I’m all for cable competition, and I am no fan of Comcast. Maybe if AT&T gets into the cable TV business, Comcast will have to try a little harder to make its gear work and provide better service.
But I’m a little dubious about this deal to let AT&T put 726 new metal boxes on the street. And I have to say: Concluding, as the City Planning Department did, that there’s no need for an environmental impact report, is a bit of a stretch.
Comcast, for all its problems, has most of its equipment undergound. That’s a better option. I’m not quite as offended by the sight of boxes on the street as San Francisco Beautiful is (hey — why not ask local artists to paint cool stuff on them? Turn them into street art instead of ugly metal contraptions covered with graffiti) but there’s a larger point here: AT&T is about to get a huge amount of public sidewalk space — essentially free.
Do the math: 726 boxes, each one taking up eight square feet of sidewalk space. That’s 5,808 square feet of prime real estate in one of the most dense, congested cities in the country. You know what it would cost to lease that space in a storefront downtown? Well, you can look here and here and you get an idea — that kind of space is worth at least $15,000 a month, maybe a lot more.
And AT&T says it has another 1,200 existing boxes on the street.
Why are we giving this public space away to a giant corporation? I’m getting sick of seeing all this money left on the table — Twitter gets a tax break, PG&E has a crazy-low franchise fee, the garbage company has no franchise fee at all … it’s like we’ve become Corporate Giveaway City.
The issue coming before the supervisors at 4 p.m. April 26th is whether the city should force AT&T to do an environmental impact report. AT&T hates that idea — because if the company has to do an EIR here, it will have to do an EIR in every other city in California before it installs above-ground cable boxes. And it seems like SF Beautiful has a good argument in favor of the EIR.
But the supervisors should go further: Why not open up the AT&T franchise agreement and charge more for the new boxes? Then at least the city will get some cash out of this.
UPDATE: Eric Potasner, who is working for AT&T on this measure, just called to tell me that AT&T will pay 5 percent of its video revenue to the city. No boxes, no video, no revenue. Of course, if I switch from Comcast (which already pays 5 percent) to AT&T, which I suspect will be the vast majority of the AT&T business — and I might switch, since Comcast has been so bad to me — the city gets the same money. No new revenue. (If I switch from Comcast to satellite, which is actually a different kind of service, the city gets nothing at all. So you could argue that the boxes bring the city some money. But I wonder how much — AT&T, like Comcast, will offer bundled web, voice and video; satellite TV doesn’t do that. Mostly, they’ll be stealing from each other.)
Still: They are putting up large pieces of metal on city sidewalks. I hope it leads to more revenue, but can’t we at least charge them rent — some minium amount each month — to be sure the city gets something out of this?