| Ted Hearn To American Cable |
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Ted Hearn long has done more coverage of the FCC than any other D.C. reporter, and been one of my primary sources. Thi Matt Polka, who just joined the Cable Center Hall of Fame, filed an interesting note on the stimulus asking for funds for backhaul networks for small telcos. Backhaul is controlled in much of the country by the telco, which often charges brutal prices. Cogent just reported a price of $6/megabit for net connection; Laramie Wyoming pays $110, and many of Matt’s members have a similar backhaul problem. In many cases, the high cost of backhaul is more of an obstacle then the cost of the deployment itself. My answer to that wouldn’t be wasting public money on a duplicate network, and believe the new FCC will quickly jump in to investigate the high rural prices. The incumbents have been winning pricing power as the FCC has backed off. The new FCC knows sharing rural fiber has played a major role in Japan and Scandinavia, and may jump in and find a solution that doesn’t cost the taxpayer. Far more interesting to me would be upgrading the three or four percent of cable systems that don’t offer modems, and perhaps extending cable into the 4% of homes they don’t reach. Michael Grebb at Cablefax had this to say. "We never thought we’d see the day that seasoned and tenacious Washington trade reporter Ted Hearn would go to the “dark side”—the affectionate term journalists use to describe the public relations profession. But in the trade business, we’re all either hacks or flacks. And Ted has been one of the best hacks out there for years. He began working at Multichannel News in 1994 and almost immediately began scooping the competition and displaying an almost savant-like understanding of obscure footnotes and subtext buried in complicated government documents. And watching him pepper FCC chairmen, Senators and Congressmen about things he understood better than they did... was a guilty pleasure for all of us “sparkheads” (Another affectionate term that Washington telecom trade reporters assigned themselves years ago)." |
ngs are tough in the print business, so he has now taken the job of vice-president of communications for the association of the small U.S. cablecos. The small telcos are remarkably well organized and have a major influence on policy, but the cablecos often are offering more to rural residents. In particular, they can offer 10 meg and maybe 50 meg to many (not all) currently unserved for a fraction of what the telcos are asking.
