Via The Mooresville Tribune comes word that the beat-down dreck of a bankrupt CATV system that Davidson and Mooresville bought for $75 million turns out to be a money-sink. Do tell.
Check out this load of crap:
Sandra Munsey, director of marketing for Bristol Virginia Utilities, the company managing the system, said Tuesday the MI-Connection board decided last Thursday that an additional funding request from the towns for system upgrades, estimated last November to be about $11 million, could jump by as much as $5 million more.
That jump, said Munsey, is because of the condition of the bankrupt Adelphia system that MI-Connection purchased from caretaker Time Warner in December.
Munsey said the problem is the amount of underground cable that must be upgraded and added to the system, which officials couldn’t have known about in advance because they did not have access to the full system details until the purchase was final.
Those upgrades, said Munsey, mean that more hybrid fiber-coaxial will be added to the system than previously anticipated, and more customers will benefit from its higher bandwidth and better quality when the upgrades are complete. In fact, she said, $4 million of the possible $5 million will be used solely for adding the fiber to the system.
“It’s a positive,” she said.
It’s a positive. Spoken like a true arm of the TVA. The towns foolishly believed the low-ball cost estimates and are now on the hook to pay whatever it takes to retro-fit the system, $16 million and counting.
MeckDeck readers knew the score last August:
The system is at least one generation — probably two — behind state of art and will require at least $20 million in upgrades to match the offerings that local Time Warner customers enjoy. Better still, the managers at Bristol Virginia Utilities have no experience running a stand-alone CATV system. The fiber-to-the-home system they run in Virginia was both heavily dependent on federal help on the capital side and, at least one study concluded, an operating subsidy from the city’s water and electrical service.
In sum, Mooresville and Davidson have bought a $100 million sink-hole.
I could go on and on. It is not clear if those calling the shots understand they must upgrade to a 1GHz system ASAP, along with all the routing and switching that requires to be able to deliver the two-way video-on demand and enhanced data traffic that will be common on other systems next year. There is no way to be DOCSIS 3.0 complaint otherwise. It is not clear that BVU knows what it is doing — it just announced on-demand movies for its home Bristol service, a service that reaches only about two-thirds of the customers it is trying to handle in Mecklenburg.
And for the last hour — solid — the BVU Web sites have been off-line.
Ah jeez.