With its bevy of tech companies and biotech researchers, San Francisco has become renowned around the world as the epicenter of new ideas, change and innovation.
So when companies come to town wanting to offer San Franciscans new ways of accessing the internet, it might come as a surprise that this isn’t the easiest town in which to be a telecommunications provider.
AT&T has been learning that bitter lesson for the past three years as it has struggled to install its broadband, phone and high-definition television U-Verse service in the city.
Next Tuesday is a watershed moment of sorts for the company: the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote on whether an environmental impact report is needed before AT&T can go ahead and install 726 utility boxes on the city’s streets.
A coalition of 25 neighborhood groups led by a group called San Francisco Beautiful hopes that the supervisors vote “yes,” so that the city can exhaustively investigate all the alternatives to the placement of the four-by-four foot boxes on the city’s sidewalks.
The group wants AT&T to bury the boxes underground, which AT&T says is not a possibility.
This is the second time that neighborhood groups have mounted a vigorous opposition to AT&T’s effort to install its boxes on the city’s streets. The first round happened in 2008, and when it seemed that AT&T was going to have to submit to an environmental impact assessment, the company withdrew.
Right now, about a million people in the Bay Area have access to AT&T’s U-Verse service, with a couple of thousand in San Francisco itself in the Sunset district and South of Market. But AT&T wants broader access to the city’s residents.
The result of the battle royale between neighborhood activists and AT&T is that San Francisco is the very last city in the whole of the United States to be wired up for AT&T’s U-Verse service.
Unlike Google, which ultimately backed out of its offer to provide San Francisco with “free” WiFi after opposition from local activists, AT&T has persevered.
Company representatives have spent the past year meeting with neighborhood associations, condominium owners, business groups and anyone else who had concerns to try and address them. AT&T has even tried guerrilla marketing tactics by showing up at San Francisco’s farmers’ markets to “get acquainted” with neighbors and to familiarize them with the service.
Nevertheless, the opposition from the 25 neighborhood groups remain, as evidenced by a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the Board of Supervisors meeting next Tuesday.
The story on Sunday quoted the leader of the “anti-box movement” Milo Hanke as saying that he firmly believes that the city needs to conduct an environmental impact assessment to independently verify whether burying the boxes underground is indeed not feasible.
Hanke, an independent financial adviser and San Francisco resident since 1982, says that his intent is not to “kill U-Verse,” but to preserve the city’s beauty, which he fears would be ruined by AT&T’s monster boxes, which in addition to being obtrusive, could possibly be marred by graffiti.
“I moved here from Boston sight unseen because this is the most beautiful city in the world,” he told TPM. “I am personally particularly sensitive to commercial intrusion in the public realm — I initially joined San Francisco Beautiful about 10 years ago to combat the proliferation of billboards.”
For his part, Hanke declined to comment on the record about the possibility that having another telecom provider might bring a needed element of competition for Comcast in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, the lobbying goes on. The San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday quoted former Gavin Newsom staffer-turned AT&T spokesman Lane Kasselman as saying that the company is working on a detailed proposal to address neighbors’ concerns.
And both sides maintain web sites arguing their point of view on the big utility box debate.
It’ll be up to the Board of Supervisors next Tuesday to decide whether San Francisco will remain an unreachable planet for AT&T’s U-Verse service.
