Fidelity Communications was the monopolistic cable operating business that controlled West Plains, Missouri’s internet services. In 2015, the City of West Plains began a project to provide internet as a city utility. This was met with all kinds of push back. This past fall, the city began testing 1GB fiber internet.
In this phase, recently announced via flyers distributed to businesses and residences in the Southern Hills district, the city will offer the opportunity to test a three-month 1-gigabit (Gb) pilot network: Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON). Participation is free.
In the first phase of the fiber project, completed in January 2016, about a dozen major employers were invited to sign on to a citywide network as “anchors.” With that phase’s implementation, city officials said the network allowed phone service to be dropped from city buildings, eliminating a $1,300 phone bill.
Surprisingly, with an actual competitor in the marketplace, Fidelity Communications, on the same day announced that they too would be providing 1GB internet to residents.
Gigabit broadband speeds have been available to Fidelity business customers via dedicated fiber circuits, but recent technology advancements have made it possible to offer the service to residential customers over Fidelity’s existing HFC (hybrid fiber coax) plant. This service, previously unavailable to residential customers, significantly increases the opportunity for increased connectivity and higher-quality communications, and supports West Plains efforts to advance and optimize the city’s infrastructure, said company officials.
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Fidelity is also expanding its fiber footprint in the city and building facilities in additional residential areas to deliver reliable and affordable high-speed internet, video and phone service. The company began offering 250 megabit-per-second internet in West Plains in August 2016.
How about that for a coincidence????
Then last month a new and strange “grassroots” organization called “Stop City Funded Internet” began a campaign against city-run broadband. Guess what? It was bullshit.
Who exactly is behind the campaign has been the subject of intense interest with the campaign's main website revealing only that it was funded by "a collection of fiscally conservative Missourians."
However one enterprising local – videographer Isaac Protiva – was able to uncover the truth: cable company Fidelity Communications, which offers internet access in five states including Missouri, and boasts 115,000 customers. The ISP had paid a marketing outfit based in Arizona to carry out the campaign.
Mr. Isaac Protiva put together a video (you can watch below the fold) that shows how Fidelity Communications hosted the “grassroots” style campaign. The company that Fidelity used to outsource this job made a boo boo.
How did he figure it out? The marketing company screwed up when it named materials on stopcityfundedinternet.com. Specifically, two images on the site were spotted revealing Fidelity as a client. Incredibly, one was the site's main header image, called Fidelity_SCFI_Website_V2.jpg. The second image was on a privacy page, and was hosted on a server called fidelity.dmwebtest.com. Talk about a smoking gun.
Fidelity Communications sent out a letter admitting that they created the fake campaign. It’s a letter that spends about four paragraphs telling everybody how awesome Fidelity Communications is and how they’re the small business owner being kicked out of town by big government. They explained how they tried to provide the services that people wanted but somehow didn’t until the people decided to go around them. Fidelity, having finished wringing its hands, finally gets to the point—at the bottom of the page.
In an effort to reach out to the public and to tell the other side of the story. we have engaged a third party to launch and maintain a "Stop-City-Funded Internet" Facebook page and related stopcityfundedinternet.com webs ite. Whether you are just !earring about the City's Internet Initiative, support It or oppose It, we invite you to visit and follow those pages and to participate in the dialogue. As a concerned citizen, we truly believe the City wlll fan and will suffer substantial financfal losses -just like the well-doa.,mented examples we have provided to the City.
Here’s a response.
