AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California | Hacker News Reader

AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California

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152 pointskungfudoi211 comments

I'm lucky that I am in Sonic's service area and get 10Gbps symmetric fiber service for $50/mo. It exposes the lie of the incumbents slow-walking new tech and bandwidth increases.

They _just don't want to_ because they _don't have to_ compete with anyone, and they'd rather print cash for their shareholders. They have the capital to build these networks far faster than a small regional ISP can. Multi-gig speeds, FTTP are profitable. There's just no incentive to innovate. They're just rent seekers. It's more profitable to charge more and deliver less.

They won capitalism. The prize is you don't have to compete anymore, you don't have to innovate, and you get to charge more and deliver less.

Getting companies to this position is foundational to the incentive structure of our economic system. Once they win, that's it. They get to stay there forever.

I worked in IT for a large telco for four years that has a monopoly on an extremely large part of Canada.

After years there, learning the insides, working closely with marketing and sales and all the rest…..I agree with you 100%.

They literally have guaranteed teed profits in the form of VERY large government subsides. Of course they chase them, so instead of FTTH or other interesting initiatives they were hell bent on installing fax lines and copper because they had enormous subsidies.

Canadians love their monopolies full stop. It's a cultural issue where each sector has its handful of heavyweights, of which you have a choice of 1 or 2 to use locally, and even if there is a third option most Canadians just won't consider it.

Comparatively, the US has thousands of small banks & credit unions, and tons of small and midsize ISPs that provide a 3rd or 4th option in areas like MDUs where they can make a go of it.

They won capitalism? The government regulations are entirely responsible for the lack of competition.

As it stands, competition found away around the wired line regulations. The wireless devices came along. And soon the satellite networks will give the cellphone carriers a real kick in the pants.

Nope, you can’t the-free-market-will-fix-everything this one. The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations. Wireless is slow and coverage is spotty. Satellite is unreliable, expensive, and has a fixed latency cost that can’t be eliminated.

> Nope, you can’t the-free-market-will-fix-everything this one. The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations

Just a point of clarification, the free market generally means independence from government regulation. This isn't the free market failing so much as incumbents using the power of government to force their advantage, part of the argument of the free market is that by not allowing the government to interfere in this manner no one can get laws written to benefit them because the government doesn't get involved in the first place. Now granted that's in a frictionless airless world with spherical cows. But to say the free market failed and the very next sentence say it is because of regulation from the government is oxymoronic.

Even in this version of the free market, monopoly is still the incentive and end goal. Eventually, either a single player wins out (possibly by buying or merging with previous competitors) or a few big players agree that colluding with each other is more profitable then competing (remember there is no government interfering in this free market to prevent this). Once this happens, new players won't enter the market because they can immediately be crushed by the incumbent.

So either way, monopoly is the inevitable end point.

Monopoly is only an incentive if it is clear that it will be permitted.

But it always is though. In a government regulated economy, there is regulatory capture and lobbying to create industry friendly laws that allow monopoly (aka our current system). In a fully free market, then there is no laws to prevent monopoly.

And by monopoly, I am also referring to systems where there are a few big players that just don't compete against one another, or one where there is a big player and a few small but inconsequential players. All of these result in the same effect as plain monopoly.

Especially with natural monopolies like infrastructure, there is no economic case to overbuild most power grids, water/sewer districts, Telecom infrastructure or natural gas networks regardless of regulation.

The rare times you see overbuilding there is always a scheme involved, whether it's Comcast's recent edge outs to appear as though they aren't bleeding internet customers, or government money incentivising an overbuild cause the current ISP didn't document that they serve a set of addresses.

The definition of "a free market" you're offering here is one that has never existed. So we can either talk about the free markets we have (which compared to markets in other places and at other times are stupendously free) or we can talk about, yes, spherical cows.

> The telco lobbyists wrote the government regulations.

This is the issue. There isn't a free market in this (or many) sectors because of regulatory capture. If that were gone, if competition was even possible, then we would see improvement.

We wouldn't necessarily see improvement, especially in a deregulated Telecom environment where you order new service and the technician gets you installed but knocks your neighbors on a competitor out of service, resulting in them scheduling a tech who knocks you out of service.

Physical networks like this also clutter up the skies or create areas you can't dig in, and accrue damage while decreasing in value each year until they are abandoned or upgraded.

Abandoned Telecom infrastructure is a serious issue all its own as well, no one wants legacy unused cabling running under their streets or in their building.

> They won capitalism? The government regulations are entirely responsible for the lack of competition.

Capitalism isn't the absence of government regulations, you seem to have confused it with anarchism.

Capitalism is the name applied by critiics to a real world economic system existing at the time it was described based on particular structures of properry rights and the resulting class system. Government regulations systematically benefitting the dominant class is... very much one of the features widely observed to result from that system.

It's not quite that simple.

Sonic focuses their fiber services only in areas that are most profitable to install fiber. As far as I know, they only install fiber on telephone poles that have free space, in areas that are high density. The cheapest install option for the highest possible revenue. I live right next to an area that has Sonic fiber, but there's no telephone poles, and an install would require an expensive underground installation. As a result, my area isn't even on their roadmap for future development.

If you're outside the areas covered by their fiber service, Sonic feels it's still perfect fine to charge $50/mo for a 50 mbps asymmetrical DSL connection.

Sonic announced expansion to my neighborhood 2 years ago with a status tracking page and everything!

Status hasn't changed since the initial announcement 2 years ago...

Stupid idea, I know, but what do you think of

Telephone-pole-as-a-service TPaaS

What are the regulations in place for putting up telephone poles and what are the associated costs?

Fiber-to-the-curb has been a concept for decades. The last couple hundred feet would traditionally be completed with copper but short range wireless could easily fill that gap in 2024.

The costs include loss of service in every third major storm.

This is already a thing in many countries! There is one company building and maintaining infrastructure, and anyone who wants to can provide a service on it for a fixed fee.

I believe this is legally required for gas & electricity in Europe, and some of the privatized national phone companies here have similar obligations.

This is called pole attachment, and most pole owners offer this for tens of dollars a year per pole.

No property owner wants additional poles put up, and it certainly won't be cheaper to buy and install a pole than just paying a few hundred dollars a decade to make it the pole owners problem.

Sonic is phasing out their DSL offerings.

Att made around a 12% profit margin, which seems reasonable if a bit high. Would you consider 12% == “printing money”? I usually think of 25+% margins like in big tech that way.

Not arguing just trying to understand how much money these companies are actually making.

12% in perpetuity with no stress the number will go down and lots of (imho insidious and customer unfriendly) ways for it to go up is in fact "printing money"

Being able to make money risk free without risk of competition always ends up being worse for the customer and bad for the overall economy (in terms of efficiency)

This is why AT&T keeps looking for the next big thing that will net them double digit margins in perpetuity with minimal effort.

They have bought and damaged the following assets in pursuit of this goal: DirecTV, HBO, CNN, Cartoon Network, Warner Bros and more.

AT&T has terribly mismanaged and damaged these assets, from destroying their carriage agreements with Dish and other cable companies for HBO, reducing their revenue by hundereds of millions a year, to, to more than halving the value if DirecTV by destroying its value proposition and failing to retain the customer base.

Compared to what? Food retail is generally at 2% ...

food retail margins are 2% every time they turn over their inventory, which if they manage it properly can be much less than a month. so that 2% is annualized via a large multiplier

the margins for telecoms are considered on an annual basis.

Sorry, I don't understand.

Are you saying that gross revenues for food retail are higher, and thus 2% of <a huge number> is bigger than 12% of <a smaller number> ?

if you buy broccoli and sell it a few days later at a 2% profit (net of costs), you just made 2%. if that took you a week, and you do it again the next week, and the week after that, you took your investment and grew it 52 weeks @ 2% a week, you'd be at 280% or more than 180% profit (1.02 ^ 52, presuming you also buy and sell 2% more of the broccoli itself every week. if you just buy the same amount of broccoli every week that's just 52 * .02 plus a little for interest, and you take the profits and pay off debts or take it as income, etc.)

if you lay fiber and connect it to the internet and hire cable guys to visit people's houses and customer service people to answer the phone, and your total revenue for a year minus your costs for a year comes out to a profit margin of 50%, you have 50% margins.

If you buy broccoli for $1.00 and sell it in a week for $1.02 you’ve made 2%. If you buy another broccoli for $1.00 and sell it again for $1.02 then you’re still at a 2% profit for the year. You’ve spent $2 on inventory with revenue of $2.04, for a total profit margin of 2%. This is obviously simplified.

the piece of corporate finance you are missing is that the money you use to buy the broccoli is scarce, you have to "pay" for it. you can't leave it out of the calculation. You pay for it to who you borrowed it from, or to your shareholders, or the opportunity cost of taking it out of whatever use somebody else was paying you for.

that dollar you use to buy the broccoli, it's like a machine you use to knit sweaters. If you put that dollar to use for a year and sell one broccoli, you made 2%. If you put that same-single-dollar to use for a year and sell 52 broccolis, you made more.

what I originally said was that you can't just look at the margin on a sale, you need to look at inventory turn, how many times you collect the margin.

what makes the margin low is competition. a grocer is willing to accept a 2% margin on a sale because the cycle can be repeated many times in a year. In a sense, the interest rate (which is quoted at annual rates) on the borrowed dollar is fixed at that annual rate, but if you get to cycle through your operating capital quickly, you get to look at it as the amount of interest you need to pay each week.

This math makes sense because grocery stores only buy broccoli once and then sell it over and over again for theoretically infinite profit. $1 spent on a broccoli over a year can be in the millions due to this phenomenon

It's not a "big tech" product. It's an infrastructure product. A public utility. With (if they don't mess up) life-long subscription customers. With essentially zero risk (aside from infrastructure risk: earthquakes, upgrade cycles.)

I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household.

US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.

Citation needed. The US is #8 in median speed for home broadband and #13 in mobile.

Considering that anything above 15mbps is enough for 4K Ultra Netflix I think the US is doing just fine.

https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states

Christ do you remember 15mbps? those were dark days.

I'm grateful for 5mbps when traveling.

* Weeps in 56k tones *

I don't think I ever got more than 20kbit on my 56k modem. Usually more like 12.

I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid, or if it's just not as population dense as other countries with faster speeds? According to this statistic, it's not very dense, meaning it's super expensive to build broadband. Because it's pretty much a question of physical area covered, not number of people serviced. This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=U...

> This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density

Yes, but America's population isn't evenly distributed across the entire dry surface area. The population is clustered tightly in cities like it is in many other countries, it's just that the cities are further apart from each other. [1]

The better metric, IMO, is the percentage of people who live in urban vs rural areas. [2] The US is 85.8% urban, which is right in line with other developed countries. Spain is 81.5%. France is 88%.

With this in mind, the expensive part would be the trunk line but America has that. [3] It's missing the last mile, especially in urban areas.

[edit] For the record I don't think it's stupidity, I think deregulation, a lack of competition and a laissez-faire policy attitude allowed a few large players to chronically under-invest in infrastructure. And of course the perennial regulatory capture, with some 16 states literally banning municipal ISPs or making it difficult to set up. Good, cheap fiber to the home is available in Chattanooga, for example, thanks to a city-run utility. They sell city-wide 25Gbit FTTH (!!). [4] That model is illegal in states like Missouri, which itself ranks 43rd in broadband coverage.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2021/geo/popul...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/urban-vs-rural-majority

[3] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/15/166239/first-det...

[4] https://epb.com

but connectivity is also not a problem in the denser areas. I live in a medium sized city in the midwest, I have access to 3 Wired Broadband Providers, including 1 Fiber, with a 2nd fiber provider rolling out in the area and could be accessible to me in the next 18-24 mos...

hell even my former home, in a town of 1500 people, I had access to 1 wired Broadband, and 1 Fixed Wireless, and I just learned that a fiber provider has plans to complete wire most of the rural areas of the county by 2025...

Deregulation is not the problem, government corruption is.

> For the record I don't think it's stupidity, I think deregulation

Corrupt legislation is 100% the problem. You have it completely and hopelessly backwards

https://baltimorebrew.com/2016/10/18/city-set-to-approve-10-...

Yes. It is a strangely regulated deregulation/privatization through corrupt legislation. Seems we all agree here and your comment is needlessly insulting.

It's hard to compare housing styles and density when you only have a binary choice of "urban" and "rural". One form of "urban" areas could have extremely different costs per customer to service than the other. Think dense condos and townhouses versus every house with 1-3 people on nearly acre lots. Both are often considered "urban".

US “urban” areas are much less dense than many other countries. Imagine servicing a building with 100 apartments vs 100 detached homes spread out over a square mile.

Agree. True "urban" starts at roughly 5000/sq.m density.

Many countries have had the trunk lines installed for over two decades now. During the dotcom bubble massive fiber trunks were installed in railway and highway rights-of-way - just in time for wavelength-division multiplexing to become economically viable and make most of them redundant.

Across the whole US, sure. But what's the density of the top 50 cities in the US and what is their internet like?

New Zealand is way lower than the US on that measure - almost half the density - yet around 87% of households here have access to FTTP with speeds of up to 800Mbps/500Mbps (you can get a slower plan for lower cost, but the lines all support at least that). Around 40% have actually connected, mostly because people don't have a reason to change from VDSL2.

That metric isn't the right one to look at.

Exactly. Look at population density inside those cities. You'll find the US is living in what they call cities, but that they are all far from one another compared to the rest of the world.

> I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid

The USA is a continent made up of 50 countries [states]. Think European Union. Most people don't grasp or understand the sheer size.

So.. the USA failed 50 times instead of 1? Not sure how that's supposed to be an excuse for anything.

The bureaucracy of state governments is almost unfathomable unless you've experienced it first hand. Start with a meeting to discuss a meeting about another meeting... When you get to that last meeting, a supposed "working session", there's 20 people there supervising and note taking, and the one actual person who seemingly does anything has called out for the day.

Canada is bigger than the USA, and is a distinct part of the same continent.

Merely being big isn't a good argument.

Canada is also not great at providing high speed Internet outside of the more populated regions.

Most of the test results I've seen, mobile and landline, place it above the USA.

You'd have to give a careful and precise definition of what your care about in order to get a more nuanced answer, which is kind of the same point I was driving at by saying "being big isn't a good argument".

It isn't that dense, but also, the utilities are monopolies that just print cash for shareholders because they don't have to invest.

AT&Ts stock price is at a near thirty year low, their dividends are lower than ever and they have a massive amount of debt.

On the other hand you have "cable is the future, I love copper" Germany

Helmut Kohl right?

Germany seems to be a prime example of how privatization can't work for infrastructure. Having the road ripped up every time another provider wants to add fiber is insane.

At least every home that has copper should get fiber.

The excuse that the US is too big or we can't do it is bull. You did it before for electricity and telephone. It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit.

Don't get me wrong, the services provided on the infrastructure can definitely be for profit but not the glass itself.

>>>You did it before for electricity

I huge part of Rural America Electricity is run by Coop's today, often non-profit anyway. Various attempts have been tried for these Coop's to also provide internet services including using Internet Over Power Lines technology, they all fail for some reason.

Also with Telephone and electric build out we did not have the levels of regulatory capture we do today. The US Tax Payer has spent BILLIONS on "broadband" roll out programs to pay for the infrastructure that should have bought fiber to every home including rural areas, the money was wasted on "Fixed Wireless broadband" and other schemes where by the ISP's more or less just pocket the money and there was no accountability by the federal agencies in charge of these programs, largely because they knew they had fat executive jobs at that ISP coming to them

Your implication that government is the solution to this problem by paying for the infrastructure is not based in reality, as government is the problem. Government and government corruption is what stopped fiber from already being a reality.

> I huge part of Rural America Electricity is run by Coop's today, often non-profit anyway. Various attempts have been tried for these Coop's to also provide internet services including using Internet Over Power Lines technology, they all fail for some reason.

They seem to be doing fine in Mississippi.

Where my wife used to live, there was a telephone cooperative. At the time, they offered DSL internet, but it now looks like they offer fiber also: https://www.mdtc.net/services/internet/

Some of the coops are mismanaged. I saw an article about a takeover of an incompetent coop management board that resulted in service improvement.

Like everything, it takes political will and community work to keep services responsible and reliable.

Yes; we need to address regulatory capture. That can be done. Saying ‘better things aren’t possible’ isn’t the solution.

I never said better things are not possible, this disconnect here is that despite all of recorded American history proven other ways people still believe we just need to "elect to right people" to government to fix everything wrong everywhere all problems in society

When in reality power corrupts and by giving power to government you corrupt anyone that enters the profession.

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. --- Ronald Reagan

Better things are possible they just do not come from government, they come in-spite of government

You did it before for electricity and telephone.

Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes.

Every six months or so there's an article in the Navajo Times about the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority managing to hook up another couple of dozen homes to electricity, but there are still many thousands to go.

There was a photo published during the pandemic of children gathered on top of a hill sitting in the dust and sun with their laptops because it was the only place they could get a cell signal to do their schoolwork.

Tens of thousands of American homes have no running water. I've visited many in Texas, West Virginia, New Mexico, and even California.

Time to get out of the Silicon Valley bubble.

It's not a silicon valley canard to overwhelmingly expect electricity and running water in the US. The difficulties faced by the Navajo are not representative of the country at large. The major service providers have preferred to put in place regional monopolies, rather than extend their fiber capabilities, that is the root of the issue.

I did research in Silicon Valley, there is no optic fiber. We have expensive comcast, or ATT or now Starlink.. or now 5G. I wish we had more options(high speed internet) for end users.

This really depends where you are physically located, the infrastructure available varies neighborhood by neighborhood, and in some cases block to block.

Some have two GPON fiber providers, others have one XGSPON provider, and yet other neighborhoods are served only with coaxial where it was easy to get to in the 1980s when the coax networks were built out, and copper services otherwise.

ATT and Sonic both have extensive fiber networks in SF.

In South Bay there are only few options

When you have such large numbers I can’t expect that there are zero people without these services. So to me this is a specious argument- we certainly did blanket the country with electricity and phone service. There will of course always be households without. I hardly see this as a “bubble” view.

> Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes.

…

> Tens of thousands of American homes have no running water. I've visited many in Texas, West Virginia, New Mexico, and even California.

> Time to get out of the Silicon Valley bubble.

Only 10e4-10e5? Even writing as a Brit who chose Berlin over Silicon Valley when Brexit happened (so I don't think I'd count as "in the Silicon Valley bubble" in the first place), I'd call that a rounding error against the USA population.

Don't get me wrong, that ought to still be an embarrassment for the USA to leave anyone behind[0], and it feels like a bigger embarrassment the closer it gets to the last person; but also, that's a minority of even just the Navajo enrolled tribal members, who are themselves a minority of pre-European American groups in the USA, who are themselves a minority of the USA.

[0] I like the space program, but I can also empathise with all those that didn't care about the Apollo landings because of the rather more pressing issues they personally faced on the ground due to endemic lack of equality; I can't find the original quote I'm thinking of, but this has similar vibes: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1969/07/26/the-moon-hours

I'll never forget the story of Paul Bunyan telecom out in I believe it was Montana who used federal funds to build to cabins at a cost of like $10,000+ per cabin to lay copper (back when that was a lot of money) under the right to service clauses of the FCC.

It turns out that servicing 100% of the population isn't practical when people choose to live in very remote areas. I agree that it would be onerous for carriers to have to service 100% of the population with any kind of service, but I disagree with the current standard on non-copper services which amount to something like 80% of population within a given metro zone. It biases too hard towards city living, especially as we are seeing more and more people move away from cities.

Rural broadband in America is extremely difficult in most parts of the country, way harder than it needs to be. And don't get me started on WISP vs hardwire, hardwire is the only real internet and don't let anyone fool you otherwise.

Source: 10 years in the belly of the beast of telecom.

83% of the population lives in urban areas and it’s only increasing (projected to hit 90% around 2050).

It turns out that servicing 100% of the population isn't practical when people choose to live in very remote areas.

Mostly correct. However, not everyone chooses to live in a remote area. The Navajo, referenced above, are among the people who were forced to settle in a particular area, at the point of a government gun.

Moreover, if it wasn't for people living in remote areas, people in the cities wouldn't have food.

> Moreover, if it wasn't for people living in remote areas, people in the cities wouldn't have food.

We need to be careful with the words here.

Not much in the way of food is produced by people who live in what I would term "remote" areas.

Lots of food is produced by people who live in what I would term "rural" areas.

We can and should and must provide improved communications services to rural areas - I think we have a moral imperative to do so. The remote areas, however, are a different story. If they happen to end up being serviced by e.g. Starlink then great, but I don't think we have the same moral imperative there.

Most food is produced in rural areas with infrastructure, not remote areas. Farmers frequently live in town. Agricultural production costs are sensitive to logistics, so doing any kind of intensive agriculture in genuinely remote areas is expensive. You don't want to be too far from a rail spur if you are a farmer.

The only agriculture on remote land at scale is cattle ranching, which has the advantage that cattle can move themselves.

> It biases too hard towards city living, especially as we are seeing more and more people move away from cities

Urbanization is progressing.

Suburbia are not sustainable and should not be encouraged. As you just noticed, it takes way more money to service their infrastructure, and they bring in far less tax revenue to pay for it than dense mixed use developments.

I think some clarity in terminology may be required here.

Those cabins in MT are not in anything that could ever be called "suburbia".

Suburbia has its problems (many of them), but we're talking about a different class of living here: actual rural living, with neighbors a mile (or miles) away, no infrastructure other than dirt roads etc.

In the US people can and do choose to live many, many miles from the nearest infrastructure in remote areas, especially in the western US. I used to have a place in the mountains of Nevada originally occupied since the 19th century that was 15 miles from the nearest utility service. Many of the remaining off-the-grid places are like this and would require creating a new right-of-way across private and government lands as there are no formal roads to many of these places. The taxpayer cost would be astronomical relative to the benefit. (The established "roads" everyone uses are informal common law trails which don't exist as far as the government is concerned.)

It's way higher than thousands, at least for water. Millions of people in the US have their own wells for water and septic systems for waste water.

That's still running water. I'm talking about homes with zero options for water. Not even a well.

And sometimes (like in New Mexico), thousands of homes are cut off from water infrastructure because some rich guy doesn't want a pipe running under his golf course.

Where has this happened in New Mexico?

The point is that fiber penetration is still nowhere near copper/POTS penetration in the US. Not even close, despite decades of subsidies and tax breaks to the telcos to make universal fiber a reality.

If people want to live in the hinterlands and avoid the conveniences of society, well that's up to them. Why should anyone else pay for their lifestyle choices? If they want to live off the land (and off sewer, water, electric and telephone utilities) they can go do it. Otherwise, these rugged individualists need to suck it up and move closer to town.

There are plenty of places in Bellevue, Washington mere blocks from major Microsoft offices where only copper is available, and the VDSL2 on offer is intermittent due to the lead clad copper lines having water infiltration and being past their standard service life.

Getting Lumen, Astound, Verizon, Comcast or any of the other vendors who have fiber under 100 feet away to even quote a directional bore is a multi-month process, then the number they give you is a "fuck you" 6 digit price, and they certainly won't let you pull a permit from the city, hire your own contractor to do the directional bore, then pull cable through your conduit.

> It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit.

Or massive government financing! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act

Money and an infrastructure that isn’t for profit pretty much directly implies massive government financing.

If I'm not mistaken, AT&T and friends got similar grants to install high-speed internet multiple times. They just... didn't do it.

> It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit.

Uhhh.... Most of the nationwide infrastructure was put into place by the railroad companies that were definitely for profit organizations.

> I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household.

that actually did happen with dad. He was working and off a sudden his internet stopped working, put up a screen saying he was on "vacation hold" and to call in and remove it.

He called in, got it removed. Next day, he can a call from AT&T retention telling him he needed to upgrade to the fiber and they were discontinuing their copper plan

What is "hilarious" is that elsewhere, AT&T sells outdated DSL, still. But they lobby to have DSL speeds and customers removed from broadband surveys and requirements because they are "obsolete and outdated".

They still sell them. In some cases, your only option. But they don't count for dragging down AT&T's broadband 'scores' and 'speeds' because ... it's inconvenient and reasons...

I wonder if it's the difficulty of laying wires. The number of permits that need to be pulled when wiring a city just makes it prohibitive.

The trick is to mandate "telephone service", not "analog landline". That'd allow them to transition to telephone-over-fiber, making new connections worth the effort.

AT&T is the Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) in various areas of California. They have applied to the CPUC to have "targeted relief" from that telephone service obligation.

Currently, AT&T could provide telephone service via fiber, rather than copper, wherever they may choose to do so. So, currently, they can transition to fiber-to-the-premises wherever they want. Their COLR obligation does not require copper wires as the technology.

The companies that used to make phone switches (Nortel, Lucent) went out of business over 2 decades ago and they are unmaintainable. Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive, and the market of Luddite little old ladies like Pereira who cling to landlines is just not large enough to make it financially viable, unlike the market for broadband.

What Verizon did was sell the business to Frontier, a company everyone knows is going to go bust, but Verizon is rid of the liability. It’s long pas time regulators stopped the quixotic quest to preserve and outdated technology there is simply not enough demand to keep alive.

Maybe they can see what is happening in the UK? They are planning to switch off the analogue part of copper phone lines next year, and people who still want a "phone line" (most people just use mobile phones) will be switched to VOIP service.

Almost everyone has internet and phone provided by the same company. For the last few years it's been a standard feature in all "modems" to have a analogue POTS interface. It just needs to be switched on in software.

Exactly, you need to have Internet service, and the phone is an add-on to that. What you won't get is a standalone emulation of Alexander Graham Bell's Plain Old Telephone Service without also having to pay for the broadband.

Frontier, Windstream, and Lumen are all really odd companies that are holding the bag on providing POTS and DSL to rural areas. From what I've heard from people in those companies, the universal service fund is the lifeblood of the companies. Much like Google, they're trying to find new revenue sources, and unlike Google, are having some success in their diversification efforts, but that universal service fund money really would be difficult to do without. With Starlink maturing and competing services in at least the planning stages, I wonder how much longer the government will keep the basis for rural copper going.

Holding people to obligations they themselves have taken on seems like a reasonable thing to do, but what do I know.

TFA even illustrates why it is necessary. Pereira got her landline cut without a suitable replacement in place:

>Pereira has relied on her landline for 58 years. She got a cell phone for the first time last year when her landline got disconnected, but she lives in a dead zone for cell phones. CBS13 had a hard time getting in touch with her because the call kept dropping.

Stop defending telcos weaseling out of their obligations when they have taken public funding for decades in order to provide a utility.

I wonder if it'd be cheaper for AT&T to just partner with Starlink and pass through a part of the subsidy?

The more people who use Starlink, the worse it performs and the higher their profits.

Why couldn't they just add more satellites like we do cell towers?

> Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive

Not sure about that, this was done for the whole German phone network a couple of years ago. People can still have their analog phone directly connected to the socket in their house but now their call will be a VoIP call. Not sure where the transition from the analog signal to VoIP happens, but I guess it's a the end of the customers copper line.

> People can still have their analog phone directly connected to the socket in their house but now their call will be a VoIP call. Not sure where the transition from the analog signal to VoIP happens, but I guess it's a the end of the customers copper line.

The transition happens at the telephone exchange, or possibly occasionally in a FTTN/FTTC outdoor cabinet. And it only works that way if you're really only using a plain phone line without internet access. Otherwise, the transition needs to happen in your router.

>> Frontier, a company everyone knows is going to go bust

Does everyone know that.. what make you say that? They seem to be doing pretty good with the hand they were delt

Frontier has an aggressive push for their fiber services.

> Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive

About $35 / connection[0], but usually basically free because it's part of the customer's router[1]. Comcast seems to offer unlimited wired telephony for $20 / month, so it's definitely doable.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-HT801-Single-Port-Telepho...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/ARRIS-Surfboard-Telephone-Certified-S...

I live less than. a mile from a mid-sized town (15k peopl), 25 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley. The only reliable internet access available is 8mbit DSL using copper and satellite (HughesNet). No cable, no fiber, dodgy cell service, and at last try Starlink was not remotely reliable. Last big rainstorm we lost service for 5 days.

I’d love to be able to ditch copper, but if AT&T is allowed to pull the plug, it means expensive, high latency satellite will be the sole option.

I live in Florida and found Starlink worked mostly fine in a rain storm (occasional disconnects). This is using their newer portable receiver though, which one did you use?

>will be the sole option.

I mean this sincerely: you could move.

In 2012, I left the Castro Valley part of sfEastBay and moved to a small Southern town with fiber optic 10gbps available at every electric-supplied address (I lived 8 years inside a rustic national forest with a fiber/copper jack on my ramshackle cabin's powermeter).

> In 2012, I left the Castro Valley part of sfEastBay and moved to a small Southern town

Apropos of anything else, I can't imagine the culture shift from the Castro in SF to a small southern town...

Castro Valley != The Castro. Castro Valley is just north of Hayward.

Ahh, I stand corrected!

Interestingly, I commuted into The Castro (once a week) and definitely let me own freak flag fly, proudly =D

Castro Valley and Livermore are culturally “the south” of the Bay Area. You can find trucks with Trump flags and stuff.

I mean it sounds like you don’t live in a town? I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect service providers to string an extra mile of cable just for one customer.

There’s always going to be trade offs in living location.

Then you'd be wrong. Those service providers got their monopolies by promising the state they'd serve the rural customers. That you don't understand these basics disqualifies you from this entire topic.

People are born not knowing anything. If you know something, it is your responsibility to share that knowledge. Remember that you were also born not knowing about the nature of subsidies and state granted infrastructure monopolies. There’s no need to be an ass while sharing your knowledge in the same way that whoever taught you wasn’t an ass to you.

Similar but no DSL because we're about 6 miles from the nearest town. We're literally screwed here. The redwoods are too tall for satellite so there's just no other option.

That seems like an unsustainable place to live because of fire risk as well.

If anyone is wondering about first reponders' use of land lines, that necessity is to be alleviated with the United States setting aside some spectrum in 700MHz back in 2012.

Do a search for "band 14" - here is something to look at: FirstNet

https://www.firstnet.com/coverage/band-14.html

[My household used to be required to have a land line ages ago and I still pay (slight) attention to things in this space. I do not have first-hand experience any more with such matters.]

The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both. With Virtual Power Plants, the grid can be reimagined and it will happen faster if competing ideas/companies battle it out in the marketplace for consumers.

Second best is for electric utility to offer fiber, like EPB of Chattanooga, TN.

I would not want PG&E (northern CA power company) in charge of any more infrastructure in California. They already have shown incompetence by shifting maintenance funds into bonuses instead of actual infrastructure maintenance.

Thats why the city should own lines. PG&E needs competition. There was a recent post, some small utilities are providing electricity a lot cheaper than PG&E.

That assumes cities are competent. The coop that provides power and fiber where my cabin is in Plumas County (far north eastern CA) is great. They even have redundant electrical feeds PG&E as well as from Nevada.

That said, after many years of living in Santa Cruz, CA - there is no way in heck the city here could manage any of that competently.

The trick is to make the power companies non-profits: split the network part from the generation&selling part, and give it proper oversight. It's what Europe has been doing for decades.

> The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both.

Something similar is the case in the European Union, as the electricity network is usually a different company than the electricity providers. The network is often owned by some municipal company and charges customers only for the transport of energy over the network. For the energy itself customers can choose from dozens of different providers, some of them generate their own electricity, others just buy and resell electricity on the market.

There are millions who don't live in a city.

I wonder about low income households and if cell phone or internet providers have the same obligation to provide baseline service as do landline? If not, this seems like an important hurdle to cross before dropping these customers…

I live in a rural area not far from silicon valley and there is no cell coverage here and there is no broadband. The trees are too tall for satellite (redwood forest) and so when AT&T pulls out, we, and our little neighborhood of about 50, half of whom are fixed income seniors, will have no connection to the outside. A couple neighbors on the hillside can get satellite but the latency's too much for wifi calling so that doesn't work. Fortunately we have a ham radio operator who can reach the sheriff if something catastrophic happens.

Related, I am not sure how to teach a toddler to call 911.

My cell is locked and I'm not giving them the pin or face.

Without a land line I am considering an exterior alarm wired to an inside panic button. In the evert I collapse from choking on a banana slug what does my toddler do? So far the I instructions are to ring the trusted neighbors.

Absolutely every cell phone has the ability to call emergency numbers from a locked device. Even without Sim card.

> Even without Sim card.

Depends on the countries though. A sim card (whether expired or not) is needed in France to call 112

To be pedantic: the cell phone is required to have this capability - the network just doesn't have to accept it.

(also note it will use any available cell tower operated by any provider and will preempt normal calls if the station is too busy, so the appearance of no signal/"bars" shouldn't discourage trying to call 911)

Emergency calls must work in locked mode (i think by law). On iphone its two button press and a swipe - def easier than operating a rotary phone from when i was a toddler

That depends on where you live. It’s definitely easier to dial 112 on a rotary phone than 911 or especially 999.

On android you can dial emergency lines on a locked phone as well from the lock screen, I suppose iOS has the same function?

You don’t need to be able to unlock the phone home in order to place an emergency call. In an iPhone trying to swipe-unlock will show an “emergency” button, for example.

On iPhone you can enable it to send an SOS message to a selected contact + call 911 by pressing the power button 5 times in quick succession.

With electric shock collar assisted conditioning, the average toddler should be able to learn how to do that in just a few days.

> With electric shock collar...

Ah, that's the thing I've been missing all the time. All this time I thought it was about good parenting.

On some Android phones pressing the power button 5 times in a row will call emergency services. I learned this the hard way when I was very drunk and fumbling with my phone - cue a call back from 911 where I had to awkwardly explain in the middle of crowded bar that the call was made accidentally.

If you have a young child you may want to consider disabling this feature as it's very easy to accidentally trigger and law enforcement is required to respond if they don't receive and intelligible response!

I learned this when the power button on my Pixel 3 started repeatedly firing. My phone started repeatedly rebooting, opening the camera, and calling 911, all with no user input.

Because the phone was booting up and initializing the camera, the GUI would take a while to respond. It would display the “slide to cancel”, sometimes overtop the camera GUI, and wouldn’t respond when I tried to cancel it.

The only thing that stopped it was running out of battery. This started at 10 PM on a Friday night, and lasted a few hours.

Yet another reason it should be a crime to sell a phone with a non-removable battery.

On iphone you can call emergency by just holding both side buttons at the same time.

Besides all the people who are telling you that you can call 911 on a locked phone, I will also point out that voice assistants are a good way to go as well.

E.g., “Hey Siri, call 911”

I am surprised at the lack of reading comprehension in these replies.

I am certain 911/emergency services work on a locked phone. My point is teaching a toddler

From my locked phone it is ~8 steps. Power on, swipe phone, press emergency button, type in 911, send.

Power button x >5 seems to trigger it as well. This may be the better option.

That's going to be hard for people on criminal home confinement. Those anklets connect to a base station that connects only to an analog land line. Most of those things are obsolete technology.

Don’t they have a few GPS-only units now where all the hardware is in the ankle bracelet? I work criminal-law-adjacent and I feel like I see booths for them at conventions. If so, this sounds like a great opportunity for more vendor grift… I mean government thrift.

Yes gps bracelets have been a thing for years

Wow. Fascinating (and extremely important) edge case.

Out of curiosity, what led you to knowing this?

Do they not work with an ATA (VoIP to POTS adapter)? If not currently, is this a technical matter (can’t work) or an administrative matter (detectable and not permitted)?

As the former wearer of such an appliance (also married to another former wearer of a different such appliance) I can confirm this is no longer the case.

My wife keeps a land line because of superior voice quality for calls to her family. I find it handy because I can give a number to businesses when they demand one. We never answer that phone (it has been silenced from ringing). AT&T has no broadband service in my area - they offer only DSL and I live in a fairly rich area of silicon valley. The problem is that my utilities were put underground when the house was built in the 70s, so it's too expensive to upgrade the utilities.

Facetime audio has super high quality. It's noticeable. If you use voip you can get "hd audio". If they turn it off... have her try that! Not trying to argue, just offering a solution.

Dumb question, but it's the same in France and Switzerland, and year the fiber optic coverage is quite good. They just use the existing conduit. Fiber creates no interference and usually they run alongside telephone cables

The issue is that a lot of countries didn't install their telephone cables in conduits, but put them directly into the dirt. Adding fiber to it requires digging up the entire run, which is of course quite expensive.

> give a number to businesses

> never answer that phone

Yes. A long time ago had to give a landline number to school, to have a discussion with them 6 months later on why they expected us to ever pick it.

We only ever used that line for international phone calls, and after cancelling it it basically made no difference in our life, except the savings. We give our mobile numbers when asked for landline, bullshit numbers to spam companies, block the ones that still get a real number, and ask relatives to call us on any other reliable service (international call quality was garbage anyway)

One thing which is absolutely infuriating is the noise cancellation of iPhones.

For me, with multiple people, it frequently aggressively mutes the microphone in noisy environments such that they're speaking and it's entirely silent on my end. You can't turn this off, there's no setting. I can't speak to my parents if they're outside and it's windy or if they're in the car, or often if they're just on speakerphone inside. It's ridiculous.

If you need to give out a number that you'll never pick up, why not just use any random non-working number?

it's often useful to have that line dump to a voicemail in the off chance that someone important did happen to call.

it's also useful to own the line you claim to own in the off chance of a verification of some sort.

POTS would have had the same voice quality as a decent VOIP provider, as upstream from your home they were converting it to ulaw anyways. This would have been better than the early GSM codecs. But these days with VoLTE "HD Voice" uses a superior codec. Most chat apps will use a codec that's better than ulaw as well. So there's a lot of places to go that offer significantly better voice quality these days.

“superior voice quality”

Superior to what? With VoLTE the only calls I make these days that sound bad are people on POTS lines.

Let's give them a choice:

1. Keep supporting landlines;

2. Relax that anywhere symmetric 1Gbps fiber is available for under $60/month; or

3. Leave the service area, transferring existing assets to a municipal authority who can then build and install symmetric 1Gbps fiber to their residents.

Pick one.

I've kept my AT&T landline mostly to reduce the amount of spam calls on my cell phone but also to see just how long it would last. It fails every year or two from squirrels sharpening their teeth on the wires. The last time I had it fixed, the service guy told me I was the only active line on the street.

I've had the number so long, it used to be (415) instead of (650).

I personally think that this reason to keep a landline also became outdated.

There are so many tools and features on cell phones to identify and stop spam, and it seems like carriers are finally starting to get ahead of it.

At this point the people I know in my life who still have landlines mostly get spam on them especially because they aren’t actually using the landline for much, so almost 100% of the calls going over the land line are low-value even if they’re not spam.

I.e., everyone I know with a landline isn’t calling friends or family on the landline, it’s more like a contact phone number to give to the electric company.

Landlines are irreplacable in case of power outage. As someone who lives in developing world we often have power outages, when if you have no charge left in your cellphone, you cannot even call emergency. Landlines are independently powered and never failed even at most serious multi-day blackouts; even municipal water pumps stopped working, but phones kept functioning..

Sure, but we were talking about the US, which is so developed that it doesn’t even have 3G anymore. Americans own over one personal motor vehicle per household, they could charge their phone with their car if they really had to. Less than one hour of the California minimum wage buys you a 30W solar panel or a large spare battery to charge your phone. The risks are minimal.

And I’ve definitely had phone lines go out in the past. All it takes is one tree falling. The lines are on the same poles as the electric service. Sure, they were more reliable, but not by any measure that makes them worth keeping around (especially since the vast majority of lines sit completely inactive).

If someone wants to remove the old lines from the pole to the house, who would do that now? I don't use my landline anymore and trying to cleanup the clutter of old lines.

Wirecutters should do the job I think?

legally, maybe not, but in my experience, every time you reactivate the service, they ask to replace that wire from the street to the home even if they don't need to so that they can overcharge ATT/customer... they even often try to replace the existing box on your house with an extra huge one for no practical reason.

Sure, but if you're 100% certain that you will never use their service again that's not such a huge issue. I did the same with a power line on my Canadian property where they kept that line powered up even if I wasn't using the service because we were all on solar and wind. They didn't want to send someone out to take out the road side fuse. I called them and asked them who would be liable if due to their refusal to power down the line someone would get injured and they sent someone out immediately :)

That wasn't a theoretical risk by the way, the first stretch of that line must have been many decades old.

Algoma Power... no love lost between us.

When some branches brought mine down in a storm, I cut mine off on the house side, spooled it up secure with electrical tape, and hung it low on the pole on the street side. Probably shouldn't disconnect it at their box but past there it's yours if you own the house.

Legally I believe it is there equipment up to the cable modem. I would bet what you did is technically illegal depending where you are. Additionally, unterminated lines to a coax network can cause RF interference, and you may actually have created a detectable problem for other people in your area.

I remember Comcast sniffer trucks driving around looking for these... do they still do that? Is it required by the FCC?

I have some coax going to my house left over from some predecessor to Comcast. It's not attached to anything, and it's sagging.

In Seattle area there's https://wirefreesky.com I saved $250 by just using wire cutters.

Previously the power company removed the cable line for me, because their cherry picker was too tall and just drove into it and it snapped. Luckily I was using DSL.

A good friend of mine recommended Henry Clark Hacker to me when I had issues with my partner, he started acting suspicious and was on his phone at odd hours & always acting strange. I contacted Henry hacker and he remotely hacked into his device granting me total access to his device without him knowing. I was shocked and overwhelmed that I could read his texts, see pictures, emails and all that. This hacker is hands down the best I’ve hired. Contact him on email : Henryclarkethicalhacker @ g mail com, I recommend him to everyone reading this post.

I'm pretty sure Verizon is doing similar things with their copper infrastructure on the East Coast – they've more or less abandoned it in favor of fiber in certain regions. For anyone curious, Camp Seco is not a particularly remote part of California but it is pretty sparsely populated. It's about an hour outside of Sacramento and Stockton according to Google maps.

I wonder if AT&T will ever get the bright idea to try this in a more populated area (like the Bay Area). The condo I'm in now has underground utilities. Sonic's abandoned DSL and their rebranded AT&T fiber. If they ever roll out fiber, the HOA's on the hook to trench from the street and to each of the buildings because Sonic cannot / will not use another utility's conduit. The phone wiring predates twisted pair, and I'm betting the coax is equally antique. High speed internet? Yeah, right.

A decade or so ago, we had an ice storm take out power for much of the town for five days. Because the copper pair was still intact and powered by the central office, we never lost phone service.

This week, after heavy rain, the copper lines, which one technician said had cheap paper insulation, stopped working. A different technician got outgoing calls working again, but incoming calls (the higher voltage ring signal) were still failing, and AT&T told their technician not to fix it. We were forced to transfer our service to fiber, which was already present for internet. The AT&T fiber router can drive our existing handsets, with replacement crawlspace wiring reasonably priced.

My UPS lasts 90 minutes, nowhere near five days. Sometime over the next year, I'll probably get a Generac attached to our gas line - the tree canopy makes solar impractical.

I'm lucky that I can afford these worse alternatives. Many can't.

Enshittification is seeping into the physical layer.

Enshittification?

The original delivery mechanism, copper, was convenient to carry electricity over. However, copper has high maintenance costs due to moisture intrusion, breakages, and signal degradation. It also has theoretical upper bound on bandwidth. In many locations the copper may never even make it to the CO anymore and may be served by a pedestal with fiber and a small battery backup.

Is replacing the deteriorating, limited, copper infrastructure really enshitification? I expect telecommunications, not power deliver, personally.

Keep in mind that many gas lines require electricity to operate. There are plenty of pumps and control stations along the line, after all.

If you want to have electricity during a multi-day regional power outage, your best bet is a generator fueled by a propane tank, or some kind of long-life gasoline.

Or they could just do what Century Link has done here in Colorado: Let it rot in the ground. The pedestals around all seem to have lost their covers and are just sitting exposed to the elements, an eyesore (and they were no beauty to begin with :-)

Did they “lose their covers” or did tweakers steal all the copper? That’s a big problem in the US.

The copper still seems to be there, it's just all exposed to the weather now. I'll have to keep a closer eye on it when I drive past.

My 90 year old mother can't always figure out her cell phone. The land line is what she uses most. I don't care what the specific technology is, but a phone that's plugged in, and always available (no "off" switch) and just makes and receives calls with the familiar UI (lift phone off hook, enter number on keypad) is still a requirement for many people.

No particular reason that "land line" phones need wired service though. My office uses 5G service for internet and ATA VOIP adapters for the phones. The experience of using the phones is exactly the same as when they were on traditional copper circuits provided by the phone company 10 years ago.

The telephone companies seem to actively push for you to get rid of your land line. My monthly bill recently dropped $75 ($50 for local-only phone service + fees like 911), when I canceled my land line.

My 100mbit VDSL2 bonded internet line is $75, so it was a very noticeable monthly decrease. My ISP/Telco is Windstream in the eastern USA.

The equipment is aging and expensive to maintain.

Have California cell networks gotten to the point where they'll be able to handle the mass calling that follows disasters? Curious how people will contact emergency services and friends/family in the critical time following an earthquake/fire/etc.

for the most part, things are much better than they were 10 years ago. you can go to a baseball/football game and your phone works. you can go to a concert and your phone works. a big part of this has been capacity upgrades, protocol upgrades, and a shift from telecom traffic to internet traffic

it has always been difficult to contact emergency services following an earthquake / massive fire. it might actually be more scalable now. and you have more options of who/how to contact

At this point the problem is likely less technical than limited manpower to actually answer phones when the call volume goes up 5000%.

it works at a football game because they know about it and send in extra equipment to handle it.

My test always used to be midnight, new years eve, when everyone wanted to say happy new year at the same time.

On 2G/GSM, the whole network would drop for 30 minutes, just zero reception on the phone.

On 3G, you'd have reception but calls were impossible and texts mostly failed.

On 3G+HSDPA, texts also worked fine but data became unusable as people sent fireworks photos

On early 4G, not much changed from HSDPA since the networks were busier from more people using smartphones and social media

On LTE Advanced and 5G it's all a non-event now, everything works fine

Not if the power goes out. Unlike landlines (which are required to have generators at the central office), cell towers are only required to have a battery backup that lasts a couple hours.

When we had the rolling blackouts in the bay area a few years ago, Comcast's cable network was the first to go, but the cell network didn't last much longer.

In order to maintain her home telephone service, my home-style conscious mom was forced to go from a from a single copper pair through the wall to three massive black boxes mounted in a very conspicuous location in the dining room.

And there are internet providers there https://go.silverrapid.com/internet/

My mom told me she was worried her cell phone might run out of battery and then she'd be unable to call 911.

It's funny how used to charging our phones we've become.

An amusing but generally harmless boomerism. Obviously, an apples to apples comparison would be a cell phone that is plugged in, since a land line has to be plugged to a power source (the phone line).

(To me, it doesn’t matter if the phone line is more reliable than mains power, because it’s probably not more reliable than a charged phone with a “backup battery.” Then you’ve got Apple shipping satellite SOS-equipped phones which must count for something.)

It is insane how reliable landlines are, though. When the power goes out, you can make "candles" by connecting a 0.47 uF capacitor to a LED leg and connect both ends to the red and green phone wires; there's enough voltage to power a couple of them without the phone going off the hook.

In an emergency, the lines don't get clogged like cell phone towers, and the Telco infrastructure is much more protected than wireless (you'd have to bomb a pretty big building with no windows to take out a small area's lines). It's probably fine in the grand scheme that we lose these properties. We'll just reinvent them later if it turns out we miss them.

> In an emergency, the lines don't get clogged like cell phone tower

Back in landline days I was in a couple emergencies where my phone only gave error tones or recorded messages of being too busy. Even in the ancient circuit switched times one could have easily run into a situation where whatever destination out you were trying to go would have been totally full.

This idea POTS would never get clogged is a myth. They could handle a lot more capacity than cell phones at the time, sure, but they did still eventually get flooded.

And in one of those times, I couldn't get a POTS call out but I could send an SMS and it would eventually get through.

Does she not have wired internet? VoIP sounds like a remedy.

What I have not seen here ours why I still have a landline.

Telcos are required to have five 9 uptime for landlines in the USA. (That's less than 6 minutes a year.)

None of this is promised or regulated for internet based voice solution.

Didn't they get paid too much by the government to install those lines?

Probably. Camp Seco is an old mining town. However, it looks like there's some EBMUD land out there. Would be interesting to see if they could be goaded into maintaining comms infrastructure. Certainly there are going to be some utility employees out there doing whatever.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2270377,-120.8562145,3a,90y,...

And don't they (and Comcast) have special rights to the phone poles? iirc, Verizon can't use them to install 5G micro-cell towers. (This was in California)

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