Study Shows California Telcos Are Simply Letting Their Networks Fall Apart
from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept
On the one hand, it's understandable that US phone companies companies don't want to maintain aging copper phone networks in the wake of sagging usage. On the other hand, traditional phone networks are very much still in use (especially among vulnerable elderly populations), many of these DSL lines remain the only option consumers can get thanks to spotty US broadband deployment, and much of the phone and DSL infrastructure was heavily subsidized by American taxpayers. Oh, and as Texas just realized, many of these older copper phone lines still work during disasters, when internet voice services don't.
As such, there are numerous regulations that prevent these companies from just severing these lines completely. But US telcos, tired of traditional phone and residential broadband service, want to shift focus. So instead of a responsible transition plan (one that might mandate even coverage of wireless or fiber broadband upgrades they don't want to perform), many of these companies are simply letting the networks fall apart. And refusing to repair the lines when they fail. In large part because they know US state and federal regulators will (usually) be to chickenshit to actually do anything about it.
In California, a report requested by the government found the same thing throughout the state. The April 2019 report, only just released after regional incumbents AT&T and Frontier tried to block it, found that as customer rates skyrocketed for both AT&T and Frontier, both companies increasingly cut back on infrastructure upgrades, repairs, and maintenance over the last decade. The report also found that AT&T has increasingly engaged in "redlining," or the act of failing to meaningfully upgrade lower income and minority communities at the same rate as more affluent neighborhoods:
"...AT&T's investment policies have tended to favor higher-income communities, and have thus had a disproportionate impact upon the state's lowest income areas. For example, the weighted average 2010 median annual household income for... areas that had been upgraded with fiber optic feeder facilities to support broadband services was $72,024, vs. only $60,795 for wire centers without such upgrades. Using 2010 US Census data, we find a clear inverse relationship between household income and all of the principal service quality metrics. Wire centers serving areas with the lowest household incomes tend to have the highest trouble report rates, the longest out-of-service durations, the lowest percentages of outages cleared within 24 hours, and the longest times required to clear 90 percent of service outages. The opposite is the case for the highest income communities."
This lack of reliability of infrastructure, combined with steadily skyrocketing prices, runs in stark contrast to what we should actually be doing in the face of a global pandemic and climate destabilization. And of course it's far from the first time these two companies have been found to be utterly neglecting their networks. It's why a 90 year old man just had to take out a $10,000 newspaper ad just to get AT&T to finally upgrade his aging DSL line to fiber. And it's far worse in places like West Virginia, where Frontier's apathy toward its own customers (or basic upgrades and maintenance) is fairly legendary.
Again, this is what natural monopolies do in the face of limited competition and regulatory capture. Obtain a regional monopoly, do the bare minimum to keep that business afloat (while you focus on other ambitions like mindless media mergers), then throw a few thousand in PAC donations at local politicians so they pretend that none of this is happening.
The answer now is: what will California regulators actually do about it? And even in one of the most "progressive" states in the nation, the answer will be jack shit. It's fairly trivial for AT&T and Frontier to simply claim these networks don't matter because they're old, or to try (as AT&T does in the link above) to insist any data that suggests they're anything less than the pinnacle of corporate responsibility is fraudulent.
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Filed Under: california, competition, copper networks, decay, infrastructure
Companies: at&t, frontier
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Conglomerates are the bane of good business.
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sigh
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/frontiers-bankruptcy-reveals-cynical-choice-deny-profitable-fi ber-millions
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Wow, who'da thunk it? Decades of libertarians running around pushing a "regulation is evil" ideology, and we get vital systems falling apart from a lack of regulation making sure they stay in working order!
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Re:
You are being highly selective in your reading, as West Virginia has even worse problems, and is being run by those fascist leaning republicans.
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They did it to themselves.
The whole reason people adapted cellphones was to get away from the telcos billshit. You want to phone your neighbor, three houses down? That area code is long distance. You want directory services? Pay up! Then there were shadey practices like slamming, where you phone company could be changed without you knowledge. Then we have DSL which forced small ISPs out of business. No one I know has a land line because the phone companies refuse to give good services at a decent rate.
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Re: They did it to themselves.
"The whole reason people adapted cellphones was to get away from the telcos billshit. "
Yeah - sure
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Re: They did it to themselves.
What? Do you have any evidence for this? When people started adopting cellphones, they had per-minute charges on all calls—outgoing and incoming—and higher monthly rates than landlines. Plus the phones were expensive. And I don't know whether they had free directory services, but I doubt it.
The mobile networks are (and were) mostly run by the same companies running the landlines. You say "They did it to themselves" as if they accidentally harmed themselves. They did it on purpose to benefit themselves. They want the landline customers to move to their own more loosely regulated and more profitable services. Anyone relying on mobile internet as their main connection, in particular, is likely getting royally screwed (caps, throttling, bullshit restrictions on connecting "unapproved" devices).
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CHOICES
only 2.
PAY our elected officials More, so that Bribing them Costs the corps more. (which would raise corp prices to consumers. LOL)
STOP PAYING OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS. NO MORE BENEFITS, NO MORE MEDICAL. NO MORE RETIREMENT.
THIS IS AN HONOR POSITION, Nothing more.
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telecom advances and failures
with the half ass 5G role-out which will end up in failure with far too many issues that will make it less usable then practical. from signal reception (being able to penetrate walls) to coverage area (lack of towers) to range of signal (higher frequency shorter rang). basically it comes down to rang/ signal vs. speed (data). with 4G having better range/ signal and slower speed then 5G with having less range/ signal and faster speed. with the brainwashing the masses with 5G hype, the customer in the end will eventually figure out that 5G is not what they want and demand to go with 4G. i see the 5G/6G failure turning into a 4.5G to where we get the 4G signal multiplied by the number of (multi-core) antennas to get
the 5G speed.
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