The FCC announced today that it will be rendering illegal any contracts between cable providers and apartment buildings. The positive: There has long been a spotty monopoly, or oligopoly, or whatever you want to call it, in urban cable. You live in a multi-unit building, a provider runs the cable in that building, and voila! You have only one choice in cable.
"Incredible cosmic programming, in a itty-bitty-little competition space" -- to coin a phrase.
The FCC wants to end that and make the cables inside the building available to all. Questions:
1. Is this even possible? I don't believe that the same cable can carry more than one set of channels (i.e. RCN or Comcast or Roadrunner, but not all 3). Does this mean that the exclusivity agreement goes, but the new company still has to run cable? Will they?
2. This is meant to increase competition and lower rates. If companies have to run new cable, will they do so and lower their rates at the same time?
3. Aren't we quibbling over the past? FIOS (Fiber optic cable) is the new hotness. Cable is old. Perhaps the provision is not meant to repair cable, but to prevent the same abuse with FOIS? !?!?!?! One can only guess.
2 comments:
You've got a few misconceptions, which I can clear up:
Currently, cable providers are allowed to say to a building "we will install cable to the unit, but only if we're the only cable company to serve the whole building." This decision means that whoever wires the building has to be willing to have multiple cable providers in the equipment room, and support changing the provider in that room.
There is no technical reason why this should be hard: apartments already have interconnections which work that way.
1) yep. The Gibson had both Comcast and RCN - both of them had connections to the building, and there were multiple cable infrastructures in the walls.
The new company should only have to run cable to the building, not to the apartment.
2) It lowered rates in the Gibson a lot - nearly 30%.
3) Nope. Coaxial cable is at least as good as fiber for what we're talking about. Coax will carry somewhere between 70-240 Mbps depending on how it's used - FIOS only offers data rates up to about 30 Mbps. Other types of fiber carry a lot more, but it boils down to how expensive your termination equipment is - a 1Gbps laser is around $500 (look up "gbic" or "sfp," and of course you'd need 2 of them - Coax is a lot more bang for the consumer buck.
Also, nobody's putting FiOS into apartment buildings: that requires doing in-building fiber, and that's really expensive too.
David,
Thanks for clearing up the FIOS question ... and for confirming that this lowered rates...but I still have a question:
You mention that the Gibson had multiple cable infrastructures. If that is so, won't the extra expense of wiring the building keep providers away as a practical matter?
Also, is it possible to simply ask every apartment which provider they want and connect them to the right trunk in the basement? (i.e. no need to run two cables to each apt.)
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