AT&T Bill Slows Down, Again

The battle over who gets to provide cable service to millions of Tennessee customers has moved back to small rooms out of the range of cameras.

Lawmakers say the adversaries – AT&T and the cable-casters –have a week or more to work on changes to the statewide video franchise bill.

The bill has been amended to require AT&T to build lines to new customers within a set period of time. House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh says the fact that the bill came out of a subcommittee on a close vote means its future is still uncertain.

“I don’t know exactly what the outcome’s going to be on that bill. They’re making an enormous amount of changes on it. My understanding, …they might make so many changes on it that BellSouth-AT and T won’t even like it when they get through with it.”

The chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Steve Southerland, has spent hours listening to testimony from the Tennessee Municipal League, unhappy cable companies and the phone company. Senate speaker Ron Ramsey says Southerland is doing his homework.

“He’s being very conscientious, to hear all sides of this. And when he got all those amendments from the TML, from the cable people, from AT and T, and he’s compiled that into kind of a book, and they’re really…seeing if there’s any kind of compromise we can come out with. I don’t know, I hate to even speculate on that right now. I don’t think the committee members know where they are. They truly want to do what they think is the right thing, and the right thing apparently is not there yet. I don’t know, we’ll see.”

The two giants in the battle, AT&T and the cable industry, have flooded cable consumers with commercials belittling the other side. An organization named TV-4-US recently released a poll of 600 registered Tennessee voters, with 76-percent agreeing that there is not enough competition to keep cable television rates down. Meanwhile, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce endorsed the AT&T bill last week.