{"id":289,"date":"2005-02-25T10:18:13","date_gmt":"2005-02-25T15:18:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=289"},"modified":"2005-07-17T21:44:56","modified_gmt":"2005-07-18T01:44:56","slug":"how-bellsouth-plays-dirty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=289","title":{"rendered":"How BellSouth plays dirty"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

So, the town of Lafayette has decided to take the broadband issue on by itself, and begin work on a municipal fiber network<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Why would BellSouth want to keep all its operations in a parish where it had no other significant business interest, Oliver asked rhetorically.<\/p>\n

The call center, which handles customer service tasks for Cingular, could be located in “Timbuktu” and still perform the same services, Oliver said.<\/p>\n

“Would you still keep people there?” Oliver said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bellsouth holds 1,300 jobs hostage in a town that wants to deply its own fiber network.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets-widgits-and-whatzits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}