“El Pelón”: Sunburned, running free, and mighty happy AT&T call center workers were happy to oblige requests for private customer information.

The Federal Communications Commission has fined AT&T $25 million after an investigation revealed AT&T customer service call center employees sold private, personal information regarding nearly 280,000 AT&T wireless customers to a shadowy figure or group known as “El Pelón,” which translates as a “bald man.”

During 2013 and 2014, employees in call centers in Mexico, Colombia and the Philippines sold customer information to third parties, presumably to help them reactivate stolen cell phones using the original owner’s contact information and at least the last four digits of the customer’s Social Security number.

When El Pelón called, more than a few AT&T employees listened and on request looked up the cell numbers given and provided customer information in return. A short time later, someone accessed AT&T’s website to submit unlock requests for the phone(s) associated with the account. Once unlocked, the phones could be sold almost anywhere around the world.

The investigation by the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau began in May 2014 after three call center employees in Mexico accessed the private information of more than 68,000 AT&T Wireless customers. That information soon led to 290,803 handset unlock requests submitted by third parties.

AT&T then learned around 40 other employees in its Colombia and Philippines call centers were also providing private customer information in return for compensation. Another 211,000 customer records were involved in those data breaches.

In return for its lax security, the FCC has handed AT&T a record-breaking fine of $25 million, and ordered AT&T to beef up security and give affected customers access to a credit monitoring service for a few years.

“The commission cannot — and will not —stand idly by when a carrier’s lax data security practices expose the personal information of hundreds of thousands of the most vulnerable Americans to identity theft and fraud,” FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said. “As today’s action demonstrates, the commission will exercise its full authority against companies that fail to safeguard the personal information of their customers.”

AT&T has 30 days to pay or contest the fine. The FCC admits it still has no clear idea from AT&T exactly how many customers were victims of the ongoing data breaches. But AT&T promised to do better in the future.

“We’ve changed our policies and strengthened our operations,” AT&T said in a statement. “And we have, or are, reaching out to affected customers to provide additional information.”

A $500 million New York State broadband improvement fund is effectively off-limits for would-be community-owned broadband networks trying to deliver broadband service in areas for-profit providers have deemed unprofitable.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ambitious plan to revolutionize Internet access for New Yorkers depends almost exclusively on for-profit providers and the state’s largest cable operator, Time Warner Cable – the company that has so far received the largest share of state funds earmarked for better broadband.

Cuomo wants all of New York wired for 100Mbps service no later than 2018. His goal is ambitious because the overwhelming majority of upstate New York barely now receives a maximum of 50Mbps from Time Warner Cable, the only significant cable operator in the region.

The broadband map from N.Y. State shows 100Mbps service is available only from Verizon FiOS, Cablevision, and a handful of municipal/co-op operators. Time Warner Cable only provides a maximum of 50Mbps service across upstate New York. Cablevision and FiOS compete on Long Island, Time Warner Cable Maxx competes with Verizon in New York City, and most of upstate New York is served by Verizon or Frontier DSL competing with Time Warner Cable.

Six months after the program was announced, Capital magazine reports the “New NY Broadband” plan is languishing with no defined guidelines, rules, or any clear sense about how the program will be implemented and the money spent.

Salway

In fact, one of the only clear statements coming from David Salway, a former telecommunications consultant who now administers the program, is that local governments should not bother applying because he doesn’t want them competing with Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and Frontier. It’s private enterprise only:

“The primary focus of our program is that we’re not going to be in the building business,” Salway said. He emphasized that municipal governments won’t be specifically precluded from receiving funds under the program, but said that the state is “wary” of “the government building and competing with the private sector. We see this as a provider partnership process where an incumbent provider or maybe a new entrant comes in.”

Local government leaders can read between the lines and most will not bother applying for funding if Salway’s vision guides the grant-making process. Instead, Salway wants to funnel money that effectively belongs to New York taxpayers into the pockets of for-profit providers like Verizon, Frontier, Windstream, Time Warner Cable and other providers that have consistently refused to expand their networks into rural areas on their own dime. The money earmarked for broadband is part of a $6 billion legal settlement the New York Attorney General’s office negotiated with Wall Street and commercial banks that helped plunge the country into The Great Recession.

Broadband advocates across the political spectrum are slamming the broadband program for different reasons. Christopher Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self Reliance predicts providers will deliver bait and switch broadband on the taxpayer’s dime and send the proceeds out of the area.

“When you subsidize the private sector, you don’t really know what kind of services they’re going to provide in the future,” Mitchell said. “There’s a fair number that basically rip off consumers,” and they “basically extract resources from the community they serve.”

Mitchell

“The only clear beneficiaries of this program will be cable and Internet providers, who will have a new state subsidy to expand their footprints into areas in which their competitors have demonstrated an inability to operate profitably,” said Ken Girardin of the conservative Empire Center for Public Policy, in a scathing review of the New NY plan.

So far, Verizon has shown no interest in the program. It’s eventual intent is to decommission rural landline service and push existing customers to wireless service, so applying for wired broadband expansion funding isn’t a priority. The most likely applicants include Windstream, which serves a small percentage of rural New York telephone exchanges, Frontier Communications, which dominates Rochester and parts of the Finger Lakes region, and Time Warner Cable, which used earlier funding to connect two rural communities to its cable service. But all three companies are waiting for the program and its grant terms to be better defined.

With incumbent cable and phone companies reluctant to take part, there are several wired and wireless broadband initiatives in rural areas around New York starved of resources to expand their networks. The “white space” wireless broadband project in Thurman, for example, will be seeking funding to expand its wireless high-speed network into other parts of the community. Other initiatives could allow existing middle mile fiber networks in the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes region to explore building out “last mile” service to homes and businesses that now receive only DSL or no Internet access at all.

Salway promises he’ll consider funding networks that deliver the best broadband speeds for the lowest relative price in similarly sized communities. But all the money in the world won’t help if an existing phone or cable company shows no interest in serving unprofitable rural areas even after the state defrays the initial cost of placing the infrastructure to provide the service.

Mitchell believes local communities are best positioned to know what their residents want and many support publicly funded fiber technology rollouts. He points to Longmont, Col., a community that fought off propaganda mailers and a $300,000 marketing effort by CenturyLink and Comcast to defeat public fiber broadband in the city. The residents voted in favor of building their own network to move beyond the “good enough for you” broadband coming from the phone and cable company.

“The Longmonts of the country can decide to wait until these private sector companies decide its in their interest to finally build these fiber networks out, or they can say, ‘You know, we’re always going to be behind the greater technological curve of the nation,’ and do it themselves,” Tom Roiniotis, Longmont’s general manager, told Capital.

Telecom Egypt

Egypt has made ditching antiquated copper phone wiring a national priority and Telecom Egypt is continuing its efforts to dump copper in favor of fiber optics to improve quality and reliability of service.

In April, customers in West Cairo, New Cairo, Giza city, and the Northern Coast may experience temporary outages as the new fiber network is connected. The company is also installing fiber service in the east, central and western Delta region, northern, central, and southern Upper Egypt, Ismailia and Suez.

When this phase is complete by the end of this year, over four million Egyptians will have access to fiber service. The company is accelerating its transition to fiber service as Egyptians are increasingly dumping landline service in favor of wireless. Competition from three mobile companies – Vodafone Egypt, Etisalat and Mobinil have taken a considerable market share. Last year, the Egyptian government allowed Telecom Egypt to compete with a wireless service of its own, but the three mobile providers also get to start selling landline and broadband service.

Telecom Egypt hopes its $400 million investment in fiber will slow down customer defections and allow the company to sell improved services to customers.

Italy is preparing to leap ahead of the United States and Canada by deploying a minimum of 100Mbps broadband to 85 percent of Italy by 2020 and a guarantee that everyone else will be able to access at least 30Mbps service by that time as well.

Telecom Italia will primarily use its own financial resources to lay fiber to the home service to 40 of Italy’s biggest cities over the next two years. The government has pushed for major improvements in Italian broadband to catch up with the rest of Europe and beat the U.S. and Canada. It will spend $6.5 billion dollars to accelerate the development of a nationwide fiber network and the government has also extended a range of incentives to persuade operators to boost Internet speeds without boosting prices for Italian consumers.

Once the fiber network is complete, Telecom Italia can further increase speeds to 1Gbps or more.