BellSouth & SBC, Partners in Crime
More news on the municipal provided telecommunications services front. The city of Lafayette, Louisiana, has been trying to get a triple play (voice, data, and video for those of you not in the telecom game) fiber-optic network off the ground for the past year or so, and has been hitting road blocks from BellSouth all along the way.
BellSouth is the number 3 or 4 telecommunications providers in the country. They partnered with SBC (the #2 telecommunications provider, #1 in profits) to create Cingular Wireless (the #1 wireless provider in the U.S.). Currently Cingular maintains a call center in Lafayette that employs nearly 1500 people. Representatives of BellSouth have informed the city that if they continue with their plans to build a fiber-optic network, they will be forced to layoff these employees and shutdown the call center. Can you say 'blackmail' kids?
Bill Oliver, president of BellSouth Louisiana said, "that customers in Lafayette already have the ability to get all the telecommunications services they need." Really? Can they get 25mbps data connections? Can they get it from various companies at competitive rates? Can they get IPTV (digital cable over the Internet) or video-on-demand? How about VoIP services? Who, Mr. Oliver, are you to tell the citizens of Lafayette what they need?
Oliver went on to say, "BellSouth's plans to bring fiber-optic cable to within 500 feet of customers' homes -- using slower copper cable only for the last 500 feet of connections to each home -- will be able to provide customers with more than enough capacity to handle any service they want." Oh! Okay! So its not that they can currently get what they need. But you plan to give them what they need eventually, so therefore since you may be able to do it, no one else should be able to do it. Umm, what happened to competition? Just because the city plans to offer a competing service to yours doesn't mean you can't use your monopoly status and revenues to compete against them.
When are people going to wake up to the fact that these companies are practicing racketeering on a multi-billion dollar scale and members of our very government seem to be benefiting from it all (yes, I am pointing at you Senator McCain, you SBC lackey).
Have fun,
j
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