BellSouth tries to shut private network

A CAJUN rural community is accusing the telephone companies and the local cable company of trying to shut down its bid to connect the town with a private high-speed fibre line.

The town of Lafayette wants to build an fibre network to offer voice, data and video to its 116,000 residents. But Joey Durel, Lafayette's mayor, claims BellSouth and Cox, the local cable-TV operator, are trying to kill the project off.

According to USA Today, BellSouth has a plan to put broadband networks across the USA, but it is also erecting hurdles that would make competition impossible.

BellSouth denies it all and says that there is tons of competition, although for some reason the price of Broadband in the US is quiet high.

Bellsouth seems to be using all the legal tricks in the book to prevent Lafayette building its little network. It said that the banjo picking town should use the FCC's "Part 64" accounting rules to run its network. Lafayette countered that those rules would be an unnecessary burden.

Oddly Bellsouth seems to agree because within weeks of making its demands to Lafayette, it squealed like a pig to the FCC to ask that Part 64 not to be applied to it, because the rules were "onerous and outdated" and force carriers to keep "extensive and tedious" records.

More here. µ