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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-profi

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.

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.