Telecom Rollouts Raise Ire Over Utility Boxes 284
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."
Bury them (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [irvinehousingblog.com] 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.
Make up your mind /. (Score:5, Interesting)
Lamenting the sad state of broadband in the US (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/13/1648211 [slashdot.org]) 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.
Re:It isn't "fast internet" or "no internet" (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, it's not a VW sized box, it's a 4 by 4 by 2 foot box, which is the size of a smaller refrigerator. Second of all, to bury the box you have a whole different set of problems to deal with; access is harder, drainage becomes a problem, and the hole that they dig to bury the box will be the size of a VW. Plus the access cover will be huge. Then you have to either patch the street, or back fill in the yard, which means that $50k is a low end number.
Now, if the city is smart, has the population density, and can make the budget work, the ideal solution is to build an underground utility system. Then everything is out of sight; but most of these problems are happening out west where everyone has their yard and lives 30 minutes to 2 hours from anything.
Re:Easement (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Looks like we've moved from NIMBY to BANANA (Score:3, Interesting)
What if they offered their services free of charge in exchange for the box on your grass?
Re:Community Planning 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Community Planning 101 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [surrey.ca]
Example 2: San Diego [apf1.org]
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.
Re:Bzzzzzt! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
But they're beautiful! (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Looks like we've moved from NIMBY to BANANA (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually rejected purchase on a newly built house for a reason like this.
They neglected to display the fact that there was going to be a monster power transformer in the CENTER of my front lawn, where a tree was supposed to have been according to the contract. ( monster = 3x3x3 )
They waited until the house was almost finished then stuck it in and claimed they didn't have to tell me about any easements or changes in the plot. I threatened to sue them under breach of contract as i waved the plot plan in the air, and they just sold it to someone else.
New? (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, you have some choices: (Score:4, Interesting)
* 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" [answers.com] (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).
Re:Community Planning 101 (Score:3, Interesting)
This must be a flatlander problem... around these parts, cell "towers" are often on sides of buildings [renowirelessinfo.com] or tiny towers on the sides of mountains [renowirelessinfo.com]. Of course, we do have the ugly-ass "tree" towers [renowirelessinfo.com].
Re:DRGAF (Score:3, Interesting)
The telecom company's equipment always "tests good from their end", even when smoke is pouring out their fibermux cabinet.
One of the guys I work with recently called the local cable Internet provider to troubleshoot his connection. The cable provider called back a little while later to report that "everything looked okay with their equipment -- [the tech] ran all of the diagnostic tests and could see the cable modem, etc." The only problem -- my friend called from work, after having shut off his cable modem before he left his house that morning. In other words, all of the blathering about everything looking fine was completely bogus. Either the tech had tested someone else's equipment or he was simply lying through his teeth.
Re:Confusing the issue (Score:1, Interesting)
Good point. I'm certainly not condoning AT&T in this case. They could have done a better job at hiding their stuff. Yeah, it would suck AT&T put a box in my front yard.
I was making a point more about the experience I've I had with the general population, not so much defending AT&T. My company just installed a cell network for a major US city. We have about 450 cell towers that we built on top of telephone poles. They are designed to be quiet and be non intrusive. They are painted brown on are really hard to notice unless you are looking for them.
Our teams only need to be in the area for construction and initial setup. When I'm out in the field, I've made a point of treating residents with respect and courtesy. I know that one my coworkers might have to visit the location again at a later date and I don't want the residents to be pissed at them for my actions. (The urban areas are pretty dangerous.)
I've had people come out of their homes yelling at me telling me to remove the tower from the pole. They don't understand what it does and are just unhappy with it. It's funny but I still like my job... it's always interesting.
Re:They have to go somewhere? (Score:3, Interesting)
.
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 isn't a good solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Impediment is selling the service (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Boxes+Eyesore=Competition (finallyâ¦) (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Easement (Score:3, Interesting)
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.