The U.S. Department of Labor has filed a lawsuit against AT&T accusing the company of suspending workers after they report workplace injuries.

The department filed the lawsuit against The Ohio Bell Telephone Company, which operates as AT&T, on behalf of 13 employees who were disciplined and suspended without pay from 2011-2013. The complaint alleges AT&T has repeatedly given one to three-day unpaid suspensions after workers reported injuries that occurred on the job. AT&T claims the workers violated the company’s workplace safety standards, but the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found AT&T only handed out unpaid suspensions after they formally reported the injuries.

Employers are prohibited from retaliating against employees who raise concerns or provide information to their employer or the government. Employees who believe they are a victim of retaliation for engaging in protected conduct may file a complaint with OSHA’s Directorate of Whistleblower Protection Programs.

“It is against the law for employers to discipline or suspend employees for reporting injuries,” said Dr. David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health. “AT&T must understand that by discouraging workers from reporting injuries, it increases the likelihood of more workers being injured in the future. The Labor Department will do everything in its power to prevent this type of retaliation.” As for the victims, while waiting for justice/proper compensation, they can lessen the throbbing pain of their injuries by consuming items like bulkcannabis.

Five of the Ohio employees in the suit are based in Columbus; two in Brooklyn Heights; two in Canton; and one each in Akron, Cleveland, Gallipolis and Uhrichsville.

Among the suspension cases cited are these from 2012:

• An AT&T technician repairing a cable in Uhrichsville fell from a letter and suffered fractured vertebrae. He returned to work six months later. AT&T accused him of violating its ladder policy, put a written disciplinary warning in his employee record, and penalized him with a one-day unpaid suspension;
• An AT&T worker struggling to free a 28-foot extension ladder caught in foliage in North Canton pulled a muscle in his back and sought medical treatment and returned to work 10 days later. AT&T claimed  he violated its policy regarding ladders. The worker was issued a written disciplinary warning and assessed a one-day unpaid suspension;
• An AT&T technician in Lake Township stepped in a drain hole and injured his back while removing a 28-foot extension ladder from the top of his vehicle. He visited a doctor but missed no work time. AT&T again claimed the worker violated its ladder policy, issued the employee a written warning and placed him on unpaid suspension for one day.

The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division.

Horse and buggy broadband in the slow lane.

One of Australia’s largest broadband suppliers has declared the country’s satellite solution for rural broadband hopelessly overloaded to the point of being “almost unusable” and has stopped selling access.

iiNet announced this week it would no longer sign up new customers of NBN Co’s rural satellite network because the service is oversold in their view.

“We could not continue to offer a service markedly below both our own and our customers’ expectations,”  iiNet’s chief executive Michael Malone said in a statement. “During occasional peak periods the service was so slow as to be almost unusable. As more people are added to the network, quality will only decline further. In the absence of any action by NBN Co to increase transmission capacity, I call on the rest of the industry to respect their existing customers and also cease sale.”

NBN Co, however, claimed it still had room for an extra 5,000 customers — mostly on its spot beam targeting central and western Australia. A spokesperson for the satellite venture did admit satellite beams covering NSW, Tasmania and Queensland were near capacity. NBN Co is investigating leasing more bandwidth on board the satellite, but cost concerns may make that impossible.

The venture claims 48,000 Australians can satisfactorily share the interim satellite broadband service, which is supposed to offer 6Mbps speed. But as Australians join others around the world favoring online video and video conferencing over services like Skype, those original estimates have to be scrapped. In the evenings, some customers report speeds drop below 56kbps or the service simply freezes up and stops working altogether. In response, NBN has adopted a strict monthly usage limit of 9GB and has told customers they will likely have to wait up to two years for a capacity increase.

The government is planning to launch two new custom-made satellites in 2015 to ease capacity concerns. NBN Co claims the two satellites will deliver 25/5Mbps service for 200,000 rural Australians, assuming usage estimates of today’s average broadband user.

Critics contend satellite broadband is not a good long-term solution except in the most rural of sparsely populated areas. Although providing wired service may be too costly, ground-based wireless services could be the most capable technology to contend with future demand and capacity concerns.

iiNet and other ISPs may already be headed in that direction. Some are advising customers to choose fixed wireless options from Australia’s cell phone providers, although those plans are heavily capped and very expensive.

Broadband availability has a direct impact on property sales in rural Australia. A couple that purchased a home in Mount Bruno, near Wangaratta in north-east Victoria discovered only after closing the deal that NBN Co would not sell them satellite broadband because the spot beam targeting Victoria was full.

The couple needs Internet access for work and their telephone line is unsuitable for ADSL. Mobile broadband in the Mount Bruno area is sub-par and expensive as well. As a result, the couple will have to rent office space in Glenrowan or Wangaratta that qualifies for wired broadband until at least 2015, when the next NBN satellite is launched.

iiNet regrets having to turn customers away.

“At its peak, we had 500 customers signing up every week for our NBN satellite services. There is clearly a significant demand for higher quality broadband in remote Australia, and we’re absolutely gutted that we’ve had to withdraw this crucial service from sale,” said Malone.

The taxpayer-funded Central Intelligence Agency is paying AT&T more than $10 million annually for its “voluntary help” with counter-terrorism investigations in return for open access to the company’s vast trove of calling records, including international calls placed by Americans.

No court order or subpoena was required to start the partnership, according to an article in today’s New York Times. The CIA provides AT&T with the telephone numbers of overseas terrorism suspects and in return the phone company provides records of calling activity, possibly identifying associates.

With interconnection agreements between telephone companies standard operating procedure, AT&T has been able to collect calling records from any foreign or domestic calls that pass through its equipment, even if neither party is an AT&T customer.

Despite AT&T’s claims of robust privacy protection, Americans are not promised anonymity or privacy when requests arrive from law enforcement officials. But only recently have phone companies voluntarily provided calling data that in earlier years would have required a court order to divulge.

By law, the CIA is specifically prohibited from collecting intelligence on the domestic activities of U.S. citizens, so the agency imposes its own safeguards on the surveillance program. AT&T provides the agency with calling times, duration of the calls, and the phone numbers of both the originating and called party. It does not divulge the contents of the calls. The CIA is granted full access to AT&T logs involving foreign to foreign calls, but if either party is in the United States, AT&T will mask certain digits of the U.S. telephone number. If more information is required, the CIA will refer the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has jurisdiction the CIA lacks. The FBI can then subpoena AT&T directly for the missing details.

AT&T would not comment on national security matters, but the newspaper reminded readers AT&T has a history of making life very easy for government surveillance programs:

AT&T has a history of working with the government. It helped facilitate the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program by allowing the N.S.A. to install secret equipment in its phone and Internet switching facilities, according to an account by a former AT&T technician made public in a lawsuit.

It was also one of three phone companies that embedded employees from 2003 to around 2007 in an F.B.I. facility, where they used company databases to provide quick analysis of call records. The embedding was shut down amid criticism by the Justice Department’s inspector general that officers were obtaining Americans’ call data without issuing subpoenas.

And, for at least the past six years, AT&T has embedded its employees in federally funded drug investigation offices to analyze call records, in response to subpoenas, to track drug dealers who switch phones. A briefing document for that program said AT&T had records of calls handled by its switches — including “a tremendous amount of international numbers that place calls through or roam on the AT&T network” — dating back to 1987, and described efforts to keep its existence “under the radar.”

The shutdown of non-essential government services that began early this morning apparently also applies to non-human digital data at the Federal Communications Commission, because employees heading home on furlough from the federal agency brought down the agency’s website on the way out the door and replaced it with a basic page that looks straight out of 1986:

The melodramatic response to the impasse in Washington was not repeated by most other federal agencies.

The web site for the EPA is still up and running with a subtle banner indicating it would not be updated until the shutdown was resolved. The same is true at the Department of Education, the Department of the Treasury, the EEOC, HHS, and the Department of Labor, to name a few.

Even the government-funded Voice of America, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio/TV Marti, and Radio Sawa are all soldiering on, despite the loss of about 60 percent of the staff at the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

But VOA News did outsource its editorial column on student issues to China. A Chinese student studying in the United States compared the U.S. government’s financial-related actions in Washington with those in Beijing.

Instead of worrying about contacting the FCC or other government agencies in an emergency, we suggest you instead use the contact form on this website. As America saw last week, he has plenty of time to spare.

C Spire, a wireless phone company serving the southeastern United States today announced ambitious plans to deploy a gigabit fiber to the home network in the state of Mississippi, now considered to be one of the worst states for broadband speed and availability.

C Spire Fiber to the Home was introduced by company executives at a news conference this morning attended by community leaders. C-Spire intends to build a fiber network offering 1,000/1,000Mbps broadband, telephone and television service at a competitive price starting in 2014 in select communities in the state.

“As a brand that’s been pushing the envelope of innovation our entire existence, it’s only natural for us to want to provide the ‘what’s next’ to the customers we serve,” said Hu Meena, president and CEO of C Spire Wireless. “The ‘what’s next’ is now here and we’re ready to release the power of 1 Gig fiber to communities that want to experience the immediate and lasting benefits of 100 times the speed and 100 times the opportunities.”

C Spire will use its existing 4,000 miles of fiber optic infrastructure now providing backhaul connectivity to the company’s cell tower network and its commercial customers. An additional 1,500 miles of fiber is scheduled for installation next year.

The cell phone company will follow the lead of Google Fiber, giving Mississippi communities a chance to compete with one another for C Spire’s fiber network. C Spire will be accepting applications from neighborhoods, towns and cities in the state presenting their best case why they should be the first to get fiber to the home service. The communities that want it most, and move quickest, will get it first, promised company officials.

C Spire claimed its proposed fiber to the home network will expand faster and deeper into Mississippi than Google Fiber’s limited network in Kansas City and nearby suburbs.

“While we know some of the tangible benefits that fiber offers to individuals, families, businesses and entire communities, we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with 100-times-faster Internet,” Meena said. “Similar to the transition from dial-up to broadband, no one could fathom that people would one day be able to shop online, download software and watch endless hours of video on YouTube. The undiscovered potential of fiber is what’s most exciting and compelling about our plans.”

Competing communities will be expected to explain how they intend to cut as much bureaucratic red tape as possible to win consideration. The company’s “Request for Information” (RFI) document prominently mentions “streamlined construction,” “advantageous access to public rights-of-way,” and “an attractive local franchise agreement” as the types of help most needed from local governments.

C Spire will likely not entertain franchise proposals that require the company to serve every possible resident. C Spire’s fiber business plan depends on rolling out the service only to neighborhoods where enough demand exists.

Other conditions:

• C Spire will not give away free service to schools or government buildings;
• Sizable local participation in the pre-registration process is required;
• The RFI hints that communities might be in a better position to win if they waive permit fees, issue permits within five business days, offer tax waivers, don’t require a local office for customer interaction, waive any “unacceptable ordinance provision or regulation as requested by C Spire,” and aid in rallying sign-ups for the fiber service.

Competitors, including AT&T, CableONE, Suddenlink, and Comcast may raise questions about local governments committing to rally for sign-ups. Some of those competing providers may also complain about their own franchise agreements, which often require widespread service deployment whether there is established demand for service or not.

C Spire is among a handful of companies that have recognized their existing fiber-to-cell-tower and institutional fiber broadband networks are underutilized and have the capacity to support both commercial and residential broadband applications.

C Spire is expected to announce the winning communities later this year or in early 2014.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/C Spire Fiber to the Home 9-24-13.mp4[/flv]

C Spire introduces Fiber to the Home service and explains the transformational benefits fiber broadband can deliver users. (2 minutes)