AT&T forbidden from cutting landline services to large parts of California AT&T will have to continue operating landlines in California despite its wish to cut off the less lucrative line of business, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has ruled. The telecommunications giant is considered a carrier of last resort (COLR) in California, which means that in certain areas, AT&T is legally …
Where I live, if you order simple phone service, it will come via fiber optics. They put it in a couple years ago because the old Copper infrastructure was just too unreliable, they couldn't get parts, and so on. Florida has a lot of thunderstorms and any nearby lightning can induce voltages in the ground that just fry anything connected to buried wires. (Happened to us twice in 10 years). Of course it also means much faster internet is available, which is nice.
Where I live, we have earthquakes and in an earthquake, the power will do out (in the last big one, it went out for more a week). Cell and broadband providers aren't required to have power backup. ATT is required to keep 48v coming down the POTS lines and that will power the customer's phone. ATT doesn't want to provide POTS because they don't want all those batteries or the requirement to keep the service up in the event of a disaster.
Can you provide a reference to cables buried in the ground being affected by lightning? "Ground" normally implies that electricity is safely dissipated. It sounds like that might have originated from someone that had an interest fibre.
Wired telephone is one of the great machines of recent centuries. I'm reading old books where they don't have telephone in every house or even every town. A real drag on many activities.
No sympathy for AT&T. That brand under its many different owners has done much good, but also taken much money from customers. Long-Lines used to be very explicitly over-priced to support Universal (local) Service. While technology forced Divestiture and restructuring, there was still money to be made. Aside from re-branding a BabyBell as "AT&T", they off-loaded less lucrative BabyBells to 2nd and 3rd parties who are so cash-shy they don't even change their name on the bills. My neck of woods used to be a proud New England Bell but is now a descendant of a Minnesota farmer coop.
And they COULD "fix" the aging switching infrastructure if everybody wanted it. Shenzhen could clone those 1970s W.E. cards and frames for under 10 bucks a line.
AT&T has been one of the most aggressive and successful lobbyists for a century, all the way back to Ma Bell.
They have been sandbagging their network upgrades for years, only spending money in areas where they faced viable competition. The rest of the time they are begging for subsidies even in areas that they could make more money upgrading the equipment out of their own pocket than just operating the existing copper network.
And it worked, for years. More infuriating is that even when they collected a government handout, they often failed to schedule the upgrade work, again, unless the locals started to offer viable competition.
AT&T is firmly committed to providing the worst and most expensive service, while begging poverty and posting generous profits.
Well, with Starlink it can now shut down its entire network, can't it ?
Oh, silly me, they still want the parts that make good money.
Well, you can't have it all. And be thankful you don't operate in Luxembourg because there, there is a law that states that anyone asking for a connection must be served.
You'd be having conniptions over there . . .
> can't get cell service out where she's at because of the – because of the trees.
Bet you these are the same people who complain that radio towers cause cancer and boycott when cell companies try to set up a tower in their neighborhood.
Nevermind that Satellite TV and Wi-Fi more or less operate in the same frequency range.
I say let att depracate it's service as soon as they replace all copper with fiber services which support voice and internet services. That will be difficult because they are such a poorly run company and even will gaining government assistance in some areas to pay for infratruxture they will profit emencely from they still have many areas of metro areas without fiber. Ive never seen a company botch project management of infratruxture builds like att. So if they want to turn off copper... Go right ahead as soon as there is a one for one replacement with fiber in place.
For those unfamiliar with this long running tale of PacBell and the PUC which goes back to almost the beginning in 1911 with MaBell ( the real AT&T not the rebranded SouthWestern Bell ersatz "AT&T") this about the horse trading of regulatory capture where PacBell has to do something useful for their defacto monopoly (until recently) to make it look like the PUC is actually doing something useful.
So in the past PacBell had to run copper up mountains, into deserts, up and down the Central Valley, into every nook and cranny of the state so that they could screw the very profitable large urban customer base royally. Then cable, internet and VOIP happened and PacBell (now bought by SWB) no longer wanted to play by the old rules because they now had real competition. For the first time in over 100 years. This is the price for PacBell keeping their huge competitive advantage but the SWB slimes don't want to pay it, because, well they are total slimes. Saying that the SWB phone I bough over thirty years ago still looks brand new and works beautifully.
I've always had a landline for a very simple reason. Because I lived with the trace of the San Andreas Fault visible from my kitchen window. And when the last (and next) big earthquake hits guess which is the only comms networks that still works. You've guessed it.. the copper wire one. Sure it took some serious war dialing over a few hours in 1989 to get through to Europe to tell family that everything the saw on TV news was total garbage. Tell them it was a mess but not The Big One. Next time? No copper? Good luck getting anything other than an immediate SMS message out.
And in SF with the shutting down of all power gen capacity in the City and no black start capacity once the cell tower batteries etc run down there will be basically no comms infrastructure for week / months until the power is restored. The City was pretty much self sufficient power gen wise until 10 years ago when the shut every thing down for "reasons. Thats why power was only out for less than a day last time. Next time? The power wont be coming back anytime soon if any of the East Bay faults popped. Which is where the City power and black start capacity comes from. Yeah, lets run our main backup power cable under the Bay across the most dangerous fault...
So yeah, if you have a natural disaster and power is out there is basically zero comms. One thing that came out of the recent North Bay wildfires is that the Reverse 911 system that worked so well with copper (and saved many lives in the past) pretty much fell apart with fiber, VOIP, cell etc.
And so on.
Which is why you now need dedicated EAS, GMRS etc radios, Because most phones are no longer reliable during disasters.
Give the glorious history of the PUC I wonder just how much longer before they totally cave in to SWB. I'm surprised it has taken this long.
"She's tried T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, US Cellular, none of them work.""
And US Cellular isn't one of them. T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon are the ones that own and operate the towers in the US. A couple of regions have small operators, but every other company is reselling service on the three.
It should make more sense for AT&T to run fiber where they want to delete POTS. It's usually the best option for digital services and while that's going in, they can spool up the copper pairs on a reel and recycle the copper which is fetching good money right now.
That assumes the copper is in the air on a pole. If it is buried, the government requires like-for-like, and they have to bury the fiber. It is a lot tougher to dig a trench and toss in some cable than it was 75 years ago. All sorts of 'earth disturbance' permits are needed. That is why we see the Ditch Witch boring machines in common usage now.
The net-net is it is not cheap to replace copper with fiber.
"The net-net is it is not cheap to replace copper with fiber."
I'd want to see numbers on that. I'll agree on a physical basis, but there's a vast difference in the services that can be sold down a fiber that can't be done with copper pairs.
In my town they used a snake sort of thing to worm a hole between green boxes rather than dig a trench and fill it back in. Once the snake hit the next junction, they'd pull the cable back through or they might have run some plastic piping. I wasn't paying loads of attention.
I have a strong objection to government telling companies they should or should not do a particular thing. While it is widespread, that is not a system of economics I want to live under.
However, as a person who lives & works 8 miles from the nearest cell service, I also have a strong objection to phone companies just giving up and abandoning customers. A few miles away across this rural county, Centurylink is actively telling land line customers to stop asking them to improve the service and to contact Starlink instead. That is trading off a completely different set of technical problems. VOIP on Starlink just isn't there - dropped calls, dodgy connections, unclear audio. The wired land line is much better.
The wired POTS was always a reliable communications method when severe winter storms took out the electrical power. Short outages and the 'big phone box down the street' operated off batteries for around 36 hours. And if the outage was longer, Centurylink would plug in a generator to the external power connection. Now the batteries have aged and POTS goes down after about 12 hours, and Centurylink no longer shows up to connect a generator. It is almost like they are hating their customers to force them to leave.
At some point the copper needs to be replaced with fiber.
AT&T should be allowed to replace copper with fiber wherever it wants and provide VoIP service at the same basic rate they do today. That does not seem so difficult.
At some point if AT&T won't upgrade to fiber then others should take over the legacy AT&T infrastructure in those counties and perform the upgrade themselves.
It makes pure financial sense that AT&T can make more money by forcing the most expensive customers to service over to wireless.
Muni-fiber for the win!
I wonder if they are giving the cities enough advanced notice so they can plan to replace all of their POTS services. Municipalities have to go through a massive pile of pig sty to do projects like that. Get 3 or more bids from contractors that have all been approved to bid. Somebody has to get expert really fast so they can make sure whatever they are being sold will do the business, etc. All of the stuff like emergency lines (911), interconnections between the city, police, fire, utilities, etc can all be configured. It's a big switch and cities are amateur run operations.
If I can get fiber service at my house without giving away far too much personal information, I expect the installation will be rather quick and work fine.
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