PSTN-to-IP transition

Republican Steve Hilton has found rare common ground with Democrats in an unlikely arena: landline phone service. The GOP candidate for governor is urging the federal government to stay out of California’s push to prevent AT&T from ending landline service via copper wiring to around 184,000 residential customers and 15,000 business customers. The debate stems over a Federal Communications Commission action on June 29 that advanced the company’s plans, over the objection of California regulators, many residents, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Copper network retirement in California has taken another litigious turn. In a suit against the Federal Communications Commission, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is asking the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a federal court in San Francisco, to determine that the FCC's new rules aimed at expediting copper network shutdowns constitutes an overreach that violates federal law and conflicts with notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements.

California state regulators say AT&T lied to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to shut off its old copper phone network without providing an adequate replacement. “AT&T asserts that California seeks to prohibit or hinder wireline carriers from discontinuing copper facilities and investing in fiber,” said a June 15 filing by the state of California and the California Public Utilities Commission. “Indeed, AT&T has been making this argument for years.

The NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission in response to the commission’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking aimed at changing rules to accelerate the transition to all-IP networks. The filing raises three points regarding the impact of the change in rules on rural local exchange carriers.

AT&T has filed a suit in California seeking to preempt state requirements that it believes are preventing the company from retiring copper-based phone services, arguing that those requirements conflict with new Federal Communications Commission rules.

I’m hearing an increasing number of stories from rural internet service providers and telephone companies about voice calls that are not completing to their customers. People place a call to customers on a rural network and give up when they don’t hear the phone ringing at the receiving end of the call in a reasonable amount of time. The industry term for this phenomenon is an abandoned call, which generally occurs when the caller assumes the call didn’t work.

The concept of buying only fiber customers from an internet service provider seems to be a new industry theme. Lumen sold its fiber customers to AT&T but retained the copper customers. We know Lumen’s stated plans when it sold fiber customers to AT&T. The company publicly said it would retain and care for its copper-based consumer services since they continue to provide a strong ongoing financial contribution to the company. But will they really?

In conversations with colleagues across the industry, I often hear a similar theory about why copper-based infrastructure is failing: the networks are old (true), and maintenance hasn’t kept up (not true). However, what I see every day in Southern California is that organized copper theft is happening more frequently and on a much larger scale. If this were only about aging copper facilities, it would be a challenging but manageable infrastructure problem.

The Federal Communications Commission adopted rules that will allow providers to retire their decades-old and increasingly expensive copper line networks, freeing up tens of billions of dollars annually for the rollout of upgraded, high-speed networks to more Americans. The Report and Order takes several actions to bring the regulatory environment in line with today’s communications marketplace, while retaining or adopting safeguards to protect public safety and ensure continuity of 911 services.

Across the country, policymakers are reexamining outdated telecommunications rules that no longer reflect how Americans communicate. Recently, the Federal Communications Commission took another big step toward speeding our nation’s transition to modern digital networks, joining the more than two dozen states who have made this progress a priority. This requires reforming decades-old state rules, such as “Carrier of Last Resort,” that require phone companies to spend billions maintaining outdated copper networks rather than focusing on faster, stronger networks consumers actually use.