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Trouble In Paradise
By Greg L | 21 May 2007 | Local Economy | 16 Comments
A few years ago it became fashionable for developers to wire their projects with fiber-optic cabling, touting “lightning fast” internet access, and superior television and telephone service as a marketing technique to differentiate their McMansions from those of other developers. In some cases, that hasn’t worked out too well for homeowners, according to a Washington Post article today, as the service has sometimes failed to be more reliable than cable or DSL and of lower quality, while being significantly more expensive. Now some frustrated homeowners are even installing satellite dishes in defiance of homeowner association covenants, even though they are being charged for fiber-optic services they can’t use.
Seven years ago, the neighborhood’s homeowners association, set up by the developer Van Metre Homes, inked an exclusive deal with OpenBand, a small Dulles firm, to provide Internet, cable and phone service to all 1,100 homes. Residents say they are now locked into an expensive, decades-long contract for second-rate services.
Erika Hodell-Cotti, who lives on Sunstone Court, says she cannot work from home because her Internet connection frequently fizzles out. The teenagers who live next door play online Xbox games at friends’ houses where speeds are faster. Dozens of neighbors have installed satellite dishes on their roofs and backyard decks, fed up with cable channels that sometimes dissolve into snowy static.
Just a few years ago, developers lured homebuyers to the outer suburbs with the promise of lightning-fast Internet access and high-definition television to go along with Olympic-size swimming pools, tennis courts and other amenities.
Residents bragged about not just keeping up with their inner-suburb neighbors but leapfrogging them altogether — only to watch their technological advantage give way to newer offerings.
This might be a pretty powerful argument for municipal broadband, if you ask me. If you treat information services like any other utility, and have the infrastructure owned by the public, you can open access services to competition and may be able to provide better services at a lower prices. Not too many localities are interested in the expense of assuming control over another utility with the current downturn in the residential real estate market, but once that market recovers, municipal internet might be something worth considering.
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Braemar. ‘nuf said.
“If you treat information services like any other utility, and have the infrastructure owned by the public, you can open access services to competition and may be able to provide better services at a lower prices. ”
Competition? Is that why we have only one cable provider that provides uniformly horrible customer service and has a product that goes out for hours on end? It was one thing when I had Comcast just for cable, but now I have make the horrible mistake of giving them my phone as well. Is there any way to get them ousted as the local provider?
Hey, Anon…not all of Braemar. Just you “lucky” folks off of Sudley. Those of us off of Braemar Parkway are doing fine. The provider on the “new” Braemar side is trying to get out of the business and Comcast has made an offer to buy out the contract. On the “older” side of Braemar, we got screwed when Verizon bought out GTE. GTE was planning to offer fibre services years earlier than Verizon (similar to Verizon’s FiOS), but Verizon dropped all plans leaving us with Comcast as the only broadband provider available (too far from a central office for DSL and not on the current schedule for FiOS).
One point, Greg. The FCC has ruled that homeowner association convenants cannot restrict a homeowner’s ability to install an antenna or dish to receive a signal broadcast over the public airwaves (including direct-to-home satellite with dishes small than 1 meter). (http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Cable/Orders/1996_TXT/fcc96328.txt)
In our home it is forbidden to even mention the “C” word. We kicked them out of here years ago!
“installing satellite dishes in defiance of homeowner association covenants”
HOA covenants can no longer prohibit the installation of dishes and TV antennas:
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html
Because comcast owns the infrastructure - the cables, the switching equipment, and all it’s really hard for a municipality to kick them out. That’s also why contracts tend to be signed for such long terms, so the providers can recoup their infrastructure investment.
The idea behind muni broadband is that the city or county would lay all the cable, install all the switching equipment, and then allow everyone to use that infrastructure to connect with whoever is going to provide the gateway from the muni network to the larger internet. It’s possible to have multiple providers simultaneously providing connections, and consumers can pick whichever one they want.
The downside is that the municipality has to maintain the cabling and switching equipment, which is where the failures tend to occur. It’s a substantial upfront cost to install or purchase the infrastructure, it costs money to maintain it, and while you can charge user fees to offset these costs, the failures aren’t predictable and the locality would be on the hook for unexpected costs.
What we have now is one company offering cable who owns all the infrastructure, and negotiated a long-term contract with the locality. If comcast gets booted at the end of the contract term, the next company can essentially pull the same thing, with poor customer service, high cost, and unreliable service during the next contract term.
Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, HOA’s can’t ban satellite dishes less than 39 inches in diameter.
I’ve had DirecTV for nearly 6 years now and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had problems with it where I had to call the company. Even then, they never had to send a tech out. Heck, even when Hurricane Isabelle came through a few years back, we might have lost our signal for a total of 30 seconds. Back when I had Comcast in Alexandria, I can’t remember the number of cable outages we had because there were so many. One of those outages probably lasted longer than all of my DirecTV disruptions combined.
Greg - thanks for the explanation. I have long wondered how that all worked. So how is it that Cox serves Fairfax and Comcast does as well? Did the infrastructure get split at some point?
Reilly - I used to have DirecTV and much preferred it. When I had to get high speed (work related), I was sort of forced back to Comcast - they charge such a premium for the internet if you don’t get their cable. Then the spouse figured out how much we were paying for phone and cable/Internet and insisted that we roll them together. Apparently, outages only bother me… I find what these monopolies can do (or don’t do for you) in relation to what we pay pretty appalling.
“So how is it that Cox serves Fairfax and Comcast does as well?”
To the best of my knowledge, Cox and Comcast do not serve the same areas of Fairfax. Comcast serves the Reston area and Cox serves the rest.
As far as Prince William goes, if you go far enough back in history, we had Columbia Cablevision who served the east side of the county and Cablevision of Manassas who served the west side. They were two separately owned cable systems until the 90s when Jones Intercable bought both of them, and then Comcast bought Jones Intercable.
Incidentally, cable TV did not come to Manassas until about 1985. The townhouse my mom lived in built in 1983 was prewired with twin-lead. I remember using that relic as a pull-string for RG6 coax. It would have already been prewired with coax if cable TV had been in Manassas at the time it was built.
I remember, by the way, doing an inventory of Cablevision of Manassas’s computers in preparation for their buyout.
“Back when I had Comcast in Alexandria, I can’t remember the number of cable outages we had because there were so many.”
Just about ALL of the outages I’ve had with Comcast were due to lightning blowing out an amplifier.
Really makes me glad I installed a whole-house surgeprotector on my circuit breaker panel.
In fact one time I was watching TV and there was a flash of lightning outside and that was it–snow on all the channels and the cablemodem was of course out.
You are a conservative? And you think a government-run monopoly would be better? Give me a break!
By the way, this idea is not new. There’s a townhouse development in Fredericksburg, built in the late 60s-early 70s that had their own cable system. I’m not so sure it’s what you could call a cable TV system as opposed to a master antenna TV system. I guess it fell by the wayside when Cox or whomever preceded them installed cable TV in the development. There was a 300MHz (now they’re up to 1000Mhz!) splitter in the attic, with a coax running through the attic from one unit to the other (through a hole knocked in the firewall, which is a building code violation since they didn’t seal it up). Also I found buried coax with a paper dielectric, it was cut and sticking out of the ground in the backyard.
Interestingly enough nobody seems to remember anything about this system. But there’s not a single rooftop TV antenna anywhere in the development, and in Fredericksburg, it’s either cable TV or an outdoor antenna…rabbit ears won’t get you anything there.
Greg, I’m not sure that a problem involving a neighborhood locked into a long-term single-provider having trouble with infrastructure will be improved by having a single-provider GOVERNMENT entity running the infrastructure.
I agree that competition is a key, assuming you don’t like the idea of a lawsuit, which I generally don’t but if I was paying for a service I wasn’t getting I’d be suing the company who was supposed to provide it, at least until I got the right to break the contract and hire another company.
We have taken too many technological wrong turns by assuming past is prologue and making decisions based on scarcity.
Like we knew nobody could ever afford to run two or three sets of cables to houses, so instead we did franchise deals for single-provider cable. But now we can do internet and even TV on phone lines, there’s two dish networks plus the original satellite TV, and in many places there are even two cable companies.
I was also going to note the rules about dishes, but others got that. I think that some of your argument there was not that it’s illegal, but that if you are already paying a company, it’s not fair you have to pay another company for the same service.
BTW, there’s nothing like being on some shared cable internet system and then having the neighbors become the XBOX internet-game site for slowing down your access.
“BTW, there’s nothing like being on some shared cable internet system and then having the neighbors become the XBOX internet-game site for slowing down your access.”
That doesn’t have to happen. It can happen, but then it could happen with other access technologies besides cable modems. (I remember a DSL provider in the late 90s that had a single T1 as their upstream connection!)
This story isn’t unique to Loudoun, it’s happening in Fairfax and Prince William.
Internet service providers and cable companies market “digital” services when the lines are analog, then an extra charge is applied for devices that convert it to digital. This is a cheap and low quality solution at high dollar pricing. We have GTE to thank in PW for contributing to that.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 rewarded big dog lobbyist that in turn cherry picked distribution areas. Municipal Internet is needed to level the playing field, force quality of service improvements and more competitive pricing.
The Strategic Plan should promote redundant optical networking infrastructure using a combination of with fiber and /or 802.16. Word of availability for this type of infrastructure will attract businesses and tourist alike.
Our ancestors lived in towns with access to the railway network for supplies and jobs. Internet connectivity is today’s modern version of this concept but we’ve reached the end of that cycle. Broadband Internet connectivity shoud be everywhere, just like electricity.
If you build it (optical / 802.15 networks) they will come!