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Frank StantonFrank Stanton
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company.

When my partner died, that presented a problem in connection with the money that we had borrowed, and when the storms hit Florida, the storms destroyed some of--

Q:

I'm sorry. I missed exactly that transition. You said it presented a problem in terms of the money you had borrowed. What exactly do you mean?

Stanton:

Maybe I should go back and try to pick it up. Cable is a very capital-intensive business. It costs six to eight hundred dollars a home to bring the cable to the doorstep or to the place in the house where you connect it to the television set. So that you can figure out as well as I can that if you want ten thousand homes, you're going to have to put up $100,000 to wire those homes.

We had ambitions to wire a large area, and so we went to the banks to borrow money. We couldn't borrow money in this country. We borrowed money in Holland, and I guess we were in debt to the tune of about $46 million. When the FCC began talking about re-regulating cable, when the hurricanes blew down a lot of the wires--because cable in most of Florida is over wire lines that are strung on poles. If you're smart and can afford it, you put the cable under ground. That's much more attractive from the standpoint of the home-owner, and from the community's point-of-view it's what should be insisted upon.

Some communities insist that if you wire the community, you have to put all your cable underground, and that's the sensible way to do it. But you have to have a distribution point on a tall tower to send the signal to various places within the area, and if that tower blows





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