Chatham County Sheriff’s Deputy O’Berry ejects a WXIA-TV news crew from a Savannah, Ga. hotel room at the direction of a senior official of the American Legislative Exchange Council. (Image: WXIA-TV)

When an Atlanta news crew from WXIA-TV asked questions about a closed-door meeting involving Georgia lawmakers, wireless industry lobbyists, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, Bill Meierling, vice president of communications for ALEC, directed four armed sheriff’s deputies to kick the news crew out of their hotel rooms and escort them to the street.

“I am a guest of the hotel, sir,” WXIA reporter Brendan Keefe told Chatham County sheriff’s deputy A. O’Berry.

“Not for long, we’ll take care of that,” responded O’Berry.

“Are we violating a law here?” Keefe asked another deputy who told them to gather their belongings.

“Don’t say nothing,” O’Berry told the other deputy.

“To protect Republicans and serve giant corporations,” said Atlanta resident Larry Jefferson, who tipped us off. “To watch a hack from ALEC wave his arm and see armed deputies throw a reporter who paid for his room out of a hotel for just asking questions should wake up every American about where this country has gone.”

In a resort hotel in Savannah, the newest crop of bills likely to end up before Georgia lawmakers are being written by corporate lobbyists for introduction by friendly legislators willing to do their bidding.

At ALEC’s Communications & Technology Task Force Luncheon, Keefe spotted Rep. Ben Harmon hobnobbing with a lobbyist for CTIA, the giant wireless lobby. When he approached Harmon, Keefe was pulled out of the room. He soon found Meierling in the lobby being watched over by four off duty Chatham County deputies paid to protect ALEC’s event.

“Turn off the camera,” Meierling demanded.

When Keefe refused, Meierling told him he was going to have him thrown out of the hotel.

Keefe persisted and asked who was paying for the legislators to attend. “Lobbyists?” Keefe asked.

“No,” Meierling replied.

Unfortunately for Meierling, looser lips from an unidentified New England legislator and two lobbyists in the hotel bar the night before suggested otherwise. One lobbyist admitted she paid a higher fee to be there to help subsidize legislators’ travel expenses.

Meierling

When confronted with that information, Meierling sighed deeply and waved over the officers to do their duty… to ALEC.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” Deputy O’Berry immediately demanded as he walked up to the reporter. He was uninterested in the fact Keefe was a paid guest at the hotel. Keefe and WXIA had to go, to protect the interests and the secrecy of a group that is responsible for writing many state laws across the country.

“It’s a corporate bill mill,” said former ALEC member Sen. Nan Orreck. “The truth be told, they write the bills.”

“There are votes taken that have the corporate folks at the same table voting with the legislators on what bills to pick and that at its core just screams out inappropriate,” Orreck said. She left the group.

For the convenience of legislators, ALEC model bills come to their desks already written. All a legislator has to do is fill in the name of his or her state on a blank line and the bill is ready for introduction. To help educate lawmakers about the hot button issues bothering America’s largest corporations, ALEC’s legislative members — almost all Republicans — are paid “scholarships” in the thousands of dollars to attend resort meetings.

David Ralston, the speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, even penned a fundraising letter on ALEC letterhead looking for $5,000 contributions to send fellow lawmakers to ALEC’s annual meetings.

“O’Berry and those other deputies should be suspended, fired, and then thrown in jail for dereliction of duty,” Jefferson believes. “These deputies either don’t know or don’t care about the law, something O’Berry was well aware of when he told another deputy to keep his mouth shut.”

“ALEC exists to subvert our democracy and any identified member of this group in public office should no longer be there.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WXIA Atlanta ALEC – The Backroom Where Laws Are Born 5-20-15.mp4[/flv]

WXIA-TV in Atlanta introduces viewers to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that can summon sheriff’s deputies to toss a reporter out of a hotel where he was a paid guest just for asking too many embarrassing questions. (6:31)

Time Warner Cable is launching a new network of outdoor hotspots in the Dallas Metroplex, giving their customers free unlimited access at popular outdoor destinations and retail stores.

The Dallas Business Journal reports Time Warner will be switching on nearly 500 outdoor hotspots starting today, available to customers and non-customers until June 8. After that date, only Time Warner Cable (and certain other cable companies) broadband customers will be able to get free access.

“We believe Wi-Fi both in your home an outside is really important to our customer,” said Mike Roudi, senior vice president and general manager of broadband services. “We’re spending millions and millions of dollars. It’s a brand new network we’re building.”

Time Warner Cable has launched outdoor Wi-Fi in about 12 of its markets around the country, most scheduled for or already getting TWC Maxx upgrades.

But Time Warner Cable customers elsewhere will also find a quickly growing network of indoor hotspots hosted by businesses that subscribe to Time Warner’s commercial broadband service. As part of their broadband package, businesses are encouraged to host TWC Wi-Fi Passpoint access, which allows TWC customers to automatically connect to any participating Wi-Fi hotspot without having to ask the business for a password.

Customers can use the TWC Wi-Fi app to find hotspots and authenticate wireless access.

Customers of other cable operators, including Comcast, can usually also get access through Time Warner’s network partners program.

In Dallas-Fort Worth, here are the locations of the new outdoor Wi-Fi hotspots with more to follow:

• Oak Lawn/Turtle Creek (including Reverchon Park)
• Uptown
• Deep Ellum/Baylor University Medical Center
• University Park
• Highland Park
• Galleria area
• Downtown/central Plano
• Downtown/central Arlington

Time Warner Cable customers can also access free Wi-Fi at more than 100 Boingo locations, including Dallas Love Field and 24 other U.S. airports.

WiredWest is a public co-op seeking to deliver fiber to the home broadband across western Massachusetts.

Despite the dreary drizzle, fog, and unseasonably cold weather that has plagued the northeast since last weekend, 191 residents of New Salem, Mass. crowded into a basement for the town’s annual meeting Monday night, largely with one issue in mind: better broadband.

A reporter from The Recorder noted Moderator Calvin Layton was surprised by the overwhelming vote for fiber broadband — 189 for and only one apparently against.

The town clerk for New Salem typically counts around 60 heads at such meetings, but this night was different because the community was voting to spend $1.5 million to bring broadband to a town completely ignored by Comcast and Verizon. That fact has hurt area property values and has challenged residents and business owners alike. The town is fed up with inaction by the state’s dominant phone and cable company, which has done nothing to expand access in western Massachusetts.

“Our goal is to make this broadband available to every house, not just the places that are easy to wire,” said MaryEllen Kennedy, the chair of the town’s Broadband Committee.

New Salem isn’t alone.

Monterey passed its own bond authorization with a vote of 130 to 19, becoming the 10th consecutive town to vote in favor of bringing 21st century broadband to the region. The community of Beckett followed a day later.

Phillip “There are no broadband magic ponies” Dampier

Residents in 16 of the 17 towns asked so far to authorize the borrowing necessary to cover their community’s share of the fiber to the home project have usually done so in overwhelming majorities. But it has not been all good news. The town of Montgomery in Hampden County voted down paying its share by just two votes. Supporters claim low voter turnout may have done the project in, at least for the time being. A call for a new vote is underway.

Perhaps the most contentious debate over WiredWest continues in the small community of Hawley, where one activist has organized opposition for the project based on its cost to the community of 347. Hawley is in the difficult position of being a small community spread out across a lot of hills and hollows.  The cost for Hawley to participate in the fiber to the home project would be around $1 million, a figure many residents decided was out of their price range. Participation in WiredWest was shot down in a recent vote and the repercussions continue to this day in the opinion pages of The Recorder as residents fire back and forth at each other, sometimes with strident personal comments.

While easy to vote down participation in WiredWest, finding an alternative for Hawley has proved difficult.

Kirby “Lark” Thwing, a member of both the town finance and communications committees, is trying to find the cheaper broadband solution advocated by Hussain Hamdan, who has led the charge against WiredWest’s fiber to the home service in Hawley.

Thwing has run headfirst into what Stop the Cap! feared he would find — the rosy budget-minded alternatives suggested as tantalizingly within reach simply are not and come at a higher price tag than one might think.

Installing a Wi-Fi tower to bring wireless Internet access to a resort park.

Thwing is looking at a hybrid fiber/wireless solution involving a fiber trunk line run down two well-populated roads that could support fiber service for about half the homes in Hawley and lead to at least two large wireless towers that would reach most of the rest of town. He’s also hoping Hawley would still qualify to receive its $520,000 share of broadband grant money from the Massachusetts Broadband Institute to help cover the alternative project’s costs.

If Hawley can use that money, Thwing predicts it will cover much of the construction cost of the fiber trunk line. After that, each homeowner would be expected to pay to bring fiber from the trunk line to their home, definitely not a do-it-yourself project that will cost at least several hundred dollars, not counting the cost of any inside wiring and a network interface device attached to each participating home. Residents should also expect to spend another $100 on indoor electronics including a receiver and optional router to connect broadband to their home computer and other devices.

But the expenses don’t stop there.

Thwing also has to consider the cost of the wireless towers and provisioning a wireless service to Hawley residents not immediately adjacent to the fiber trunk line. He will be asking residents if they are willing to pay an extra $25-50 a month ($300-600 a year) to pay down the debt service on the town’s two proposed wireless towers. It isn’t known if that fee would include the price of the Internet service or just the infrastructure itself.

As Thwing himself recognizes, if the total cost for the alternative approaches the $1 million the town already rejected spending on fiber to the home service for everyone, it leaves Hawley no better off.

As Stop the Cap! reported last month, we believe Hawley will soon discover the costs of the alternatives Mr. Hamdan has suggested are greater than he suspects and do not include the cost of service, billing and support. Fiber to the home remains the best solution for Hawley and the rest of a region broadband forgot. Other towns that want to believe a cheaper alternative is out there waiting to be discovered should realize if such a solution did exist, private companies would have already jumped in to offer the service. They haven’t.

At the same time, we cannot ignore there are small communities in western Massachusetts that will find it a real burden to pay the infrastructure costs of a fiber network when there are fewer residents across wide distances to share the costs.

That is why it is critical for the Federal Communications Commission to expand rural broadband funding opportunities to subsidize the cost of constructing rural broadband services in communities like Hawley.

At the very least, state officials should consider creative solutions that either spread the cost of network construction out over a longer term or further subsidizing difficult to reach areas.

There is strong evidence voters across western Massachusetts are not looking for a government handout and have more than stepped up to pay their fair share to guarantee their digital future, but some challenges can be insurmountable without the kind of help the FCC already gives to private phone companies that spend the money on delivering dismally slow DSL service. Western Massachusetts has demonstrated it can get a bigger bang for the buck with fiber to the home service — a far better use of Connect America Funds than spending millions to bring 3Mbps DSL to the rural masses.

AT&T and Verizon Wireless are ditching subsidies for the popular (and expensive) Apple iPhone in favor of straight installment payment plans.

9to5Mac reports Apple has sent a memo to employees outlining major changes in how iPhones will be sold to AT&T and Verizon Wireless customers.

Apple iPhones sold via AT&T and both Apple’s retail and online stores will shift exclusively to AT&T’s Next financing plans this month and end device subsidies. AT&T Next allows customers to buy a device at retail price and pay it off in 20, 24, or 30 installments on their AT&T bill. The primary benefit of the Next plan is it permits customers upgrade to a newer device after 12, 18, or 24 installment payments. For now, customers transitioning away from their existing plan to Next will be able to keep their unlimited AT&T data plan.

Verizon Wireless is also planning to drop its two-year subsidy programs, perhaps entirely across all devices, as early as the end of this summer. That will force Verizon Wireless customers onto the Edge installment payment program unless they are willing to pay for a device upfront.

But Verizon will tighten the screws even more on iPhone users by blocking the Edge Up feature for Apple phones. Instead of being eligible for an early upgrade after 18 months, Verizon will commit its iPhone customers to a full two-year waiting period or until the phone is completely paid off. Magnanimously, Verizon will let the customer keep the phone after they pay it off completely. It is unclear if Verizon will allow their legacy unlimited data customers to participate in the Edge program without forfeiting their unlimited data plan.

For many customers, this will represent a distinction without much difference. Phone subsidies have always been effectively paid back to the wireless carrier through artificially high service plan rates charged over the length of a two-year contract. The installment payment plan brings the cost of the phone subsidy out into the light where a customer will see (and pay) a separate installment payment for their device instead of having the subsidy’s recovery buried in the price of service. But Verizon has clearly sought constraints on its iPhone customers who aggressively pursue upgrades at the appearance of any new iPhone model. Going forward, they will have to pay off any remaining installments owed on their old phone before upgrading to a new one.

With AT&T’s arrival in the Mexican wireless marketplace with its purchase of Iusacell and Nextel, América Móvil is responding with plans to build a new state-of-the-art $50 billion fiber-to-the-home network for Mexican consumers.

According to El Economista, América Móvil has a five-year plan to construct a 311,000 mile fiber network that will offer phone, broadband, and television service. The move comes in response to media reports AT&T is exploring delivering a video package over its acquired wireless networks within the next two years. The network will support broadband speeds that are faster than what most Americans along the border with Mexico can receive from AT&T and CenturyLink’s prevalent DSL services.

In comparison, U.S. phone companies like Verizon have stopped expanding its FiOS fiber to the home network and AT&T largely relies on a less-capable hybrid fiber/copper network for its U-verse service.

Competition in Mexico has forced providers to upgrade their networks to compete for customers while those in the United States tend to match each other’s prices or advocate for industry consolidation to maximize revenue and keep their costs as low as possible.

América Móvil’s broadband service Infinitum Telmex has already attracted 22.3 million broadband customers — a number likely to rise once it can enhance its online video streaming service Clarovideo.