Your Internet Service Provider keeps telling you there is no need for faster broadband speeds, but no matter how many times they say it, you still don’t believe them.

Neither do the folks at LUS Fiber — Lafayette, Louisiana’s publicly-owned fiber to the home broadband network.

In a state dominated by AT&T and cable companies like Cox, Louisiana has never experienced super-fast broadband.  But now they will.  LUS Fiber today announced 1Gbps broadband is now available in the Hub City.

Businesses will now have access to affordable broadband at speeds 20,000 times faster than dial-up.  Residential customers used to getting 1-12Mbps from phone company DSL or up to 50Mbps from Cox can put the slow lane behind them forever.  LUS Fiber can deliver upload and download speeds as fast as 1,000Mbps.

“Gigabit service from LUS Fiber is one of the most robust Internet offerings on the market today,” says Terry Huval, Director of Lafayette Utilities System and LUS Fiber. “We built this community network with a promise to the people of Lafayette that we will work hard to provide them with new opportunities through this unique, state-of-the-art fiber technology, and that’s just what we’ve done.”

That puts Lafayette on the map with Chattanooga, Tenn., as the two fastest operating fiber broadband networks in the country selling to both residential and business customers.  Both are publicly-owned networks private companies like AT&T have lobbied hard to banish.

In fact, Louisiana’s record on broadband outside of Lafayette is decidedly poor.

An $80 million federal grant to fund much-needed improvements to the state’s Internet infrastructure was returned in what one public official called Gov. Bobby Jindal’s special favor to Big Telecom companies like AT&T.

Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell publicly berated the Republican governor for intentionally interfering with the project until time ran out and the government withdrew its funding.

The cancellation of the project has proved embarrassing because it was the first time a state lost federal broadband grant money.

The state’s Division of Administration eventually scrapped plans for the public broadband network and replaced it with a proposal to use grant dollars to purchase long term institutional broadband contracts from private providers.  AT&T is the dominant local phone company in Louisiana — the same company that has steadfastly refused to provide DSL service across rural Louisiana. The new proposal would have not delivered any broadband access to individual Louisiana homes, only to institutions like schools, libraries, and local government agencies.

The Consumerist awards AT&T the "Bronze Poo" Award for Third Worst Company in America. (Image: The Consumerist)

A video game company reviled by game fans and the perennially-shoddy Bank of America managed to beat out America’s lowest rated phone company in The Consumerist’s “Worst Company in America” annual award contest, but not by much.

As Electronic-Arts tries to explain away its top-worst rating, AT&T easily took third place after a consolation round decidedly eliminated Walmart.

Congratulations to the folks aboard the Death Star! As soon as we get some proper bronze-colored paint, we’ll be packing up your Bronze Poo and sending it off in the mail. It will, of course, include a 620-page end-user agreement that preempts any class-action lawsuits by AT&T employees.

Some Consumerist readers wondered why game fans rushed to beat EA over the head over its anti-consumer tendencies when Ma Bell was still ripe for some kicking:

The Consumerist notes their award epitomizes the last 12 months for AT&T.

“First it attempted to leap-frog to the head of the wireless pack by swallowing T-Mobile whole, only to fail miserably after many months and at a cost of several billion dollars,” the piece reads. “Then it came tantalizingly close to vying for the coveted Worst Company In America Golden Poo trophy, only to be given the smack-down by a video game company. At least it won’t be leaving the tournament empty-handed.”

AT&T has joined Verizon in a groundbreaking decision to stop allowing bogus charges on customer’s phone bills.

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.) publicly thanked AT&T for joining with Verizon to stop the fraudulent fees, which a recent Senate investigation found netted at least $10 billion over the last five years.

“AT&T made the right decision to end cramming by August,” Rockefeller said. “While the decisions of AT&T and Verizon are a step in the right direction, I still believe we need to pass a bill that bans this abusive practice once and for all.”

Phone companies have been reluctant to stop third-party billing because it represents lucrative revenue for companies that have watched their landline customers disconnect and disappear.

“According to financial information my staff has reviewed, telephone companies earn a dollar or two every time they place a third-party charge on their customers’ bills,” Rockefeller said. “Do the math. That’s well over a billion dollars in profit over the past decade.”

AT&T suggested the cramming problem was overblown, but relented anyway.

“We currently receive cramming complaints for only about one out of every thousand bills that contain third-party charges,” said Michael Balmoris, an AT&T spokesman, in a statement to MSNBC.  “However, due to continued concern over the possibility of unauthorized charges, we have decided to take this additional step and eliminate third-party billing for most types of services.”

In late March, Verizon notified its billing partners it would cease third-party billing by the end of 2012.

AT&T’s ongoing efforts to win deregulation and an end to universal landline service have now reached Colorado, where state lawmakers are reacting favorably to an AT&T-sponsored bill that would strip away rural landline subsidies and deregulate basic phone rates, much to the consternation of incumbent provider CenturyLink.

The long-winded bill,  SB 157 – Concerning the Regulation of Telecommunications Service and, in Connection Therewith, Enacting the “Telecommunications Modernization Act of 2012,” is just the latest in a series of deregulation measures co-authored by AT&T that would let phone companies off the hook for guaranteeing affordable, universal landline service to every American.  Instead, AT&T is happy to sell rural consumers pricey mobile phone service.

Ironically, AT&T’s bill would deliver the worst blows to fellow landline provider CenturyLink, the largest phone company in the state. Consumers pay 2.9 percent of their phone bill toward a rural landline subsidy fund, or 87 cents for a $30 bill. It is no surprise CenturyLink is adamantly opposed to the measure, declaring the loss of rural phone service subsidies a guarantee of future rate hikes and discriminatory pricing, if not the end of basic telephone service in rural Colorado.  The company also receives more than 90 percent of the annual proceeds collected from Colorado ratepayers.

“The bill continues to legislate discrimination of one very large group of consumers. It allows a consumer living on one side of the street in rural Colorado to continue to receive High Cost Fund support while his neighbor on the other side of the street will not, simply because of the logo at the top of their telephone bills” said Jim Campbell, CenturyLink regional vice president for regulatory and legislative affairs. “We continue to be baffled that lawmakers voting in favor of this bill feel it is good public policy to write consumer discrimination into Colorado law.”

As with other AT&T-written deregulation bills, the “sufficient competition” test to prove consumers have plenty of choices for phone service is notoriously easy to meet.  SB 157 defines a market competitive when 90 percent of customers in a geographic area have a choice of at least five providers.  While that sounds like competition, in fact the bill defines just about anything resembling a phone company as “competition.”  That includes traditional landline service, mobile phones, satellite telephony, Voice Over IP providers like Skype, and cable company phone service.

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A provider declaring service to any particular geographic area on a coverage map is sufficient evidence that competition exists, even if that provider does not deliver a consistently suitable signal, charges extraordinarily high prices, or only markets service in selected areas or in a package that includes other services.  In rural Colorado, wireless companies maintaining roaming agreements with other providers would count as multiple competitors, even though they rely on the same infrastructure to handle calls.  Poor reception? That’s your problem.

The bill also allows phone companies to charge whatever they like for traditional phone service, and only requires one day’s notice of pricing changes.  The bill would also strip away the right of regulators to demand justification for the inevitable rate increases and takes away their right to reject, modify or suspend rate hikes they deem unacceptably unfair.

That could force CenturyLink prices way up in rural Colorado, perhaps to a level that makes AT&T cell phone pricing not that bad after all.

CenturyLink: Victim of Friendly Fire from AT&T?

That suits AT&T’s Colorado president William Soards just fine, as AT&T is willing to sell rural Colorado lots of wireless phones.

“There’s plenty of competition out there that will be very excited to take their business, and AT&T will be one of them,” Soards told the Denver Post.

Colorado’s Rural Broadband Fund: The Fix Is In

One of the boldest provisions of SB 157 is the establishment of a rural broadband fund that delivers up to $25 million of ratepayer money to a select group of telecommunications companies to underwrite the costs of building  non-competitive broadband networks in the most distant, unwired corners of the state.  They wrote the rules, so it comes as no surprise they are, by definition, the intended recipients — often the very same companies that have refused to provide service in rural communities in the past.  Among those they’ve made certain are prohibited from accessing the broadband fund:

• Broadcasters experimenting with sub-channel broadband data service;
• Government agencies;
• Local municipalities;
• Public-private partnerships;
• Any organization, including non-profits, controlled in whole or part by a public entity;
• Electric utilities;
• Electric co-ops;
• Non-profit electric companies or associations;
• Every other supplier of electrical energy.

Who can access the broadband fund?  Why, the backers of the bill of course, especially AT&T:

• Wireless companies like AT&T;
• Telephone companies;
• Cable operators;
• Wireless ISPs (meeting certain conditions).

Padgett: Let local communities solve their broadband challenges themselves.

The bill is written to require a minimum level of 4/1Mbps service, which may lock out many rural telephone companies unable to deliver those speeds over traditional DSL as well as congestion and distance-sensitive wireless ISPs.  Cable operators are unlikely to provide any service in the most rural areas qualified to receive broadband funding. CenturyLink’s ongoing opposition to the bill suggests they don’t see much broadband funding in their immediate future either. That leaves just one technology most suitable to receive ratepayer funding: heavily capped and expensive wireless 4G broadband from companies like AT&T.

That may leave rural (but potentially not rural enough) Ouray County up the broadband creek without a paddle.

CenturyLink has shown minimal interest in providing ubiquitous broadband across the area dubbed the “Switzerland of America” for its rugged mountainous topography.  With just 4,450 residents, Ouray County is not the phone company’s highest priority.  But the company serves just enough of the county that it might fail the “unserved area” test — a ludicrous notion for broadband-starved Colona, Eldredge, Dallas, Ridgway, Ouray, Thistledown and Camp Bird.

Long-term residents have been through something like this before.  Some remember having to fight for basic electric service as well.  The San Miguel Power Association, a non-profit, member-owned rural electric cooperative established back in 1938, finally brought electric service to the San Miguel Basin area after residents were denied service for years by Western Colorado Power.  The region ultimately had to fend for itself, and did so successfully.

That same electric co-op may just have the best broadband solution for Ouray County — fiber infrastructure already in place, but prohibited from being funded to completion by AT&T’s corporate welfare bill.

Many rural legislators understand the rural broadband problem and see community-owned co-ops as their best chance of getting broadband service in rural Colorado.  They want to amend the bill to strip out the anti-competitive, anti-public broadband language.

Ouray County Commissioner Lynn Padgett is convinced her county’s broadband problems will never be solved by the Colorado Legislature or AT&T.

“Fundamentally, I believe that we need to let those closest to the areas with the rural broadband challenges, and those most accountable, help their communities,” Padgett said.

The entertainment industry, in cooperation with the nation’s largest Internet Service Providers, joined forces to open a new copyright enforcement center that critics charge sidesteps judicial process, leaving consumers forced to prove they are innocent after they’ve been accused of being guilty.

On Monday, the Center for Copyright Infringement named its executive director and board, and intends to gradually begin serving as a clearinghouse for copyright infringement complaints brought by the nation’s music and movie companies.

CCI has representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon Communications collectively working to streamline enforcement of copyright law and control Internet piracy.

Often known as the “Six Strikes Plan,” CCI participants will coordinate piracy notification warnings for suspected illicit downloads of copyrighted content from peer-to-peer file sharing networks.  Hollywood studios and recording labels will identify those they suspect are involved in illegal file swapping and participating ISPs will notify customers tied to the infringing IP addresses up to six times before reducing a customer’s Internet speed, temporarily disabling the account, or terminating service.

The CCI hopes to bypass the court system and adopt a self-regulation, “in-house” approach to Internet piracy.  Some courts have proven increasingly-reluctant to hand over identifying information to copyright holders based on the sometimes-flimsy evidence of illegal downloading included in supporting affidavits.  Judges in some courts have also become leery of a cottage industry of “settlement specialists” that threaten expensive litigation for alleged copyright infringement that can be resolved with a quick cash settlement.

Judge James F. Holderman of the Northern District of Illinois ruled against one litigant who demanded ISPs divulge the identities of every participant exchanging bits and pieces of a copyrighted work in a so-called “BitTorrent swarm,” because they were involved in a conspiracy.  Holderman dismissed that argument.

Such tactics have allowed some settlement specialists to demand settlement payments from a larger group, substantially boosting revenue at little cost to them.

CCI’s executive director Jill Lesser says laws no longer favor copyright holders.

“While laws that protect intellectual property remain strong and enforcement efforts continue, technology has tipped the balance away from the interests of most creators and artists,” Lesser said. “The ease of distribution of copyrighted content has helped create a generation of people who believe that all content should be free.”

CCI’s so-called “Copyright Control System” will bypass the courts entirely, as entertainment companies coordinate directly with major ISPs agreeing to enforce copyright compliance.

Lesser says consumers will still have a fair process to challenge notices of alleged infringement.  But it will cost at least $35 for consumers to argue their case.  Additionally, as a self-regulated, industry-controlled body, consumers’ rights of appeal are undetermined.  The arbitration process will be administered through the American Arbitration Association.

Why would ISPs want to become involved in a copyright control regime?  To reduce their own expenses and legal risks.  Copyright holders and their agents have peppered service providers with compliance and identification demands for years, creating full time positions processing the paperwork.  By adopting a clearinghouse and developing a streamlined process to handle complaints, service providers can cut costs and avoid possible litigation against themselves.

Still, both the entertainment industry and ISPs seem to be open to listening to consumer advocates.  Lesser was formerly involved with People for the American Way, a group sensitive to privacy rights.  Serving on the advisory board are Gigi Sohn from Public Knowledge and Jerry Berman, founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology.  Neither have direct authority over the group’s enforcement efforts, but Sohn told Ars Technica she hoped her involvement would give a voice to consumer interests and maintain transparency in the enforcement process.