companies shouldn't have to pay something for essentially "free" right of way access to lines. Cable companies are required to carry certain community channels, are a forced to negotiate with the local governments in terms of what sorts of service they are required to provide.
If they don't want to deal with local governments, they can simply negotiate with every individual land owner for line-stringing rights, or they can go wireless.
If my local community is going to be forcible taking land from landowners for telecom companies, those telecom companies better follow the landowner's rules, which are represent by the local governments.
I'm sorry you live in a small town with little choice, but at my location I've got a fair number of choices; I can go with the 2 satellite companies, or 3 cable companies. The 3 cable companies ALL have franchise rights with the accompanying requirements; I get local Chicago public television, and I get state channels, which includes all kinds of political goodies.
This is not about the FCC allowing good old fashioned competition. This is about AT&T taking my land away. Either buy it from me, or put up with my town's laws/requirements. But don't try and spin this as a free market thing; having the federal government take away land rights from landowners in the name of the world's largest telecom company is most _certainly_ not a free market position.
Re:And you wonder why US is behind on broadband? (Score:3, Insightful)
People talk about AT&T like it's the scrappy pull-itself-up-by-the-bootstraps earthly incarnation of capitalism. The truth is that every penny AT&T takes in is made under an essentially free grant of profit by some government agency -- municipal, county, state, or federal. And now that Ma Bell has taken us for hundreds of trillions of dollars, they are trying to fuck us over (more) by rolling out their new services to only wealthy neighborhoods.
People should realize that AT&T's historical monopoly grants still represent a huge competitive advantage over all other players in the market. So AT&T's actions need to be restrained to prevent them from killing off every competitor. If AT&T wanted to repay write off all past profits made under regulated monopolies, that would be fine. But the current situation requires strenuous local government oversight.
Re:And you wonder why US is behind on broadband? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, if the government oversight just looked the other way, ATT could fiber up all the rich neighborhoods they want, and someone else who could do it cheaper could show up and fix up the other neighborhoods, pretty much screwing ATT out of any chance of growth (while the rich neighborhoods start to bitch about their overpriced service).
Unfortunately, the reason this has stalled so hard is because ATT wants that oversight. The entrenched telcos love government oversight. They just want the government oversight on their competitors, not on them. Simply put, if they were to do something that got these monopoly franchise contracts struck down, they'd be in deep shit, since the competitors would be crawling out of the woodwork and kick their ass. And they know it, so they are locked in this slow dance with the government, trying to weasel out of the contracts while still keeping their monopolies protected by them.
The Usual Slashdot Ignorance (Score:2, Insightful)
1) AT&T wants to deploy fiber which will carry the triple play everyone's been drooling over for the last 10 years: Video, Phone, and Internet on one bill.
2) Comcast just got done with a very expensive infrastructure buildout in the last 3-4 years in my city, so that their network could deliver triple play services. Before that, large parts of the city could get NO broadband service at all, except from some (necessarily expensive) wireless ISP's that sprang up or $125+/mo IDSL at a whopping 144 kbps.
3) Comcast, by the franchise agreement, must serve all homes in the city or none. It's the ONLY consumer-friendly provision of the franchise agreement, IMO. So they were required to run the upgraded infrastructure to ALL parts of the city. We have an older downtown full of lower-income, mostly Hispanic residents, and newer, higher-income subdivisions. Guess which residents are very profitable to serve? Guess which residents would be left in the digital dark ages if Comcast weren't bound by the franchise agreement?
4) AT&T wants it both ways. They want to compete with Comcast. But they refuse to be bound by the ONLY consumer-friendly part of the franchise agreement -- serve everyone, or serve no one.
5) They also claim the right to drop their ugly green boxes wherever they want. Comcast doesn't get to do that.
Comcast sucks -- it's expensive, and their internet service blows compared to top-of-the-line DSL, let alone FIOS. But at least everyone can get service, and at least there aren't butt-ugly 5' dark-green steel cubes for Comcast all over the place. AT&T is fighting in court for the right not to serve everyone, and to put their butt-ugly, way too big green boxes wherever they want.
The moral of the story: Not all super-highspeed-broadband rollouts are good. Some of us here don't want AT&T ramming their accountant-driven priorities down our communities' throats because it's for our own good. "Our" own good is defined as "any household that is most likely to be most profitable for AT&T, and to hell with the rest. Oh yeah, and aren't those 5' dark green steel cubes really attractive?"
doctorcisco