FCC Moves To Boost Cable Competition in Apartment Buildings (bloomberg.com) 49
Cable operators would face more competition for the roughly one-third of Americans living in apartment buildings under an order advanced Friday at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. From a report: FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel asked fellow commissioners to approve a measure that she said would "crack down on practices that lock out broadband competition and consumer choice." The order would prohibit cable service providers from entering into certain revenue sharing agreements with a building owner, and seek to ease alternative providers' access to the wiring of buildings, Rosenworcel said in a news release. The order would affect more than one-third of the U.S. population who live in apartments, mobile home parks, condominiums and public housing, Rosenworcel said. The order needs to succeed in a vote before the FCC, which is split with two Democrats and two Republicans as a Democrat nominated by President Joe Biden awaits Senate confirmation.
Good. Stop landlords from taking kickbacks (Score:4, Insightful)
Right now, landlords of apartments buildings get kickbacks from ISPs when they lock their tenants in to a specific provider. That's anti-competitive, corrupt monopoly bullshit and needs to stop.
Re: (Score:2)
I use to have a 3 family home, where I was the landlord. I never got such a kickback.
However the reason I would have kept each tenant to get their own connection would be, my responsibility to the tenant is less, if the Internet is down, it is their issue not mine, they will need to call the ISP. If there was a hacker, they will get my Tenants equipment, not mine, where I would be responsible for managing security on my devices. Also if my Tenants did something illegal on the network, I don't want my who
Re: (Score:2)
Who would bother to bribe you for 3 customers?!?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm questioning if it's always bribes. I know it happens, but I'm wondering how often the owners are renting the cabling infrastructure to the cable companies coming in, and it's getting called bribes.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody is worried about them renting to the cable companies. People are upset about the lock in. If you rent to one ISP, you must rent to all companies on the same terms.
Re: (Score:2)
The cable plant is unlikely to be done in a way that this is easy. Who [w|s]hould pay for the additional risers to make it happen? A provider that only has a chance at 30% of the customers isn’t likely to do it.
Re: (Score:2)
That’s exactly what Fiber ISPs are willing to do, it’s factored into the cost of laying down lines. Verizon was willing to do this for example in New York with FIOS, but they encountered these shady exclusivity deals at apartment complexes and couldn’t get around them in many cases, and bringing them all to court would be prohibitively expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
Who said that and in what context?
Re: (Score:2)
This is also an issue when new subdivisions (single-family homes) are built out. Want cable in your sub? Prohibit DSL and satellite.
Prohibiting satellite isn't legal, but that doesn't mean HOA Nazis won't try it anyway.
Re: (Score:3)
HOAs attract the worst sort of petty tyrants. I would never buy a property encumbered by a HOA.
Re: (Score:2)
No way. That's blatantly in violation of existing FCC regs. From at least the last 20 years.
If it's happening in the US, I'd love to read any articles or accounts of that happening to try to break down how it happened.
Re: (Score:2)
It has happened to me a couple times. And, being a licensed HAM for over 40 years now (damn, when did I get old?), I was very familiar with the FCC regs on antennas, including satellite.
They get away with it just like every other unenforcable clause, like when schools have you indemnify them from all liability if your kid goes on a field trip. Put it in the form and count on the ignorance of the populace.
Almost nobody challenges them because almost nobody knows better.
Re: Good. Stop landlords from taking kickbacks (Score:2)
No, they cant prohibit dsl. That goes over POTS. Sorry that's not the ways subdivisions are developed.
Re: (Score:2)
POTS was not deployed in the one subdivision I had moved into. It was cable only, and DSL was prohibited in the HOA. Lots of new developments in the U.S. are copper-free, now.
I was working as a tech for a telecom contractor at the time and needed absolutely reliable Internet for work. Cable existed, but I paid to have a DSL line brought in as a backup. My router (Mikrotik?) was triple redundant, with the cable as primary, DSL as backup, and 4G LTE as 2nd backup.
They bitched until they found out I was paying
Re: Good. Stop landlords from taking kickbacks (Score:2)
Re: Good. Stop landlords from taking kickbacks (Score:2)
Proof? The cable provider may get an easement for their lines to go across the property but paying the property owner in an ongoing basis? I highly doubt that. Even if they pay money for an easement (they usually don't since it's the property owner and developers best interest for allow utility easement) those amounts are typically nominal (a couple grand maybe in most cases) and a one time fee.
Re: (Score:2)
Wait, you doubt people do shady but profitable things? Are you interested in some fool-proof investment opportunities? I have some guaranteed winners for you!
Seriously though, what I'm saying is that large apartment properties will lock tenants into a certain, property-wide ISP. If you rent there, you are not allowed to use any ISP but the official one. I know for a fact that at least one manager of such a property has taken a bribe from an ISP to ensure no one else has access to the tenants. The property
Re: (Score:2)
I agree it's a crappy practice if they're getting kickbacks. I have to ask, though... Are they really getting kickbacks, or are they renting out the cabling infrastructure that THEY own, to the cable companies that are using it for the last few hundred feet?
What if you were a building owner that said enough of this coax shit, I'm putting fiber in for all 20 stories... Should he get paid immediately by the providers that are using it, or does he just make it back in rent/HOA fees?
Again, I'm asking, not being
Re: (Score:2)
In the case I am talking about, a property manager bragged to me about the kickbacks, in order to get me to stop pestering him about allowing us to use Dish. He literally said "Bro, Comcast pay (or "paid," not sure I remember exactly) me to keep you from using Dish, give it up, it ain't happening."
Let them rent their infrastructure to ISPs. No problem. Prohibit them from making it a monopoly. That's all. The article is pretty clear on what is being proposed, so I have to ask, did you read it? If not, why no
Re: Good. Stop landlords from taking kickbacks (Score:2)
No they are not getting kickbacks. This guy has no idea how this works. Comcast paid for the easement (or most likely the developer long ago just assigned easement rights to the local cable company, either Comcast or the previous company Comcast swallowed up and they own the lines into the building. The property manager in almost all cases has no clue how any of the property was developed and who owns what rights. They just don't want you attatching dish to their building. It's really that simple.
And the local governments selling (Score:2)
Subsidized access... provides access (Score:1)
Before some click-seeking social-media-whore pops on and claims this will prevent anti-competitive behavior, let's put some facts in here.
Without those subsidies, most retrofitting won't happen. Without them, low-end new construction will either lack the wiring or it will be "contractor grade."
With them, the ISP does a better job generally, because it's their butt when customer service becomes an issue.
No, I don't work for an ISP. I am on a major complex HOA board, and have personally brought competition
Re: (Score:2)
Be careful with what kind of behavior is rewarded. The idea is that private companies exist do provide these services without the government needing to step in. If they aren't doing that make sure that there's competition to ensure it's in their best interest not to leave demand un- or under-served.
Re: (Score:1)
Being cheaper up front may mean more expensive down the road, as lack of competition almost always results in slack eventually.
Re:Subsidized access... provides access (Score:4, Interesting)
Before some click-seeking social-media-whore pops on and claims this will prevent anti-competitive behavior, let's put some facts in here.
Without those subsidies, most retrofitting won't happen. Without them, low-end new construction will either lack the wiring or it will be "contractor grade."
We're talking about the wiring inside an apartment building — coax, fiber, or twisted pair. The materials cost is on the order of double-digit dollars per unit, and it is way, way cheaper to put in that wiring while building the building than to add it later. Why would anyone in their right minds who is building an apartment complex not pre-wire it with at least coax and Ethernet? (Fiber to the unit is a nice-to-have.)
And we're talking about cabling inside the walls, so who cares what grade the wiring is? There's exactly zero wear and tear for in-wall cables, and they don't meaningfully degrade unless they're exposed to the elements. Statistically, those sorts of cables are installed once, and last as long as the building does. If they ever get upgraded, it is because of a technology change, not because anything went wrong with the existing cabling. And even technology shifts typically take decades. The generic cat5e cabling that I installed in my house 20 years ago is still good enough to handle 10-gigabit throughput at the cable lengths in question.
Everything you're saying just sounds like an excuse to me, unless you're talking about underground cables, which aren't covered by this proposed law change, AFAIK.
Re: (Score:2)
For the builder, yes. But they quoted me something like $100 per drop location for CAT5e. (Not per wallplate, per cable. What a ripoff.) And, of course, it raises the home price and gets reflected in your property taxes. In comparison, a low voltage electrician charges just just over half that price to do a 12-drop retrofit [reddit.com].
So for now, I use MoCA [amazon.com] for those rooms that need ethernet.
But that's all in-house wiring. Y
Re: Subsidized access... provides access (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
For the builder, yes. But they quoted me something like $100 per drop location for CAT5e. (Not per wallplate, per cable. What a ripoff.) And, of course, it raises the home price and gets reflected in your property taxes. In comparison, a low voltage electrician charges just just over half that price to do a 12-drop retrofit [reddit.com].
I think it would definitely worth asking for time-and-materials billing at that point. A hundred bucks per drop for a house with the walls still open sounds high to me, particularly if you can get the electrician to pull the Ethernet cable alongside the electrical wiring while they're pulling wires, so that all that the network people have to do is terminate the cables. Of course, doing that requires a fair amount of planning, but since most house construction these days involves building a hundred houses
Re: (Score:2)
How many buildings really need to be retrofitted to provide cable or DSL Internet. Cable has been around for 50+ years and I would hazard to guess that 90%+ of the apartment buildings already have cable installed.
but multi cable for areas with more then 1 cable c (Score:2)
but multi cable for areas with more then 1 cable co?
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you need multi-cables. Everyone can share the same cabling it really isn't that hard.
Re: (Score:2)
and comcast will let some other cable co run there service over the same master cable run in the building?
Does the law force the Apartment Buildings to run an full master cable to each unit to the main room for each cable co? Run an wire from each unit all the way down to the main room?
Let other cable co's run an 2th master cable up to each floor cable room?
Force the Apartment Building to put door cam (clear qam?) on all cable systems.
Re: (Score:2)
There's cable and then there's cable. In the beginning, the coax (and splitters and amps and everything else) only had to carry the bandwidth of analog broadcast TV (the original CATV). Then there was the 36-channel early cable TV. Now it's got to handle digital TV, streaming, and all the rest, and the cable provider is only responsible up to demarc. You may very well have to retrofit every unit in your building with modern coax (or fiber).
Re: (Score:2)
RG6 has probably been the norm in new construction for the last 20-25 odd years. Sure you may need to run fiber if you want 1gbp+ Internet but for most people RG6 should provide more than fast enough Internet. If you are sticking with coax the worst you would probably have to do is install a bigger backbone cable and then just use the existing cabling on each floor*.
*In a large apartment building I hope they didn't run individual cables from each apartment to a single utility closet.
Re: Subsidized access... provides access (Score:2)
I think the BIG inflection point for coax was daisy-chain (pre-1990s) vs homerun (post-1990s). RG6 vs RG59 is more of a symbolic proxy. If it's a homerun, 50 feet of pretty much any coax that's in good shape generally works fine, even IF it's not officially certified.
Most people don't realize it, but 100mbps Ethernet generally works fine over any existing 4-wire cable (twisted or not), as long as you're talking about distances like 10-25 feet. And if the interfaces at both ends are gigabit-capable, you can
Re: (Score:2)
Coax wasn’t installed in most new buildings until about 30 years ago. Retrofitting it was cumbersome, but is largely done today. However, retrofits were often done in a way that never anticipated competitive cable television markets.
DSL is a whole different matter. My 1960’s building had 25-pair riser cable to each unit stack. It is poorly spliced at each floor (think wirenuts). We could only get 11mb in our unit without trying to access the whole riser for each stack (generally behind some
needs more regulation (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in an apartment, it's Comcast or nothing. (Score:2)
They all have local monopolies, if you go to a competitor's page and put in your zip code it will LITERALLY redirect you to Comcast's order page.
I live in a residence and I have choices . . . (Score:2)
(sarcasm aside, I've got Gb Cu that's generally stable at ~800Mbps down, ~150Mbps up with an 11 ms. ping - and I pay for it!)
Great news (Score:2)
would have been great news 25 years ago
satellite broadband needs to be under rules as wel (Score:2)
for areas where things like starlink is better then OLD DSL / old cable systems.
Re: (Score:2)
You are free to install your own satellites.
Unintended Consequences (Score:2)
My condo has had negotiated bulk contracts with Spectrum and just now the local telco. In both cases, the 60-year old building needed significant upgrades to accommodate service. While I don’t like paying for “Cable” television which I don’t use, the joy of living in a condo is that the majority rules and the majority wanted a double-play package.
But, the accounting is just that. The association pays what I would pay for internet only, but charges back the “value” of t
"FCC Moves To Boost Cable Competition" (Score:1)
And Big Telecom moves to crack down on the FCC's efforts.
You cannot do anything that even attempts to interfere with the profits of mega-corporations.
Just apartments? (Score:2)
What about houses? :(
In other news... (Score:2)
In other news, the FTC has moved to increase competition among buggy whip manufacturers.
Government Is the Problem Here (Score:1)