6 ms·

AT&T can't hang up on landline phone customers, California agency rules

47 points by jnord 2y ago

FireBeyond 2y ago
Hey, AT&T, that line on all of my bills that says "Universal Service Fund"? That's your compensation for it. I know you like to pretend like that's something that telcos pay into, but that line on my bill is because the FCC allows you to pass that cost onto the consumer, so of course it's passed on.
- rayiner 2y ago
  But AT&T doesn’t get that money.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    What? > Part of the money also helps keep your local telephone service reasonably priced. The Universal Service Fund is one source that helps make it possible for telephone companies to service remote areas without having to raise everyone's rates. It's more costly for telephone companies to provide service in remote or rural areas than it is in densely populated cities.
  - saghm 2y ago
    According to https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund, it sounds like AT&T _does_ get the money for this purpose, just not directly: > Today, FCC provides universal service support through four mechanisms: > 1. High Cost Support Mechanism provides support to certain qualifying telephone companies that serve high cost areas, thereby making phone service affordable for the residents of these regions. > 2. Low Income Support Mechanism assists low-income customers by helping to pay for monthly telephone charges as well as connection charges to initiate telephone service. > 3. Rural Health Care Support Mechanism allows rural health care providers to pay rates for telecommunications services similar to those of their urban counterparts, making telehealth services affordable. > 4. Schools and Libraries Support Mechanism, popularly know as the "E-Rate," provides telecommunication services (e.g., local and long-distance calling, high-speed lines), Internet access, and internal connections (the equipment to deliver these services) to eligible schools and libraries. It sounds like the government mandates that carriers like AT&T service communities in areas that would otherwise not be profitable enough for them to bother offering service to, and they help subsidize those customers with a tax on all of their customers. You might be able to make an argument that the tax doesn't generate enough revenue to offset the cost of serving those customers (I don't pretend to have any idea of either how much revenue this tax gets or how it compares to the costs of serving the customers they would otherwise avoid), but the money that the parent commenter is mentioning is quite literally spent on their bills, so I don't know how you can argue it doesn't end up going to AT&T.
    - rayiner 2y ago
      You’re overlooking that all the money goes into the universal service fund, from where it is redistributed to the carriers that service those high-cost customers. AT&T gets some of that money, but very few of its customers are high cost. Most of the money goes to different, smaller providers. (At the same time, the tax on AT&T’s service reduces AT&T’s revenues, like any other tax.)
      - FireBeyond 2y ago
        Right, so it's proportionally allocated to providers based on their service to those challenging customers. I'm not sure what's being overlooked.
        rayiner 2y ago
        OP called the USF fee on his AT&T bill “compensation” to AT&T for maintaining landlines. That overlooks that the vast majority of that money is redistributed from AT&T and its customers to other carriers serving a small population of very high cost customers.
        saghm 2y ago
        The USF isn't a final destination for money though; it's spent on those small population customers in proportion to the carriers that serve them. You seem to be arguing that because 100% of the money doesn't go to AT&T, paying that fee somehow isn't relevant to the discussion of AT&T serving those remote customers, but the amount they get is literally determined by how many of those customers they serve. By the same logic, other carriers collect the same fee from their customers that could get funneled to AT&T! I'm not sure if you're just trying to argue semantics about the fact that only part of the fee goes to AT&T or if you misunderstand how the USF actually works, but AT&T isn't disadvantaged at all compared to other carriers by this fee; they're all on the same playing field in terms of having to collect the fee and then only getting it back in proportion to the costs of serving the customers that the article discusses.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - aiauthoritydev 2y ago
    Uncle sam gets the money which gets used to feed a massive bureaucracy that does no productive work and whatever remains then goes to ATT. Often very little.
    - dctoedt 2y ago
      > feed a massive bureaucracy that does no productive work Sometimes inefficient, sure. Sometimes wasteful, sure. But whenever you have a large, complex system with lots of moving parts — such as any human society — you need rules and traffic cops. That's especially true when "the market" — that is, a cult of "everyone for himself" individualism, focused on personal near-term gains — creates incentives for people to lie, cheat and steal: Running red lights, speeding through school zones, dumping toxic wastes into the nearest available stream or river, etc. — fucking things up for everyone else. That way lies failed-state status. </rant>
      - aiauthoritydev 2y ago
        > such as any human society — you need rules and traffic cops. We need some rules does not automatically mean we need to put government in charge. Rules and order can emerge spontaneously from the society itself and it is much more accountable to their customers than any government red tape system will be. > Running red lights, speeding through school zones, dumping toxic wastes into the nearest available stream or river, etc. — fucking things up for everyone else. That way lies failed-state status. Most of these issues happen "because of government" rather than due to lack of it.
        dctoedt 2y ago
        > Rules and order can emerge spontaneously from the society itself and it is much more accountable to their customers than any government red tape system will be. That's a nice idea, and it might work in special cases where everyone has equal smarts, equal access to information and to economic- and self-defense power, along with a generous helping of fellow-feeling. But in the general case, that idea doesn't comport with millennia of human experience: Too many opportunistic folks are happy to lie, cheat, and steal to the greatest extent they think they can get away with it, with little or no regard for others except friends and family (and sometimes not even them). For those folks, their seeming motto is often, "hooray for me and [forget] you." EDIT: Also, overall costs are increased for everyone when each person has to be perpetually on guard for possible rule-breaking by everyone else. Better to achieve economies of scale by outsourcing some of that function to a commonly-empowered and -regulated agency. And that's just fancy name for "government," of course. This is true even when the "government" is based on Hobbesian brute force: Even brute-force governments have to deliver a modicum of security and order at a minimum, lest they risk being overthrown by challengers. (Think of gang leaders in failed states: They have to keep not just their "soldiers" but their "citizens" from becoming too dissatisfied — otherwise, they risk losing their power and, sometimes, their lives.)
p51-remorse 2y ago
Confusing title; my initial impression was AT&T was literally hanging up on landline customers when they called support. Article is just using “hang up” in a colloquial sense. Cute, but unnecessarily confusing.
- playingalong 2y ago
  Isn't it the English-language world tradition to use a word play in news articles like this?
KerrAvon 2y ago
This is ridiculous. AT&T should be required to either wire fiber to every house in every service area, or to give up its franchise completely to local non-profit municipal broadband collectives. No more cherry-picking who they want to serve; you serve everybody in the area or you forfeit the area entirely.
- asadotzler 2y ago
  This is the correct answer and precisely what the CPUC told AT&T. "If you don't want to maintain that shit copper network, then upgrade it to fiber and everyone's happy." But AT&T won't do that because bringing fiber to rural customers would eat into their margins. Consider the west side of the peninsula and south, and how much it would cost to trench or even string fiber to all these mountain forest homes (which have mostly all had copper for a century). 90% of AT&T's customers are packed neatly into 30% of the land area and 10% are spread across the 70% of the land area. Of course AT&T wants to ignore the expensive rural users and serve the lucrative town ones, and that's entirely what this now failed petition was about.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    For running fiber, all of the landline customers already have lines running to their house. My impression is that running fiber on existing poles is much cheaper than digging or putting up poles.
- mindslight 2y ago
  Don't even bother with that ultimatum. Hoping unfunded mandates will squeeze blood out of the corpo stone no longer works. It's cultural at this point - they'll spend more money fighting any regulation than it would have cost to just implement. Government is already large enough that it's straightforward to create municipal bonds to build out municipal fiber, which are then paid back by subscription fees. I've got municipal fiber and my Internet access is now just a solved problem - no contract, fixed price, no throttling, no caps, symmetric. Let "AT&T" compete with that in areas where it makes sense for them to, after everyone has straightforward access via basic public infrastructure.
londons_explore 2y ago
The 'obvious' thing to do in AT&T's shoes is to design a small $10 solar powered 'copper line simulator'. It would sit outside customers homes and provide copper line services bridged to the mobile networks (many, for redundancy, and even starlink for even more redundancy). 4G voice only chipsets come in under $2 now. Then they can shut down all their copper networks easily paying for the transition.
- throwAGIway 2y ago
  Wow, sounds like a product idea. It could even provide an ADSL-4G/5G bridge. Is anybody selling this?
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    ADSL would need a much bigger solar panel and battery considering most people use ADSL 24x7. I believe the power requirements for ADSL modems are much higher too.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Who in their right mind would prefer simulated-ADSL-over-(4|5)G to actual (4|5)G?! You'd get the worst of both worlds. Also for us (not AT&T country) we want to keep our landline because it has extremely low downtime and never drops the signal because the phone got held 5 degrees away from the perfect angle in front of the correct window...
    - throwAGIway 2y ago
      Individually it doesn't make much sense. On the other hand, in some parts of the world (I live in Europe and it's normal around here) the operator owns the modem and the last mile infrastructure - so perhaps they would do it if the cost of replacing all the customer side modems and cabling + installing the antennas in that area would be larger than installing this simulated ADSL station. Also - you can't just switch 1000s of people in a dense small area to individual modems and expect good performance. There needs to be aggregation. Presumably the last mile station would always have the perfect angle to the base station(s) - perhaps even radio priority.

47 points by jnord 2y ago

Hey, AT&T, that line on all of my bills that says "Universal Service Fund"? That's your compensation for it. I know you like to pretend like that's something that telcos pay into, but that line on my bill is because the FCC allows you to pass that cost onto the consumer, so of course it's passed on.

rayiner 2y ago
But AT&T doesn’t get that money.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  What? > Part of the money also helps keep your local telephone service reasonably priced. The Universal Service Fund is one source that helps make it possible for telephone companies to service remote areas without having to raise everyone's rates. It's more costly for telephone companies to provide service in remote or rural areas than it is in densely populated cities.
- saghm 2y ago
  According to https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service-fund, it sounds like AT&T _does_ get the money for this purpose, just not directly: > Today, FCC provides universal service support through four mechanisms: > 1. High Cost Support Mechanism provides support to certain qualifying telephone companies that serve high cost areas, thereby making phone service affordable for the residents of these regions. > 2. Low Income Support Mechanism assists low-income customers by helping to pay for monthly telephone charges as well as connection charges to initiate telephone service. > 3. Rural Health Care Support Mechanism allows rural health care providers to pay rates for telecommunications services similar to those of their urban counterparts, making telehealth services affordable. > 4. Schools and Libraries Support Mechanism, popularly know as the "E-Rate," provides telecommunication services (e.g., local and long-distance calling, high-speed lines), Internet access, and internal connections (the equipment to deliver these services) to eligible schools and libraries. It sounds like the government mandates that carriers like AT&T service communities in areas that would otherwise not be profitable enough for them to bother offering service to, and they help subsidize those customers with a tax on all of their customers. You might be able to make an argument that the tax doesn't generate enough revenue to offset the cost of serving those customers (I don't pretend to have any idea of either how much revenue this tax gets or how it compares to the costs of serving the customers they would otherwise avoid), but the money that the parent commenter is mentioning is quite literally spent on their bills, so I don't know how you can argue it doesn't end up going to AT&T.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    You’re overlooking that all the money goes into the universal service fund, from where it is redistributed to the carriers that service those high-cost customers. AT&T gets some of that money, but very few of its customers are high cost. Most of the money goes to different, smaller providers. (At the same time, the tax on AT&T’s service reduces AT&T’s revenues, like any other tax.)
    - FireBeyond 2y ago
      Right, so it's proportionally allocated to providers based on their service to those challenging customers. I'm not sure what's being overlooked.
      - rayiner 2y ago
        OP called the USF fee on his AT&T bill “compensation” to AT&T for maintaining landlines. That overlooks that the vast majority of that money is redistributed from AT&T and its customers to other carriers serving a small population of very high cost customers.
        saghm 2y ago
        The USF isn't a final destination for money though; it's spent on those small population customers in proportion to the carriers that serve them. You seem to be arguing that because 100% of the money doesn't go to AT&T, paying that fee somehow isn't relevant to the discussion of AT&T serving those remote customers, but the amount they get is literally determined by how many of those customers they serve. By the same logic, other carriers collect the same fee from their customers that could get funneled to AT&T! I'm not sure if you're just trying to argue semantics about the fact that only part of the fee goes to AT&T or if you misunderstand how the USF actually works, but AT&T isn't disadvantaged at all compared to other carriers by this fee; they're all on the same playing field in terms of having to collect the fee and then only getting it back in proportion to the costs of serving the customers that the article discusses.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- aiauthoritydev 2y ago
  Uncle sam gets the money which gets used to feed a massive bureaucracy that does no productive work and whatever remains then goes to ATT. Often very little.
  - dctoedt 2y ago
    > feed a massive bureaucracy that does no productive work Sometimes inefficient, sure. Sometimes wasteful, sure. But whenever you have a large, complex system with lots of moving parts — such as any human society — you need rules and traffic cops. That's especially true when "the market" — that is, a cult of "everyone for himself" individualism, focused on personal near-term gains — creates incentives for people to lie, cheat and steal: Running red lights, speeding through school zones, dumping toxic wastes into the nearest available stream or river, etc. — fucking things up for everyone else. That way lies failed-state status. </rant>
    - aiauthoritydev 2y ago
      > such as any human society — you need rules and traffic cops. We need some rules does not automatically mean we need to put government in charge. Rules and order can emerge spontaneously from the society itself and it is much more accountable to their customers than any government red tape system will be. > Running red lights, speeding through school zones, dumping toxic wastes into the nearest available stream or river, etc. — fucking things up for everyone else. That way lies failed-state status. Most of these issues happen "because of government" rather than due to lack of it.
      - dctoedt 2y ago
        > Rules and order can emerge spontaneously from the society itself and it is much more accountable to their customers than any government red tape system will be. That's a nice idea, and it might work in special cases where everyone has equal smarts, equal access to information and to economic- and self-defense power, along with a generous helping of fellow-feeling. But in the general case, that idea doesn't comport with millennia of human experience: Too many opportunistic folks are happy to lie, cheat, and steal to the greatest extent they think they can get away with it, with little or no regard for others except friends and family (and sometimes not even them). For those folks, their seeming motto is often, "hooray for me and [forget] you." EDIT: Also, overall costs are increased for everyone when each person has to be perpetually on guard for possible rule-breaking by everyone else. Better to achieve economies of scale by outsourcing some of that function to a commonly-empowered and -regulated agency. And that's just fancy name for "government," of course. This is true even when the "government" is based on Hobbesian brute force: Even brute-force governments have to deliver a modicum of security and order at a minimum, lest they risk being overthrown by challengers. (Think of gang leaders in failed states: They have to keep not just their "soldiers" but their "citizens" from becoming too dissatisfied — otherwise, they risk losing their power and, sometimes, their lives.)

p51-remorse 2y ago

Confusing title; my initial impression was AT&T was literally hanging up on landline customers when they called support. Article is just using “hang up” in a colloquial sense. Cute, but unnecessarily confusing.

playingalong 2y ago
Isn't it the English-language world tradition to use a word play in news articles like this?

KerrAvon 2y ago

This is ridiculous. AT&T should be required to either wire fiber to every house in every service area, or to give up its franchise completely to local non-profit municipal broadband collectives. No more cherry-picking who they want to serve; you serve everybody in the area or you forfeit the area entirely.

asadotzler 2y ago
This is the correct answer and precisely what the CPUC told AT&T. "If you don't want to maintain that shit copper network, then upgrade it to fiber and everyone's happy." But AT&T won't do that because bringing fiber to rural customers would eat into their margins. Consider the west side of the peninsula and south, and how much it would cost to trench or even string fiber to all these mountain forest homes (which have mostly all had copper for a century). 90% of AT&T's customers are packed neatly into 30% of the land area and 10% are spread across the 70% of the land area. Of course AT&T wants to ignore the expensive rural users and serve the lucrative town ones, and that's entirely what this now failed petition was about.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  For running fiber, all of the landline customers already have lines running to their house. My impression is that running fiber on existing poles is much cheaper than digging or putting up poles.
mindslight 2y ago
Don't even bother with that ultimatum. Hoping unfunded mandates will squeeze blood out of the corpo stone no longer works. It's cultural at this point - they'll spend more money fighting any regulation than it would have cost to just implement. Government is already large enough that it's straightforward to create municipal bonds to build out municipal fiber, which are then paid back by subscription fees. I've got municipal fiber and my Internet access is now just a solved problem - no contract, fixed price, no throttling, no caps, symmetric. Let "AT&T" compete with that in areas where it makes sense for them to, after everyone has straightforward access via basic public infrastructure.

londons_explore 2y ago

The 'obvious' thing to do in AT&T's shoes is to design a small $10 solar powered 'copper line simulator'. It would sit outside customers homes and provide copper line services bridged to the mobile networks (many, for redundancy, and even starlink for even more redundancy). 4G voice only chipsets come in under $2 now. Then they can shut down all their copper networks easily paying for the transition.

throwAGIway 2y ago
Wow, sounds like a product idea. It could even provide an ADSL-4G/5G bridge. Is anybody selling this?
- londons_explore 2y ago
  ADSL would need a much bigger solar panel and battery considering most people use ADSL 24x7. I believe the power requirements for ADSL modems are much higher too.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Who in their right mind would prefer simulated-ADSL-over-(4|5)G to actual (4|5)G?! You'd get the worst of both worlds. Also for us (not AT&T country) we want to keep our landline because it has extremely low downtime and never drops the signal because the phone got held 5 degrees away from the perfect angle in front of the correct window...
  - throwAGIway 2y ago
    Individually it doesn't make much sense. On the other hand, in some parts of the world (I live in Europe and it's normal around here) the operator owns the modem and the last mile infrastructure - so perhaps they would do it if the cost of replacing all the customer side modems and cabling + installing the antennas in that area would be larger than installing this simulated ADSL station. Also - you can't just switch 1000s of people in a dense small area to individual modems and expect good performance. There needs to be aggregation. Presumably the last mile station would always have the perfect angle to the base station(s) - perhaps even radio priority.