Digital Divide: AT&T U-verse Battling the Chicago Suburbs

[engineerboi81]

There's an interesting article over at Ars Technica detailing the battles between AT&T and the Chicago suburbs. It's a pretty long read, so I'll go ahead and summarize the details from my view point below.

Suburbs against the U(ni)verse: the battle over AT&T's fiber rolloutThis is just another reason why I love living in Illinois in the Chicago

Comments

[thespos]

I think that's a great law, and particularly applicable in this case. It's too bad that voice and data services are not regulated in a similar way, because even lower income areas should have the same access to broadband and other services.

Kudos to the suburbs for standing up for this.

[engineerboi81]

Unfortunately, AT&T is driving the state to pass new laws and statutes to amend the old laws so that they will more clearly not apply to them since the laws are somewhat ambiguous now primarily focused on video cable franchising.

[thespos]

Then Illinois citizens need to contact their legislators.

AT&T is, in effect, creating a deprived area by not agreeing to offer the same technology everywhere. You all have the power to stop this, you know, and the municipalities can also go the route of the pocketbook, by letting AT&T do their infrastructure upgrades, but then purchasing the services from other providers.

And if contacted for a sales offering, let them know that.

[engineerboi81]

The interesting thing here is that Comcast primarily dominates the IP data services market in Chicago since most people have digital cable and just add internet to their services since the franchise requires them to build out service to everyone. Therefore, far fewer people have DSL since they already have cable. However, AT&T is hoping to steal Comcast customers because Comcast charges a lot for their services and AT&T thinks they can do it cheaper and still make money. However, they can only do that if they hit the densely populated areas first. Comcast would have to bring their prices down to compete. So in this region there's less deprivation than the rest of the state. We've not heard about the rest of the state yet since it's more sparely populated and so AT&T wouldn't even be looking to add service at all in those municipalities of the rest of the state.

[engineerboi81]

That's pretty interesting. I bet Comcast still dominates the market there though since people prefer the higher speeds they can get by just adding it to their cable. DSL has always been slower and less desirable especially as people continue to use their cell phones more and more and are dropping their landlines and wouldn't have one just for DSL.

I like the idea of the AT&T services; I think it could even be superior to Comcast. But, I think they should build it out to everyone just like Comcast had to do. I think their problems would be solved and they could supply the dense areas first and gradually build out like they want and even sign 6 year builds outs so they make their money back more quickly as they expand. But, they seem too hard headed to let such a presidence take place. Plus, I don't think they realistically ever want to build out to whole communities. They never did with DSL, so I don't know why they would now.

[engineerboi81]

Can see the advantages for some people, but for many I see it as a nearly dead technology. My parents have had the same land line phone number for longer than I've been alive I think. For me though, I have plenty of minutes on my cell phone and most of my usage is in the evening or on the weekends when it's unlimited anyway, so I have no need for a landline anymore.

Devil's Advocate position

[kefitzat]

Though if the municipal law mandates AT&T expand to non-viable areas in the community this ultimately hurts the consumer as AT&T will ultimately decide to not expand in that network at all. The leapfrog effect. They'll just go somewhere else where somebody wants (and will pay for) their services.

Re: Devil's Advocate position

[engineerboi81]

It depends on what you consider non-viable areas. I'm sure the law is not going to mandate they put service where people do not live. As long as there's significant numbers to the municipality then they will probably mandate a build out to that area. However, in the eyes of AT&T they may just prefer to serve those in say the most densely populated area. For example, let's say the downtown area has a population density of about 9,500 people per square mile but out near the edge of the municipal district there are only 2,500 people per square mile. That's still a significant number of people that could benefit from such services but AT&T wouldn't feel it significant enough to consider. What is really annoying is that they won't even sign agreements to eventually service these people 3 to 6 years after the initial deployments when costs come down and they start making money on their initial investments.

[justanothergeek]

Whenever a telecom company (or more than one of them) is on one side of an issue, it's usually a safe bet to support the other side. AT&T, Verizon, and the like all yearn for the day when telcos were a monopoly, and now they want to use the government to compensate for their inability to provide what customers want.