arstechnica.com— In a victory for consumers and telco video providers, an appeals court has upheld the FCC's order banning exclusive cable contracts in apartment buildings.
May 27, 2009View in Crawl 4
@s73v3rwith a tripod. Of course that assumes that you have a place to put a tripod. You can also plant a stake in the ground and attach the dish to it as well.
I read this, and found that this includes Homeowners Associations (HoAs). Our HoA has a bulk deal with Comcast, but AT&T just installed U-Verse in our neighborhood. I'm still not sure if our contract is considered exclusive (fees included in HoA fees, cannot drop it, but is it "exclusive"), and what the ramifications of that are. I brought up the issue of dropping the Comcast contract to the board meeting yesterday (unaware of this article), but the President was concerned about angry residents, or Comcast pulling lines or hiking rates. The contract supposedly ends in 3 years, but if the FCC has a ban on this, then I assume the contract is null and void anyways? Our HoA would probably have to have a full vote on this, and since we can never get a quorum, we'll probably be stuck.
Building a modern HFC or FTTH plant from scratch for a single country in a state like CT would cost somewhere between 300-500 million dollars or more. An existing company that already has pole rights (ie, a municipality for example) could do it a lot cheaper but you can't avoid the actual cost of hanging equipment/fiber/coax, installing ONTs on homes in the case of FTTH, headend costs, labour to install/support the product, programming fees, etc. Contratry to popular belief there isn't a wealth of companies who want to go build out to rural areas. Dropping exclusive deals would certainly help more highly populated areas however .
To be clear, you can not put a satellite dish on the roof if you aren't allow by the landloard. They won't allow you to drill anywhere in the building if they don't want you too. A try pod can only be installed if you have a balcony. So yeah, this doesn't really change anything.
publiclurkerMay 27, 2009
Are you sure the reason for the price increase wasn't the two year time interval? Cable prices have always gone up a lot faster than inflation.
Closed AccountMay 27, 2009
@s73v3rwith a tripod. Of course that assumes that you have a place to put a tripod. You can also plant a stake in the ground and attach the dish to it as well.
jerr0328May 27, 2009
I read this, and found that this includes Homeowners Associations (HoAs). Our HoA has a bulk deal with Comcast, but AT&T just installed U-Verse in our neighborhood. I'm still not sure if our contract is considered exclusive (fees included in HoA fees, cannot drop it, but is it "exclusive"), and what the ramifications of that are. I brought up the issue of dropping the Comcast contract to the board meeting yesterday (unaware of this article), but the President was concerned about angry residents, or Comcast pulling lines or hiking rates. The contract supposedly ends in 3 years, but if the FCC has a ban on this, then I assume the contract is null and void anyways? Our HoA would probably have to have a full vote on this, and since we can never get a quorum, we'll probably be stuck.
pak314May 28, 2009
It never went up the 5 years before.
deadbabyMay 28, 2009
Building a modern HFC or FTTH plant from scratch for a single country in a state like CT would cost somewhere between 300-500 million dollars or more. An existing company that already has pole rights (ie, a municipality for example) could do it a lot cheaper but you can't avoid the actual cost of hanging equipment/fiber/coax, installing ONTs on homes in the case of FTTH, headend costs, labour to install/support the product, programming fees, etc. Contratry to popular belief there isn't a wealth of companies who want to go build out to rural areas. Dropping exclusive deals would certainly help more highly populated areas however .
negativediggMay 29, 2009
To be clear, you can not put a satellite dish on the roof if you aren't allow by the landloard. They won't allow you to drill anywhere in the building if they don't want you too. A try pod can only be installed if you have a balcony. So yeah, this doesn't really change anything.