Both houses of the Illinois General Assembly passed a bill yesterday which allows telephone companies to provide video services in competition with cable franchises. The text of the bill is here:

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/95/SB/09500SB0678ham004.htm

It passed by such a large majority that it is deemed veto-proof and takes effect immediately. The cable lobbyists flew a bunch of influential legislators to Vegas a few months ago, but this seemed to backfire as most of the newspapers in the state picked up on it and wrote editorials blistering the honesty and judgment of the lawmakers who took the trip. Of course about the only thing you can say about the honesty of Illinois state politics is that it is not quite as corrupt as Louisiana--4 former governors have been sentenced to federal prison for corruption during my life and a federal grand jury is investigating our current governor.

The bad news is that our major telephone services provider is AT&T and their HD-hobbled U-verse system. It looks like AT&T has gone to direct to the home fiber in newly constructed neighborhoods and hopefully will extend that to subdivisions like mine, which aren't new but do have all underground utilities. If it were an option, I'd be willing to pay to have fiber run to my house and bypass the Microsoft/AT&T mess of converting the signal to run over copper. It'd take a guy with a trenching machine about 30 minutes to run fiber from the AT&T switching box to my house.

My Brother-in-law was working on a IP system using ICTC lines in Coles County a few years back. The system is running and has subscribers as they bundle it with Internet&Phone. He quit it after getting it viable. He was saddled with non-handshaking equipment that was purchased prior to his hire by people who had no idea what they were doing.

TPM

I'm glad to see this done,but I must say I wish they would work on the electric rate problems instead. I'm sick of paying 500$ a month on electricity. We use to pay about 150 a month. It's amazing how one corrupt politician (emil Jones) can cause a whole state to suffer.

Gov. Chet Culver of Iowa signed a similar law about a month ago.

Here it's not really a matter of allowing competition; there's already a second cable company in Cedar Rapids and several phone co-ops in the video business. But they had to get franchise agreements from the cities where they operate in order to do this -- just as the incumbent cablecos had to do -- and the big phone companies just don't want to do that. They want the option to just go to the state and bypass local governments.

This is great news. Cable company monopolies should be abolished.
Maybe they could drop their rates to maintain competitiveness. Ya...just like the oil companies do...