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.

Time Warner Cable has taken the lead on this front, though the tactic is used by most every major cable operator, including Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Charter. Qwest is of course guilty of this as well, advertising their copper-based ADSL2 and VDSL services as "Qwest Fiber Optic Internet Service."

By and large, carriers only get wrist slaps for this false advertising.

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. VoIP operators are under no such restrictions, which is why everybody from Speakeasy to MajicJack freely blocks access.

Free conference services users may not like it, but given they're not a common carrier, Google Voice is similarly under no restrictions, and has blocked user access to these services as well.

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.

The companies AT&T, Verizon and Comcast hire to run these kinds of modern disinformation operations (and win "ethics awards" for doing it) are usually fairly slick outfits, using a combination of fake consumer groups, compromised real consumer groups, and regular lobbyists to create the illusion of broad support for corporate positions. Usually this is done without the press or public noticing the men behind the curtain, but occasionally they screw up.