ATT and the city of Naperville in Illinois have reached an impasse in their IPTV franchise negotiations. (Naperville is a suburb outside of Chicago that is also home to the Bell Labs location that did a lot of development on Lucent's central office switches.)
ATT is insisting on the right to choose where it will deploy its U-verse IPTV service. Naperviille calls this "cherry picking" and wants the service to be made available to the entire community. ATT is trying to bypass Naperville and get the state of Illinois to pass a statewide franchise bill as Texas, California, and 11 other states have done.
ATT's strategy has been to provide its IPTV service in high income areas in order to have a profitable introduction. This is understandable as is Naperville's desire to have the service universally available.
The recent FCC decision does not seem to address this. This is an example of why ATT was trying to get video licensing bumped up to the Federal level. While that would certainly simplify things for ATT, it does not seem to be in the cards. ATT is just going to have to slog it out one town at a time.
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4 comments:
"Naperville" not "Napierville"
This is also amusing:
[http://www.freepress.net/news/21408]
Naperville announced Wednesday it will be distributing large yellow boxes around the city to demonstrate the size of AT&T’s proposed junction boxes for its new video service. Itasca officials did the same a few days ago, only they were pink in color. The boxes are about 5 feet tall and 4 feet wide.
Each box in Naperville is also emblazoned with: “This big ugly box brought to you by AT&T Project Lightspeed in the name of competition.”
Thanks for the spelling correction. I should have known that. I have been there.
The Freepress article is interesting. I got a letter from ATT in October asking if they could put one of these Alcatel boxes in my front yard. The City of San Francisco is asking them to move the boxes to private property as much as possible.
I thought "cool, zero wire distance, I should get 100 Mbps". My wife said "you have to be kidding" and that was that.
She was right. The box is so big that it would impinge on my next door neighbor's property when they opened the door. In any case, it will actually be less intrusive if they put it in the pedestrian alley across the street where they have their other cabinets.
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