The town of Lafayette, Louisiana has grown tired of its lack of broadband service. Despite having a cable and landline phone company serving the area, both have refused to upgrade their networks to offer true high speed internet access (instead option for a slower copper “last mile”), and both clearly state that they have no plans to do Fiber-to-the-Home in the future.
So, the town of Lafayette has decided to take the broadband issue on by itself, and begin work on a municipal fiber network. While their site promotes the the idea that such a service will offer helpful competition with the cable and phone companies, it’s clear that neither really had any plans to compete anyway.
Yet, BellSouth isn’t one to let this opportunity to act like asses pass them by. Seeing as this fiber project is such a huge threat to the current duopoly, it has threatened to remove the Cingular customer service call center from the town, potentially eliminating 1,300 jobs.
Why would BellSouth want to keep all its operations in a parish where it had no other significant business interest, Oliver asked rhetorically.
The call center, which handles customer service tasks for Cingular, could be located in “Timbuktu” and still perform the same services, Oliver said.
“Would you still keep people there?” Oliver said.
I would if I expected those people to be loyal customers. A person can’t afford a cell phone if they don’t have a job to pay the bill with. Or would BellSouth rather leave that to the municipality to handle, too?
