An ad from AT&T that ran the other day in these pages and elsewhere warned that some Time Warner Cable customers are in danger of losing phone service as the cable giant makes some technical changes.
The ad -- which sneeringly declared, "You got cabled" -- was certainly attention-getting.
It also was apparently wrong, and at least one state regulator is mighty cheesed that AT&T is spreading what he called false information among consumers.
"I'm very disappointed in AT&T," Timothy Simon, a member of the California Public Utilities Commission, told me. "The content of the advertisement is not true."
He said he was "not ruling out the potential of sanctions" against AT&T, possibly a fine for making false claims.
Gordon Diamond, an AT&T spokesman, acknowledged by e-mail that the ad contained incorrect information, but he didn't back down from the contention that some Time Warner phone customers might lose dial tones.
"We have no plans to run the ad again," Diamond said.
At first glance, this would seem to be little more than an isolated episode involving a single company making dubious claims. But it's more than that.
Although industry members routinely insist that the telecom market is a hotbed of pro-consumer competition, the reality is that it's little more than an oligopoly in which a handful of major players duke it out for dominance.
And since those players don't want to do anything to jeopardize profits, they seldom compete on either price or quality of service. Instead, they rely primarily on propaganda -- and occasionally misinformation -- to win customers.
"AT&T's 'dead phone lines' claim appears to be dead wrong, but that's not a huge surprise," said Steve Blackledge, senior policy analyst for the California Public Interest Research Group. "When companies don't compete on price, they compete with scare tactics."
A little history: Time Warner and other cable companies once relied on phone companies' systems for their voice offerings. Most are now switching to digital, Internet-based technology that allows them to bypass the phone companies and use their own cable networks instead.
The move allows cable providers to compete more aggressively with phone companies for customers. Time Warner, for example, is offering 12 months of bundled TV, Internet and phone service for $89.85 a month.
AT&T offers a comparable bundle for $99.98. Verizon's TV-Net-phone package runs $94.99 monthly.
