On Mon, 7 May 2001, RJ Atkinson wrote:
In parts of the Boston suburbs, RCN has built a parallel cable TV system (with DOCSIS cable modem service also) serving houses that were already (and still are) servicable from Media-One (now part of AT&T Broadband).
I live in Newton, MA, and serve on the local cable board - and have first hand experience with so-called competition in the cable arena. We are served by ATT/MediaOne, RCN, and Verizon. RCN is a well managed company and has built a system here that seems to work at least as well as ATT's. And RCN is a lot easier to deal with (ATT sends government affairs flunkys to cable meetings, RCN sends senior operations managers who can make decisions. But.... ATT has started with the lion's share of the market and a profitable position, while RCN is having trouble picking up market share and is in financial difficulty. And, more fundamentally, our overall telecom situation is not very good: - Verizon purports to offer DSL, but just try to order it - ATT offers cable modem service, but they have about the worst technical and operational support I've ever seen: -- as far as I can tell, their network monitoring system consists of waiting for customers to call and complain about outages (actually, the folks in "the noc" can see outages, but the data isn't available to front-line customer support) -- customer support people from voice, data, video are in different organizations - and have to request support from the folks who roll trucks via a web form -- as just one example of how bad it is: last week, two newly installed ATT wires serving my house fell off the pole, onto a busy road - the Mayor's office called Verizon, ATT, and RCN - only Verizon rolled a truck, and all they did was cut the wires - ATT took until the next day to get someone on site - the poles in town are now full, all with obsolete technology (DSL and HFC) - none of the current carriers are going to upgrade anytime soon, and there's no polespace left for a new entrant to deploy something more powerful (like gigabit ethernet) Meanwhile, in my professional role of advising cities and towns on telecom. policy, I get to watch other communities - where the environment isn't as attractive to "competitive carriers" - obtain far better service than in our highly desirable "competitive" market. To cite two examples: Harlan, Iowa: poulation 5000 (city) 13,000 (county-wide): - Farmers' Coop Telco (user-owned coop): provides telephone in city/county, cable in county - Harlan Municipal Utilities (city dept., operates only within city limits): provides water, sewer, electricity, cable tv, cable modems (2mbps and 10mbps offerings, serves businesses as well as residences) - jointly operated ATM backbone serving high bandwidth users Grant County, WA Public Utility District: county-owned electric utility, that's begun to deploy gigabit ethernet, and plans county-wide deployment over about 3 years Miles Fidelman ************************************************************************** The Center for Civic Networking PO Box 600618 Miles R. Fidelman, President & Newtonville, MA 02460-0006 Director, Municipal Telecommunications Strategies Program 617-558-3698 fax: 617-630-8946 mfidelman@civicnet.org http://civic.net/ccn.html Information Infrastructure: Public Spaces for the 21st Century Let's Start With: Internet Wall-Plugs Everywhere Say It Often, Say It Loud: "I Want My Internet!" **************************************************************************