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.'"
And you wonder why US is behind on broadband? (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, so there should be competitive entities. Well, if you are going to spend a billion or so dollars you need to mitigate every risk, right? Unfortunately, the lawyers have set things up such that one risk that is very difficult to mitigate is someone else suing you over some perceived wrong. And yes, trying to run a fiber link is going to distrupt many businesses and push a few under. When those entities have been forced to jump through other legal hurdles to combat all the NIMBY lawsuits and "beautification" lawsuits (you know, those wires are really ugly...) and endless other lawsuits a lot of people feel very justified in suing over what will essentially put them out of business.
Sure, it is just the changing face of technology. But cable TV has been over-regulated in most US cities for so long that it is going to be a real battle to convince those owners that they bought nothing with all of their franchise fees, taxes, and public meetings.
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Not sure what it's like where you live, but look at what happens when you let the monopoly lay ther wires whenever they like:
http://comunidad.muchoviaje.com/cs/photos/dan/pict ure417.aspx [muchoviaje.com]
That's all over the country. And they can't change it now because it costs a lot of money and the c
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Sadly, this actually was legitimate wiring, though it worked like crap.
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I'm too lazy to go take a picture, it's 4 blocks away from here, but I could show you a good ol' fashioned wooden telephone pole (one of the few remaining) with almost 100 lines coming out of it in every direction. It's so weird it's like a monument or something.
Actual
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Nope, that is actual, Telco-installed phone wire (it says electrical wire on the pic but it's actually telephone wire). If you ever go to Buenos Aires and look up, you'll see that all over the country. There aren't that many cable pirates heh.
I'm too lazy to go take a picture, it's 4 blocks away from here, but I could show you a good ol' fashioned wooden telephone pole (one of the few remaining) with almost 100 lines coming out of it in every direction. It's so weird it's like a monument or something.
Actually the telco replaced those poles about 10 years ago, with surface boxes bolted to people's walls, and multipair cables going underground to somewhere (never had the luck to see where those cables go underground, because they go way inside the block and come out I don't know where, and come out at little white closets every few blocks (where I assume they go through more heavier multipair wires). I think those "mega-poles" remain in service because it's too complicated to rewire that many houses.
I can take a picture of the cable lines behind my apartment.
My block consists of 3-5 unit apartment buildings in two rows, centering on an alley, with maybe 10 buildings per side.
Each _unit_ has its own feed running from a central bundle of cables in the middle of the alley, there are three cable providers, and two telephone providers.
It's like a bloody mesh up there. It's ugly as sin.
Thank god we've got alleys; but that stuff should be underground.
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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 tri
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.
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You might get some progress if you had Local Loop Unbudeling and real competition.
FCC supporting monopolies again (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FCC supporting monopolies again (Score:5, Insightful)
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If the tax were direct, the local government would be held accountable for all the money they spent. As it is now, I am aware of very few communities that don't spend more than is necessary to provide the essential services. Most people chose not to participate in local government (even by voting) as long as the check they have to write every year (or quarter) is small enough. Governments e
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Re:FCC supporting monopolies again (Score:5, Informative)
The Ars article has all the details, including the metal giant that they called 52B. It stands around 5ft tall, 4ft deep, and is about 2ft wide. It is big. AT&T wants to build and deploy those boxes wherever they please. Part of the problem is that these so-called tele-comm upgrade is also going to provide video services (like cable). Using IPTV as part of the legal loophole, AT&T wants to put a bunch of these boxes scattered across the towns that they're trying to roll fiber out to. These deployment also affect a section of a town. So unlike a cable TV deployment, service is available to the area where it is immediately available instead to every home in the town.
Both the suburban communities and AT&T are stuck. Yes, competition is good. We all want a choice. But in legal terms, both sides are stuck and AT&T isn't all that lenient when it comes to what they provide as services.
* AT&T claims it is not cable and that it's all telecomms.
* If AT&T deploys, the town is likely to be sued by Comcast and the state DA, citing violation of two laws.
* If AT&T cannot deploy, the town is sued citing support for monopolies and anti-competitive acts.
AT&T doesn't want a build-out, which would guarantee the service is provided to every house/building in that town within a limited time period. AT&T also refuses to provide a structured layout plan of where they wish to deploy these 52B boxes (for all we know, it might end up in someone's front yard 5ft from the house). The people in some of these towns do not want that. They also do not want a single corporate entity to be the only choice they have for broadband and cable tv services. So the question continues to remain: Where do you stand?
Oregon Verzion FIOS TV too (Score:1)
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The real issue is they want to use the old easements, cable right-of-ways that they were *given* years and years ago, for free. In fact they were less than free, we hired them and we paid for all that infrastructure in our rates. It's actually ours.
These old "regulated monopolies" want to be unregulated in their "new media" enterprises, but they want to use all the old easements, so they can be protected from competition. Competitors don't have free easements, and even if
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The Ars article has all the details, including the metal giant that they called 52B. It stands around 5ft tall, 4ft deep, and is about 2ft wide.
I like how the picture in the article has the guy standing a step or two down, a few feet behind the box, rather than right next to it. It makes the box look much bigger than it really is... or it makes the guy look like a midget. Way to spin the issue, guys!
And for what it's worth, those aren't the type of boxes that I'm seeing down here in Texas. The Lightspeed cabinets here are of a similar size, but have a distinctive beveled edge in front.
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If AT&T wanted to put these boxes on private property, they're required to make an agreement with the property owner to do it. (In fact, the article specifically discusses these situations as ways AT&T is successfully getting their upgrades accomplished without requir
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That may be a necessary but not sufficient condition in many jurisdictions. Many local districts have zoning laws that restrict the rights of property owners to put "nuisances" on their property.
If you think that the FCC is a bottleneck now ... (Score:2)
If you think the FCC is a pro-monopoly bottleneck NOW, just WAIT until the Democrats rehack it, the next time they have a president and a congressional majority all at once.
The FCC under the recent regimes has been solidly behind keeping hands off the Internet, and keeping everybody ELSE's hands off it, too. To the point of suing to keep both the F
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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 comm
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I recently moved from the north side of Chicago and my only choice there for cable was Comcast, where abouts do live and what are the 3 cable com
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RCN is currently in the middle of a franchise dispute with the City, in terms of not rolling out far enough.
The city is forcing them to rollout to more of the city; and they would not be able to do this without the franchise agreements.
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Chicago is a mess. There's one company that gives any decent coverage of the city and that's comcast. RCN is strictly gold coast, lincoln park, and affluent north side. Comcast's pricing is monopoly pricing. I was paying up to 70 dollars for a friggin cable modem capped at 2 or 3 megs just last year. 59 for service, taxes, and 'modem rental.'
I tried their video service after being told by my new landord I can't install
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I live in Chicago (the city proper, not the suburbs mentioned in this article) and we have zero competition in our neighborhood. The lakefront area where many of the wealthier folks live have a wide variety of choices for telco and TV. Some parts of town don't even have DSL available, even if they live near a CO.
AT&T (nee SBC, Am
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Maybe, but remember AT&T (SBC) made the same claim about CLECs, ISPs, and Cable companies when these began offering phone service. And really, the cherry picking claims were/are justified. Of course AT&T will do that, at least at first, just like the startup telcos did. But it would seem that turnabout is fair play. If AT&T wants to cherry pick, let em. It isn't going to hurt anyone, maybe except for the cable companies. But then again, they are in
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Problem is that corruption is so rampant. Politicians and even the cities are being bought.
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Oh, yeah, because the "lowest bidder" mentality has really brought us some great stuff in the past...I, for one, am all for open-market competition.
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The plan seemed pretty good, the city would provide fiber to the doorstep selling bonds to cover the upfront costs. The bonds would be paid back by the subscriber base's monthly fees which were slated to be reasonable ($40-50/m
I just want some fiber (Score:1)
and/or phone companies have gotten special breaks, in order to have
had fiber installed already?
Why isn't there fiber to my HOUSE yet? I'm seriously under the
impression this technology should be much more widespread than
it is, but don't know any facts. I just have the notion that
somehow we've been paying for something we're not getting yet.
I want my fiber already.
hpy
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For a real, high band fiber connection, I'd be willing to put in some change, and I doubt I'm t
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Does your water company seriously do that? In my town, they wanted to run water to the middle of town to promote denser development. I have a nice little private well and live along the way, and they not only forced me to pay the $5K hookup charge to this new (totally uneeded) line, but also to pay for the pipe running out in the middle of the road, and to take on a monthly fee even though I a
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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 attemp
so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, Telecom Argentina had to do something to keep their customers: They increased the speed 5x, kept the same price, and removed all kind of caps. That's just capitalism and competition in action. Yes, local cable operators want to "protect their investment", but most of these did that investment 10 years ago, and want to keep earning money without investing in newer stuff. So they go through the legal way in order to stop competition (or to buy a few more months). But, well, sooner or later they either do some spending or competition will eat them. It's just the way it is. It's everyting america stands for, right? Capitalism.
Big Business is against local power (Score:2)
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If you knew how much that public access stuff cost, you'd p
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Holy smokes, batman!
Given that public access channels generally include the ONLY coverage of local politics, I really think that's a small price to pay.
Consider; across the ENTIRE US, that's $750 million. That's really not a large chunk of change to insure that _each_ and _every_ small community has broadcasting of it's internal politics. All of the other stuff, PBS, etc. . . are freebies.
Power should be devolved as much as possible. If it's responsible for landowne
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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.
Ooops (Score:2)
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Beware of creating temporal paradoxes by mentioning "simple" and "law" in the same sentence.
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I'd say the right way to get it don
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I was with you all the way up to here... Too much bandwidth is just unpossible!
If it's not eventual migration to a new standard (e.g. high-definition was not even thought of when the original cable lines were run), increased numbers of communications-capable devices will start chewing through all the "extra" bandwidth no one needs (xbox, video phone, transmat pad, food replicators, etc.).
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Regardless, if there is money to be made by running wire to a place, someone will do it, and, in the interest of not having 5 sets of wire going to each house, companies should be allowed to purchase space on existing wires, from the company that ran the wire in the first place. You have to add in that stipulation, or the company that ran the wire will refuse to
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and getting together enough tax money to do major upgrades could take a decade.
If the municipal network provider was able to have the municipality issue tax-free bonds on behalf of the network provider, it shouldn't be hard to raise money to perform significant upgrades, and the upgrades ought be cheaper this way than via a private entity borrowing money from a bank or issuing their own bonds (we'll ignore the broader issue of the "cost" of the bonds tax-exempt status).
What I think should happen, though, is that cities should build in some of the underground infrastructure -- cable t
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I'm not a yuppie, or affluent, or yard-obsessed. And I *still* wouldn't want one of those giant boxes on my property.
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Here, here! The problem here is that both companies are competing for the same damn thing, data service to your house. The data might be voice, might be email/web or it might be video. But it is just bits. And FWIW, the stream goes down and up you shifty blighters!
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I don't see how you have to be an affluent, yard-obsessed yuppy to not want a giant ugly telecom box in your yard.
http://origin.arstechnica.com/articles/culture/u-v erse.media/wheaton.jpg [arstechnica.com]
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I think "appearance-obsessesed bourgeoisie" is probably a better description.
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I agree with you everywhere but in that statement. There is no limit in sight for how much bandwidth is needed. Years ago nobody ever imagined anything but a large corporation needing more than a 300 baud modem. We should lay all the wire we possibly can to everywhere we can.
And people think we have net nutrality already.... (Score:4, Informative)
Here is a case (and the same thing is happening with Verizon's FiOS) where a company has wires in place, and is sending data, but the local government won't let them send certain data (digitally encoded TV shows) without giving the municipality a cut of their total revenue. It's ridiculous. Worse, this cut of the money is passed directly on to consumers, but most consumers (voters) don't realize that their local government gets between three and six percent of the local cable TV revenues. It's a huge tax that people don't know is there, and that's why they are surprised when their local government doesn't allow a new competitor into the market. Well here's the reason: It's so the town/city continues to get a fat check every month.
Re:And people think we have net nutrality already. (Score:2)
Those lines ostensibly belong to the teleco company, but exist by the good graces of the LOCAL governments. That land was taken from the local community for the greater good.
There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with local communities regulating what goes over essentially public property. In fact, I'd rather have localities controlling that then the federal government.
If AT&T wants to build a fancy new network without dealing with localities, all they have to do is secure their own rights of way fr
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And good graces my ass. They exist to benefit both parties. It's not like the town said "Oh, OK, I suppose you can run some cable and turn a profit." The town needed phone service as much as the company needed permission to run its wires.
Also, the wires frequently (if not usually) run over private property that th
Re:And people think we have net nutrality already. (Score:1, Interesting)
You've apparently bought into some random smokescreen interpretation of it, spread by either an idiot, or by a telco.
If you want to try and make an analogue between network neutrality and TV and the government, it would be like the FCC broadcasting interference on every channel except those that paid extra. They would receive a channel allocation where it would come through crystal clear. Any other channel could pay up at any time if they wanted crystal clear
OK, call me paranoid (Score:2)
Then when it happens (of course) DSL won't work, the only remaining "high-speed" connection will be a slice of fiber bandwidth, the only ISP you can get will be MSN, and the bandwidth slice if you don't want television will be 256 kb/s.
I've never seen a technological advance yet that Ma Bell hasn't tried to pr
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Common carrier (Score:2)
I wonder if AT&T's U-Verse service will be tariffed? Will I be able to purchase that 20+ Mbps link as just an Internet link and without the additional TV & telephone services? Will they be required to make that band available to competitor
Nope, you won't get 20 Mbps. (Score:2)
Verizon, however, is offering 15Mbps/2Mbps.
When uverse comes to me the internet portion won't even match what I am getting from cable is offering (10/1) now.
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If all they're offering is 1 Mbps up, they can count me out.
Franchise even needed? (Score:2, Interesting)
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Comcast pays a percentage of its revenues to the licensing municipality. Satellite TV providers don't. Comcast doesn't have to put pressure on the local governments. The local governments w
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We're talking about a video franchise agreement. Since AT&T was not previously selling video services, they don't have one.
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I see no functional difference between telephones carrying voices, fax dat
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Can't have it both ways (Score:2)
Rob Biederman tells Ars that AT&T's IPTV system is "neither cable, nor is it a telecommunications service."
and
AT&T planned to upgrade its network in Geneva and said that the city could of course conduct zoning oversight of the process, but could not halt it (cities cannot stop ordinary network upgrades).
On the one hand he seems to be saying this is something "new" that doesn't fall under existing laws. On the other hand, he says it is a network "upgrade".
Seems to me an "upgrade" would be to an existing network that was regulated by existing laws...
Arstechnica: New Media, Good Ol' Journalism... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If this were not a tech news site I would have excused an error like that. From a site like Ars it is not excusable. And it hasn't even been corrected, even though a year has passed and comments indicated the error.
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fiber for all (Score:1)
I thought Verizon was IPTV (Score:2)
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I can find precious little on the lo-layer specifications of FiOS, however, it appears to be IPTV. They may build in the converter box to the outside of the house to convert it back to something that "old" boxes can
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"Verizon" and "Verizon Wireless" are separate companies. "Verizon" doesn't sell any cellular telephone services. This arrangement does point out a way that AT&T and Verizon can bypass the legal hurdles. They can depl
No reply from ATA yet.... (Score:1)
No answer.
Hmmmmm.....
(The article was EXCELLENT, btw)
BWilde
Cable is over-regulated (Score:1)
http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2005-2006/ billenrolled/House/pdf/2006-HNB-6456.pdf [mi.gov]
The "Uniform Video Services Local Franchise Act".
AN ACT to provide for uniform video service local franchises; to promote competition in providing video services in this state;
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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
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I have AT&T and I have the triple play. Local phone, DSL and Dish for TV. Granted it's not one line, but it is one bill. Still MUCH cheaper than comcrap too.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Teleco Bill (Score:1)
Consider demanding Net Neutrality (Score:1)
Could a Net Neutrality debate on the local level make sense? More sense then federally in Congress? I think it is really there where communities ca assert their rights and Interests.
Living in Geneva... (Score:3, Interesting)
Their data vs. our data? (Score:2)
So how does this fit in with their push for a tiered Internet? Is it "just data", or is it voice and high-bandwidth video that we need to be charged extra for? Which is it?
People are such stupid shits! (Score:2)
People are stupid shits.
Let em deliver the fiber and if we don't like the way its going, then we can regulate their balls off.
BUT LET 'EM DELIVER THE FUCKIN' FIBER!!!
Sounds like classic NIMBYism to me. (Score:2)
Re:Fuck AT&T (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why should AT&T be exempt.. (Score:2)