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From: Daily Herald

Naperville Tries to Box AT&T into a Corner

March 1, 2007
By Jake Griffin

Taking a cue from Itasca, Naperville leaders are placing giant boxes around the city to show residents what the landscape could look like if the state legislature takes away a municipality’s right to regulate cable franchise agreements.

Telecommunications giant AT&T is pushing for the change and now municipalities are pushing back.

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.”

City officials said the proposed state law would allow AT&T to circumvent requirements that have been put in place to ensure complete coverage of the city and fair competition among providers.

“This is a case where there is one entity that doesn’t seem to think the process works,” said Terry Miller, Naperville’s senior assistant attorney. “We don’t think there’s a need for change since it works for everyone else.”

He said the city spent six months negotiating with AT&T officials over Project Lightspeed last year when the company abruptly pulled out of negotiations. AT&T has sued several other municipalities for not allowing it to install the boxes, including Itasca.

Rob Biederman, an AT&T spokesman, said the company has been welcomed in other communities, including a recent agreement in Mundelein. He said the company was nonplussed by the box displays in Naperville and Itasca.

“Though we’re currently not in discussions with Naperville, we wish these efforts and resources would have been spent bringing cable competition to Naperville and we look forward to reaching that goal,” he said.

Last week, AT&T was accused of dirty tricks by Itasca officials for pulling the plug on phone services at village facilities shortly after the pink boxes went up. Company officials blamed the outage that only affected village buildings on a “connector glitch” that also affected systems in Bensenville.

Naperville officials don’t know how many boxes will be placed around the city or for how long. Miller said the intent is to educate the residents about the legislation.

“One day they could wake up and this could be right in front of your house,” he said.