AT&T filed a lawsuit this week against several California state officials, asking a court to overturn rules that require it to keep offering plain old telephone service even as it tries to move customers onto fiber. The company says the mandate forces it to keep spending $1 billion each year on a telephone network used by only a small slice of its customer base.
AT&T framed the fight as part of a broader overhaul of its California network, announcing plans to invest $19 billion in the state between now and the end of the decade. The company said that spending will bring fiber to more than 4 million additional households and businesses and that the copper wires that once served every home now serve just 3 percent of households in its California territory.
The lawsuit lands just after the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules encouraging telephone companies to retire aging copper lines, saying there is a need for carriers to divert precious resources from deteriorating legacy networks that deliver outdated services to an ever-decreasing number of subscribers. AT&T says California’s Carrier of Last Resort rules cut against that direction by forcing it to keep supporting and maintaining plain old telephone service even after federal regulators authorized the service to be phased out.
That puts the company on a collision course with state regulators and consumer advocates who have long warned about what happens when old phone networks disappear too quickly. Public Knowledge has said the FCC directive could affect rural customers, older adults, people with disabilities and users of specialized medical equipment that depends on phone lines, and it has argued that the federal order relaxes or drops safeguards put in place by previous US administrations.
AT&T said it will take “a thoughtful, phased approach to upgrade customers” and said no customer will be left without access to phone or 911 service. But the legal fight shows the hard part of the transition is not whether copper lines are fading; it is who gets to decide how fast they go, and who carries the cost while the old network is still standing.
