Over the years several communities have gotten upset about the AT&T VRAD cabinets required to deliver the company's U-Verse FTTN/VDSL service. In some areas, complaints involved anger of AT&T ignoring easement rights or childhood traffic dangers, while in other markets the complaints have been aesthetic or property-value driven. In Illinois, groups like Stop The Box fought to have a say in VRAD placement, with AT&T finally going so far as to agree to pay $1,500-$2000 for landscaping surrounding each box.
In San Francisco, community opposition to installing 725 six-foot-tall utility cabinets was so heated, AT&T ultimately backed off of a significant expansion. Several years ago AT&T decided to try again, and in July of 2011 the city voted to approve the installation of 726 U-Verse cabinets.Debate still rages however over efforts to get AT&T to go above and beyond just plunking down the cabinets wherever they'd like. A new
bit of proposed legislation, for example, is seeing
heated resistance from AT&T because it would require the company to "at least try" to obscure the boxes and seek public feedback:
quote:
Wiener’s legislation would require companies to at least try to place new boxes off public streets (such as underground, on private properties or in alleyways), to force them to allow artwork on the boxes and to pay for greening around them. It would also require AT&T and other utility companies installing new boxes to propose multiple locations and hold a public meeting as part of a “pre-application” process so neighbors can weigh in ahead of time.
AT&T's lawyers have argued in response that the new proposed legislation violates state law in "10 different ways," and that allowing murals on the boxes would "damage AT&T property." City Supervisor Scott Weiner, who is behind the proposal,
voted yes on AT&T's cabinet expansion because Comcast was "in desperate need of competition." Cities like Seattle are
eliminating many existing rules governing cabinet placement in the hopes of encouraging faster broadband deployment.