lml, Thread, Re: the "street tear" article
In case anyone is searching for the company, Starpower, which was mentioned in the article for whatever reason, they are [or at least they were at the time the article below was written last year] a joint venture in the DC area between RCN and Potomac Electric Power Co. (see June '98 article from Cable News below)
The article I posted doesn't even begin to address the legal issues on the other side of the cable, that is, the building easements in multitenant commercial and residential structures. Consider that each hair-like strand (isn't that getting rather trite?) can have an entire room or basement full of hardware hanging off of it.
In many office buildings carriers are being told outright that they can't come in. Wow, there's a lot of room for funny stuff, which usually ensues after such a disclaimer... often undisclosed, and even very unattractive and seemingly tawdry, I would assume, for the professionals and the legals to even want to get involved with.
It therefore remains an area of who can shout the loudest [literally, folks] at times, and who is willing to go to extremes (take that the way you will), at other times. And then there are always the legitimate forms of rentals (which sometimes strongly resemble extortion <cough>) that the landlords have within their powers to exert for easement, riser and roof rights.
In many ways it's another instance of the WWW, only this time those initials stand for the Wild Wild West. Indeed. To wit, take a brief note of the opening words of the first sentence in the article below [bold]. -bg-
Similarly, another point that the author misses, which was a sad fact that I once had to find out the hard way, is the unspoken levy that the cities and municipalities exact on the new carriers in the way of their pound of flesh, as measured in numbers and situation of silica strands. Ostensibly, these are used for Institutional Nets, or I-Nets, and these can account for the equivalance of tens of millions of dollars in revenue during the life spans of those f-o cable infrastructures. Sometimes, however, these never get used due to budgetary constraints from other directions, despite the carriers' having spent tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes, in order to get them installed.
Explanation of the strand fee:
In many locally-franchised f-o abd coaxial undertakings (I'll only focus on the f-o here), the carrier must drop off x number of strands (it used to be four) to each municipally owned building in its path (and a number of backbone strands as well on major routes), lest they not enjoy the reduced franchise fees that would otherwise hold true. Hmm. And where they don't a fiber cable going past one of their buildings, they usually take a pledge.
The foregoing held true for alternative access providers and cable cos going back to the late Eighties, and into the mid-Nineties, at least. One has to wonder if this still holds true with the number of pullers out there today, since at some point additional strands make little sense, if cash equivalence could be had. Comments welcome.
Regards, Frank Coluccio
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RCN Tries To Elbow It's Way Into Cable's Turf
June 8, 1998
By Alan Breznick
Muscling its way into the market with eye-catching bus and subway posters heralding the downfall of the cable "empire," RCN Corp. has started signing up phone and data customers in Washington, D.C., and plans to begin offering cable TV there in the fall.
RCN, a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) that already provides bundled phone, video and Internet-access services in New York, Boston, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, is building a $300-million, 350-mile fiber network in the Washington region with a local utility, Potomac Electric Power Co. Their joint venture, Starpower, rolled out phone and data service last month using leased fiber lines.
Starpower's Washington launch comes as the city's two incumbent cable and phone providers, Tele-Communications Inc. and Bell Atlantic Corp., scramble to upgrade their own video, voice and data offerings in the nation's capital.
TCI's District Cablevision system, preparing for a franchise renewal in two years, has started rolling out digital cable and plans to upgrade its oft-criticized operation. After years of testing, Bell Atlantic just announced last week that it plans to begin introducing asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) technology to Washington and other prime markets in September.
In its first week of service, RCN reported that Starpower signed up more than 750 local and long-distance phone customers in Washington, which it termed "stronger than anticipated initial sales." The company said it signed up fewer than 75 customers apiece in previous market launches.
RCN also said it has contracts to provide telecommunications services to nearly 7,000 housing units in the Washington area, including Georgetown University Law School, real estate developer Charles E. Smith Co. and other large apartment building owners and managers. The company says its local phone rates are up to 5% less than Bell Atlantic's charges.
Spokesmen for RCN and Pepco said Starpower will begin offering cable and high-speed data services over its own fiber network sometime in the fourth quarter. Plans call for launching service in the city and then expanding to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.
Starpower has not yet disclosed the pricing or packaging for its planned 330-channel system, which includes 110 channels of video. But in New York and Boston, RCN offers 81 basic channels for $27.95 a month, or $24.95 a month if taken with phone service.
"We plan to be very competitive in the District and the surrounding suburbs," said an RCN spokesman. The company now has at least 63,000 video customers in Manhattan and Boston and recently expanded cable service to Queens.
Separately, RCN bought fiber lines last week from Qwest Communications International Inc. to link its local networks from Boston to Washington. END
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