Climbing wireless towers is dangerous enough if you're a trained professional -- it's statistically one of the most dangerous professions around. It's even more dangerous if you're just a guy climbing towers so you can parachute off them -- especially when you're climbing the 1,339 foot tower while it's still on. "It's insane, what he did," the tower owner tells The Hartford Courant, noting that climbing a live tower is "analogous to being inside a microwave." The parachutist has not been found or arrested, though a guy was questioned who was dumb enough to jump from a live tower and leave his car there, but apparently smart enough to hide all his parachuting gear.

As cable companies have been trying to compete with FiOS and municipal fiber builds, one of their favorite tactics has been advertisements that intentionally distort the difference between core and last-mile fiber. Marketing folk assume that since the public is probably too stupid to understand the difference, they can take some of the shine off of fiber to the home by pretending all fiber is created equal.

We've frequently explored how a growing number of VoIP companies were blocking FreeConferencecall.com, because the service relies on a practice known as "traffic pumping," a regulatory loophole that allows small, rural telcos to sock bigger carriers with huge connectivity fees. A few years back, AT&T tried to block access to such services but were yelled at by the FCC because it breaks common carrier laws.

Last week we told you how some sloppy AT&T lobbying resulted in an Arkansas senior citizen group writing a form letter against net neutrality to the FCC, but forgetting some important details -- like replacing the form field "XYZ Organization" with an actual company name. Telecom companies frequently use a slew of existing or artificial groups to parrot company positions, giving the illusion of broad public support. Several users have subsequently written in to note that the letter signatory, and head of the "Arkansas Retired Seniors Coalition," unsurprisingly worked for Southwestern Bell for nearly thirty years. Mike Masnick at Techdirt has also been digging into the story, and notes that the man still claims he wrote the letter himself, for whatever that's worth.

We've long criticized the broadband industry's biggest companies for their unethical practices when it comes to DC lobbying, from the creation of artificial consumer groups, to the "co-opting" of legitimate groups who parrot anti-consumer phone or cable company lobbying positions for donations. While with one hand AT&T and Verizon are busy publicly throwing their support behind the FCC's new neutrality rules, with the other hand they're doing things like scaring their employees into flooding the FCC comment system from their home e-mail addresses, or using fake and/or hijacked organizations to bombard the FCC with complaints.

Oregon Live has the interesting tale of 83-year-old Dennis Streed, who only wanted to pay $77.99 a month for broadband, TV and phone service. So Streed drew up his own contract that ensured this was as much as he'd ever have to pay. More interesting perhaps is that Verizon agreed -- though as Verizon sometimes has a tendency to do -- a billing mixup wound up with Verizon charging him consistently twice the amount that was agreed to. While they've issued a refund, Verizon now seems like they're waffling on the agreement moving forward, and the article explores whether Streed will have any luck getting the massive operator to adhere to a non-routine customer created contract.

Charter's been having a problem with people stealing cable at two apartment buildings in Michigan. Their solution, according to the Kalamazoo Gazette? Terminate service to the entire 400-unit apartment complex.

Earthlink lost $80 million on their attempt to offer citywide Wi-Fi, their investments in broadband over powerline (BPL) have gone nowhere, they can't share access to next-generation broadband networks (with the sole exception of Time Warner Cable as a condition of the AOL merger), and their effort to run an MVNO (Helio) flamed out spectacularly. Now they're trying everything in their power to at least retain their remaining dial-up customers.

If you still don't know what astroturf is, it's bogus grass roots efforts designed by corporations to present the illusion that a company policy has broad public support. Using fake consumer groups, co-opted (read: paid off) minority and disability groups and think tanks, lobbyists and PR firms are paid to create a sort of "sound wall" of bogus public applause for corporate political positions.

Because the nation's largest telecom companies clearly don't already exert enough political pressure on lawmakers crafting our national broadband plan, telecom vendors and broadband ISPs have created a new PR and lobbying operation called Broadband For America. The goal of the group, according to a group spokesman, is to be "a resource for policy-makers in an effort to ensure that the national broadband plan results in a faster, smarter and safer Internet." A brief introduction from the group's website: story continues..

Bernie Arnason over at Telecompetitor notes that in-flight broadband provider Aircell (GoGo) thinks the company deserves some of the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus funds. Stimulus fund reviewers will likely view the request as absurd, given in-flight technology right now remains a bit of a luxury and there's vast stretches of space here on the ground that remains unserved. Aircell's playing up the funding request as a way to beef up public safety, their bid saying the added funds "will allow Inflight Internet service to be more widely available for national security agencies and accelerate adoption by U.S. airlines and millions of domestic passengers." "What's next, the unserved population on cruise ships?" jokes Arnason

We've seen countless wireless tower or hotspot deployments delayed by people who believe they're allergic to wireless transmissions, but we've never seen rural customers relegated to dial-up in order to protect garlic. The Chronicle Herald reports a farmer in Nova Scotia has managed to delay the deployment of a local wireless broadband tower because he's afraid that the tower's transmissions will harm or otherwise mutate his garlic. "Back in the ’70s I argued till I was blue with agricultural officials that chemical pesticides and fungicides and fertilizers were not healthy and I sort of feel I’m having the same argument all over again about radiation," the farmer tells the paper.

Police in Springfield, Florida apparently don't appreciate the creative marketing efforts of at least one Comcast technician in the area. According to the Panama City News Herald, local police arrested contracted Comcast technician Kennedy Cao, 33, for disconnecting customers of the local municipally-owned cable operator, Springfield Cable, then pushing Comcast service on users who complained of an outage.

With so many carriers now going with paperless bills, the nice thing for a carrier to do is to give you a discount for going paperless, since it saves the company money. T-Mobile decided to go the opposite direction, and was cooking up a plan to start charging customers $1.50 if they wanted to receive a paper copy of their bill in the mail.

AT&T, Comcast and Verizon all came under fire recently for suggesting the baseline definition of broadband should remain low (as in, between 200-768 kbps), given that means they'd have less work to do -- and less government oversight into their affairs. AT&T's comments to the FCC (pdf) went one step further, arguing that video gaming should not be considered an essential component (like e-mail and browsing) when discussing broadband definitions, and is instead an "aspirational" service.

The other day we noted how some disgruntled Telkom DSL customers in South Africa planned to pit a carrier pigeon versus their sluggish DSL line in order to see which one could transmit 4GB of data faster. You'll be happy to know the BBC has been keeping up with the story (with video), and reports that the carrier pigeon delivered 4GB of data 60 miles in a little over an hour -- while the DSL line had only completed 4% of the same 4GB transfer. Telkom, the recovering South Africa monopoly telco, tells the BBC they "are not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds."

Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont regulators yesterday took the unprecedented step of collectively meeting in order to question Fairpoint executives on their repeated problems in integrating Verizon's DSL and landline networks in the three states. As you might expect, Fairpoint CEO David Hauser downplayed the problems, giving a prepared speech (pdf) full of the kind of effusive optimism reserved solely for CEOs.

Given they've got the lobbying support of K Street juggernauts Verizon and AT&T, Connected Nation has had an easy time getting the inside track on broadband mapping funds in states like Minnesota and Florida, despite often submitting more expensive bids. But in their home state of Kentucky, where the group (to the local public's surprise) once proclaimed they were responsible for giving the state 94% broadband coverage, Connected Nation has ditched their bid to map the state.

Slashdot directs our attention to some small business customers of a South African ISP Telkom (aka "Hellcom"), who were so annoyed by the sluggish DSL service of the carrier while transferring 100MB files that they decided to see if carrier pigeon would be any faster. Judging from these two blog posts, early trials do suggest that carrier pigeon is faster than a lumbering DSL monopoly, but the official race occurs tomorrow.

Already under fire for struggling to integrate Verizon's New England DSL networks, Fairpoint Communications was rocked last month by anonymous allegations that they faked network readiness tests in order to gain approval for the deal from regulators. An e-mail sent to regulators by someone who called himself "David Unavailable" suggested that Fairpoint colluded with a consultant to fake a live network readiness handoff test. According to the Bangor Daily News however, the Maine state Attorney General isn't going to continue her investigation into the matter, after she found the tipster's information was second hand and involved no solid evidence. "This would be a very expensive investigation, we would have to hire experts and that is not justified by what I know today," she said.