{"id":2846,"date":"2007-03-24T09:38:46","date_gmt":"2007-03-24T09:38:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=2846"},"modified":"2007-03-24T09:38:46","modified_gmt":"2007-03-24T09:38:46","slug":"atts_rhetoric_o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=2846","title":{"rendered":"AT&#038;T&#8217;s Rhetoric on Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.madison.com\/wsj\/mad\/top\/index.php?ntid=125809&#038;ntpid=1\">Mark Pitsch<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>Wisconsin residents would lose their rights to cable television repairs within 72 hours, credit for service interruptions and advance notice of rate increases, under a bill on the fast track in the state Legislature.<\/p>\n<p>The proposal, designed to increase competition in an industry dominated by cable companies, is supported by the lobbying muscle of telecommunications giant AT&#038;T.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s part of AT&#038;T&#8217;s challenge to cable companies such as Charter Communications, which are licensed by local governments.  <\/p>\n<p>There is little agreement on whether the proposal would help consumers or hurt them.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Pitsch mentions this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>But proponents say the bill would lower costs for telecast delivery &#8211; whether by cable or AT&#038;T&#8217;s fiber optic lines &#8211; by up to 23 percent by introducing competition and deregulating the industry.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What fiber optic lines would that be?   AT&#038;T has done nothing to upgrade it&#8217;s copper based network to the home (other than spend money on  lobbying and advertisements regarding the ongoing resale of the old network, something we&#8217;ve paid for over and over and over&#8230;), unlike <a href=\"http:\/\/www22.verizon.com\/content\/ConsumerFios\">Verizon<\/a> in other parts of the country.  Nice to see our politicians continue to &#8220;stick it to us&#8221;.  `<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mark Pitsch: Wisconsin residents would lose their rights to cable television repairs within 72 hours, credit for service interruptions and advance notice of rate increases, under a bill on the fast track in the state Legislature. The proposal, designed to increase competition in an industry dominated by cable companies, is supported by the lobbying muscle [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,9,17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2846"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}