In January, Vancouver and unincorporated Clark County residents may have a TV delivery option besides Comcast for the first time.
The city and county are negotiating separate franchise agreements with CenturyLink to provide Internet-based Prism TV service to the area. Portland entered into a TV franchise agreement with CenturyLink earlier this year.
“I think it’s good for our citizens to have choices, and it’s nice to have someone interested in providing a choice for our citizens,” Mayor Tim Leavitt said at last week’s city council workshop.
Prism TV customers can use wireless set-top boxes that will allow them to move their TV anywhere in the house because they’re not tied to a cable outlet, said Karen Stewart, CenturyLink’s local government affairs director. Customers can watch TV anywhere and on any device, set their DVRs remotely, watch and record multiple shows at once with a single DVR, or pause a show and pick it up in another room. The service offers a variety of packages and more than 210 high-definition channels.
In addition to delivering another TV service, the franchise agreement would drive availability of higher broadband speeds using CenturyLink’s existing telephone infrastructure. CenturyLink will be working to expand its Prism TV service along its existing fiber telephone lines — a connection speed of 40 megabits per second is required for Prism to function.
“It’s going to be a slow expansion. Once they get the cable franchise, it’s not like they’ll flip a switch and everyone will get cable service. There will be a roll-out they’ll be working on over the next few years,” said Jim Demmon of the City/County Cable Television Office on Friday. “There’s quite a bit of work that goes into getting a neighborhood up and established.”
Stewart said CenturyLink can’t serve some Clark County cities, such as Camas and Washougal, because it doesn’t have telephone network lines there. Camas and Washougal are served by Frontier, formerly Verizon telephone.
For proprietary reasons, Stewart said, she can’t disclose the percentage of residences in Vancouver that CenturyLink could serve today. However, people can type in their home address on the company’s website to see if Prism service would be available to them, she said.
Demmon, city and county representatives began meeting with CenturyLink last December, using the existing Comcast franchise document as a starting point to ensure equality. If the Vancouver City Council approves the CenturyLink agreement at its regular meeting Dec. 21, the contract would go into effect Jan. 22. The county councilors will consider the issue at their Dec. 8 meeting.
Because Vancouver and Clark County both have nonexclusive franchise agreements with Comcast, the door has been open to a nonbroadcast TV provider other than Comcast all along.
“We just haven’t had an interested party,” Demmon told the city council last week.
The city would provide incentives for CenturyLink to expand its network as quickly as possible. The initial five-year agreement, which would expire in December 2020, could be extended by another three years if CenturyLink reached at least 20 percent of households in the franchise area. The contract could be extended an additional two years, through December 2025, if the company reached 30 percent of households.
“We can’t require them to serve the entire city of Vancouver, but it looks like their fiber plant will reach the majority of the city,” Demmon said.
Under the agreement, CenturyLink would pay the city a franchise fee of 5 percent of gross revenues in exchange for use of the streets where the company’s phone lines are run. (Satellite providers don’t need to pay franchise fees because they don’t use the roadways.)
The city and county don’t have the legal authority to regulate rates, which haven’t been established yet in Vancouver. However, having a competitor in the market could result in lower prices for consumers. Stewart said wherever CenturyLink offers service, competitors “are quickly there also talking about their new and improved pricing.”
According to Stewart, the company has invested more than $7 billion into its Washington network to provide gigabit service. A gigabit is one billion bits of digital information.
