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Illustration by John Ceballos.
You’ve probably heard that telephone giant Verizon is rolling out its TV services with plans of running high-speed fiber-optic lines to every home. This should be a welcome change for anyone paying a monthly cable TV bill. Only Verizon has a little problem. Wireline TV services often require licensing at the municipal level, and that means negotiating contracts with many cities and towns where Verizon wants to offer TV service. But Verizon doesn’t want to take years haggling with each municipality. It wants statewide franchises to speed things up.
Naturally, some local officials want to maintain the right to demand that Verizon put up money for a much-needed traffic light in exchange for charging people to watch Dancing with the Stars. At least, that’s what Verizon claims. And maybe some towns have asked for those things.
Take it from someone who has recently helped to negotiate a municipal license with the county’s largest cable TV provider, Comcast: traffic lights and other community expenditures are not the issue here. The entire cable industry needs more competition—and the sooner, the better. Negotiate a cable TV license, and you’ll realize the virtual monopoly cable companies enjoy is far worse than most citizens and public officials realize. The cable industry has so many laws and regulations tilted in its favor that it simply isn’t a fair playing field.
Comcast certainly deserves some credit for being a technological leader among cable companies, but nearly every time in our negotiations that we asked for something we felt was reasonable and fair, we heard this refrain: “By law, we don’t have to do that.”
In one case, we thought it would be wise if our contract contained a clause requiring the company to upgrade its technologies if its network in our town proved to be antiquated or couldn’t handle the bandwidth of many high-definition channels. But guess what? We can’t require that. Federal law says so.
Cities and towns also can’t regulate TV programming or rates. They can’t regulate Internet services. Any money they’re paid from the cable company to operate town-owned cable access stations is “passed along” to subscribers in a fine-line charge at the bottom of their bills, meaning that the money is completely funded by the local subscribers and not by the cable company. In fact, there are too many eye-popping injustices in this process to list here.
Sure, other cable companies can come into a town and compete with the present cable provider, but this isn’t a realistic option in most smaller communities, as the investment to run new cable lines is too great. Also, a city or town can’t even get a contract with Comcast these days without agreeing to a clause that could award the cable company damages if another TV provider, including a satellite service, harms Comcast’s business. Which begs the question: Is this still America?
So I say bring on the fiber. The only traffic light I’m looking for is one with a big green light.
FIOS is in some parts our community here in Upstate New York. The problem is that Verizon is installing the fiber at a snails pace. While people near the main roads can get it, people that live in the subdivisions cannot. You hardly see any Verizon trucks running fiber in the town. In comparison when the local cable company did there “major rebuild” there were trucks and linemen running cable down every street in the town. I believe it took them about 6 months to rewire the town. Verizon has been at it here for over a year now and only small limited sections of the town can get it.
I’d love to get FIOS. I see the Verizon FIOS tents at local community events. I ask the workers there about it they look up the first 3 digits of my phone number and shrug ,“Maybe in 2008”. So for those of you waiting for FIOS don’t hold your breath.
I’ve seen all the local roll out maps and timetables read all the local newspaper articles on it but the times keep getting pushed back. The difference between Verizon’s wiz bang Marketing campaigns for FIOS and the actual reality of running the fiber are 180 degrees apart here were I live.
Steve maybe you should do an article on how well Verizon is doing running the fiber lines. I’m sick of hearing “maybe next year”. I don’t understand how the cable company can do a complete rewiring of the town in 6 months while Verizon keeps draging there feet.
I actually work for Verizon, you can hook up a tv without a box. However, you will only get your local channels plus a few others.
to Jonathan H
in the “early” Cable days they wanted the same thing. Most TVs were not “cable ready” (remeber your UHF and VHF dials) so the cable company got to charge monthly for each analog box the was in your home. In addition, you may have had a older home the was not prewired for cable, they got to charge you to run wire for each outlet.
Now as cable ready TV’s filled the market and more homes were built prewired for cable that revenue dried up. So comes the advent of “digital cable” with more channels available. ( WTF!! I never got more that 80 out of 120 anyway) The hook, ya need that all important “digital cable box” to get the same channels and the extra ones, plus PPV/ON DMD. You say you have one of those new HDTV’s that are digital cable ready; you will only be able watch the channels that are not encrypted, not too many of them. If your set has a CableCard slot, the only place to get one is from (drum roll) the cable company and they charge you a montly fee for it.
Cable Co’s want control and digital gives them that. I have been to apartment complexes where the main cable head is on the side of the building. usually its locked in a box so nobody can fool with it. However in severe cases of piracy the covers have been destroyed or discarded and the bare wires, splitters and tags are all exposed, so now every body in the building (4-20 units) has cable, in a complex with 20 buildings. switching to digital would end the problem. right now they are doing the soft sell, by encouraging the customer to switch. but soon that wont be the case.
We all know that a federal mandate is going to shut off all BROADCAST analog signal in 2009. So if your sole source of TV content is an antenna hooked up to your ANALOG TV, there will come a day in 2009 that you will see nothing but snow on your TV.
But what if the Cable Co’s did that? Big boost in revenue for all involved in the tv content biz. Be it FIOS, CABLE, or SAT.
(i am in no way inferring that anybody here is a cable theif)
here is some MA-specific info, complete with roll-out map
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As both a Fios installer and a Fios subscriber, let me first explain the problems we’re running into installing our lines. 1-competition, as was mentioned in the article, we face tremendous obstacles in getting our lines placed, including waiting on proper permits and inspections. One big problem we have is waiting on Miss Utility to mark other utlitiy lines. Another thing that people forget is that this project is not covering just one county or state, but in fact a large portion of the northeast. No one has ever tried to run fiberoptic lines all the way to the customers home before. As we go along, the more we learn and the easier it will get. We’ll be able to refine the process and speed up the installation.