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Voters Not Fooled In Louisiana Over Muni Broadband
from the and-so-it-goes dept
While there have been plenty of fights between telcos and local governments trying to offer muni-broadband, none received quite as much attention as the battle in Lafayette, Louisiana, over muni-broadband, where it seemed like the more attention the battle received, the nastier the telcos became. This included threatening to move call centers out of state and conducting push polls (which are designed to influence opinion while pretending to be asking for opinions). However, it appears that those efforts have backfired, as all that media attention allowed the folks in Lafayette to understand the real issues and vote in favor of a muni fiber network. If BellSouth and others had spent half as much effort in actually providing better broadband to the folks of Lafayette, this issue might never have come up at all. There are still plenty of questions over implementation, and having a muni-broadband offering certainly doesn't always make sense. However, given the constant misleading FUD put out by BellSouth concerning this plan, hopefully the folks in Lafayette know what they're doing.
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I'm sure this is far from over
Telcos have much bigger pockets. Here in the Silicon Valley, a cable operator was passed over for franchise in favor of a local "co-op". They sued the city. The result was no cable service in that city for over 8 years. Finally the cable operator went bankrupt, which was the original reason the city council passed on them.
Some 10 years later, the co-op was in dept up to their eyeballs and was sold to AT&T. The cable plant was outdated but it worked and you could get _real people_ on the phone for help. That all ended when AT&T took over and the techs that knew the system were canned.
Now Comcast, after buying AT&T and giving even worse service is actively working against the same city to pull the plug on their "Fibre to the home" project. Shocking, huh?
The only ones who are going to win here are the lawyers. I'm sure the telcos are readying litegation at this very moment.
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