Yeah, funny how my cable consistently becomes unreliable whenever AT&T is doing work in my subdivision.

I switched to DirectTV last month after years of shoddy comcast service and constant price hikes.

It cost me 0 dollars fo them to come in, wire-up 2 TVs and start service. Now I get 100 more channels than Comcast at less cost. Now i'm finally free of those Cable Bastards!

Our government should be on top of these sort of things and create some nice fines to prevent this. Why is this even happening?

To play devil's advocate for a minute, the reason this type of thing is happening is that the AT&T entity (in all its current and historical aspects) has had a virtual monopoly on the public telephone network for a very long time. They've gotten all the public subsidies, all the rights to dig up streets and build their facilities wherever they need to, etc. Competitive telephone companies, as such, have to interface their own equipment to the existing public telephone network. This means they have to cut the lines somewhere. The lawsuit appears to be arguing, simply, that they are cutting the lines in the wrong places, and that they're doing it maliciously to mess with at&t.

Time Warner should know better, but I think the article is making it sound a tetch more egregious than it really is. I also want to know how exactly I'm supposed to switch local phone providers without 'trespassing' onto the NIC (the small gray box on the outside of my house). I guess it's a multi-dwelling thing or something, but how are you supposed to connect someone to a new network without disconnecting them from the old one? Are they saying they disconnected the wrong lines or something? I don't get it.

I had a supervisor a few years ago who told me a story about cutting a cable company's lines when he worked for a small local power company.

The power company owned all the power poles in town. If someone else wanted to use them, they had to lease space on the poles, for a few cents per foot per pole per month. (And if you've ever seen phone/power/everything poles in Korea, you understand why a company might want to do things that way)

When cable first came to town, the operators didn't bother leasing, or even informing the power company before stringing up their cables all over town on the poles. My supervisor comes along doing maintenance or inspections or somesuch and sees all this mystery cable all over his poles...so he cuts it. At every single pole. The cable company's cables are now lying in hundreds of pieces all over town.