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Report takes issue with AT&T proposal(Daily Oklahoman, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Apr. 1--13-state project is pledged Citing what it calls a track record littered with broken promises, a cable industry-backed report released this week calls AT&T's planned deployment of a $4.4 billion fiber optic network a "shell game." In "Frayed at the Edges: The Bells' Broken Fiber Promises," the authors claim that AT&T -- and fellow Baby Bell Verizon -- demanded new legislation that allows them to skip local franchising negotiations before bringing promised high speed data and television services to consumers throughout their service territories. "These monopolies, who for years had the temerity to accuse their competitors of cherry-picking the most affluent customers from their monopoly-service footprints, now ask state and federal regulators to exempt them from local video franchising agreements, which would by definition allow them to exclude many, if not most, neighborhoods from their rollout plans," the authors said. The report was published by a group called Broadband Everywhere, a "coalition" backed by the American Cable Association and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. AT&T Oklahoma spokesman Andy Morgan called the report a desperate attempt by the cable industry to halt its plans to compete directly with cable with its own menu of television programming services. "We want to give consumers an alternative to the cable monopoly, and the cable industry is doing everything possible -- including patchwork-quilt fake research -- to try and stop us and others from competing in providing video choice," Morgan said. AT&T's "Project Lightspeed" would allow it to bundle television, Internet and telephone services in the same way its cable competition does. The "Frayed at the Edges" authors claim that AT&T and Verizon are targeting the most lucrative high income neighborhoods for fiber network deployment and bypassing low income areas. "It took cable 35 years to reach 50 percent of the population," Morgan said. "Yet they have the audacity to demand that any new entrants into their monopoly market serve 100 percent of the population on day one. "We will deploy our new technologies and will reach 80 percent of our traditional 13-state footprint within three years. Where we don't deploy Lightspeed, we will offer Homezone, a satellite version of the same services." Sean Voskuhl, associate state director of the AARP, which represents 400,000 older Oklahomans, said the consumer group opposes relaxed franchising rules that take local communities out of the process. "We think the local governments should have that right," Voskuhl said. The cable-backed report also outlined what it called the history of broken promises by AT&T and Verizon. It cited SBC's decision in 2002 not to open a promised call center in Enid that would have brought 500 jobs to the community. "The decision to not open the Enid call center was unfortunate, but 2002 was a depressing period for the telecom industry," Morgan said. "We were losing thousands of customers to competition, so adding several hundred jobs just didn't make good economic sense." Officials with Cox Communications in Oklahoma City had no comment on the report. |