The Cellphone Imperative: if I can't text, I'm moving [telecom]

Perhaps it's that he Cable and Phone companies learned that it was both far less speculative and far more profitable to overcharge individual tenants for post-construction installations :-) .

Cheers, -- tlvp

As the moderator said it's always cheaper to pre-wire. Any marketing expert will tell you that you don't make money on one-time up-front fees. Savvy companies either waive up-front fees or charge very little. They take the loss up-front knowing that they'll make a profit on their monthly fees. Gillette pioneered this philosophy more than a century ago. It gave away razors for free and made their money off their safety razor blades. Some may that there's a limit to this. But, back in the

80's MediaOne(?) got the cable franchise in Groton MA by guaranteeing 100% coverage of the town. Because of a covenant they were required to wire my house via underground cable. But my house was more than 500 feet from the road. It costs them a lot of money to get the cable to my house.

The apartment building I'm in is pre-wired with Comcast and FIOS. It has phone and cable outlets in every room. I have Comcast which doesn't require that bulky FIOS modem box. But there is a large enclosure in a bedroom closet for the FIOS modem.

The only problem in the apartment is that the four phone outlets aren't connected via a "66 block". After a year here I just realized that. If they were connected I would have phone service in all rooms. I use a wireless phone so it's no big deal. When Comcast installed their stuff they said they weren't responsible for ensuring that I had wired phone service in every room.

/dan

That's an incredible statement. Is it *never* "profitable" the postwire a building; indeed it's not even possible to break even.

In my 25+ years in the cable TV industry I encountered this issue hundreds of times. We evaluated every job on projected ROI assuming that the postwire installation cost was a capital investment to be recovered through future revenue. Furthermore, except in exceptional circumstances, we would not wire individual units: we would undertake an installation job only if we could wire the entire building at once and only if the building owner agreed to an easement granting us the right to "enter and occupy" the building (enter the building for the purpose of installation and maintenance, and to occupy space in the building for equipment and wiring).

The Telecom Digest Moderator noted:

Absolutely. We made every effort to prewire every new residential building during construction. We usually tried to prewire commercial buildings at least to the extent of getting signal as far as equipment rooms.

Nevertheless cable TV companies often had to postwire existing buildings. Back in the '70s and '80s, when cable TV industry was growing rapidly, tenants everywhere suddenly wanted cable. The industry postwired thousands of older buildings.

I well remember those years. I spent hundreds of hours inspecting older buildings, meeting with building owners, negotiating easements, calculating budgets, dealing with contractors, and inspecting their work.

But we would never wire any building without a signed easement. This was sometimes a hassle. Some building owners simply refused to sign (at least until their tenants started screaming). Even cooperative owners often wanted detailed agreements on technical and cosmetic issues (be careful boring under the privet hedge; don't let Mrs. Jones' cat out). Buildings owned by governments were a nightmare (the paperwork is sitting in somebody's inbox, or the city attorney has to review it, or the mayor wants TV in her office, or the City Council has to have a public hearing, or...). I even encountered one apartment building owner who wanted "a deal" (the phone company paid him a commission for the payphone in the lobby, so we should pay ... forget it buddy).

And of course they all wanted free cable (including HBO, Showtime, etc.) for themselves.

Neal McLain Retired Cable Guy (TCI, Niall, Comcast, Warner)