Apparently the attraction of having a competitive TV provider is not quite enough to overcome some Illinois elected officials' concerns when it comes to welcoming AT&T's (NYSE: T) U-verse service into their towns.
In Skokie, village board members were so unimpressed with a presentation by AT&T execs that they pushed the question of whether to approve the service back to staff members who were told to work out the details.
If approved, U-verse would be the third TV provider in Skokie after Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) and RCN, and that was enough to have Village Manager Al Rigoni questioning of how and where AT&T would place the necessary utility boxes it needs to run the service, the Skokie Patch reported. There's also the issue of who would get service since large areas of the town could be unserved.
Trustee Edie Sue Sutker questioned both the "size and appearance" of the utility boxes and the holes left in the service map.
"I feel like there's vagueness to what you're going to provide for us," she told the petitioning execs.
Things might be going a little better in Glenwood, where the village board has tabbed Aug. 20 as the date to vote on a resolution welcoming U-verse to town. Utility boxes wouldn't be an issue--or would be a sublimated issue--thanks to a deal where AT&T would give the village "$1,500 per box to simply install them or $2,000 per box if the village does a walk through with an engineer from AT&T to determine where the boxes will go and what type of landscaping will be used to screen them," a story on NWI.com said.
"What AT&T is offering up is money to the village to then landscape them, screen them in such a fashion that they're a little more appealing, so they're not such an eyesore in front of the resident's home," said public works director Patrick McAneney.
For more:
- the Skokie Patch carried this story
- and NWI.com had this story
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