AT&T can't hang up on landline phone customers, California agency rules
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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>
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.
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.)
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.
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...
Presumably the last mile station would always have the perfect angle to the base station(s) - perhaps even radio priority.
There are tens of thousands of families living with those conditions. This is the reason the copper network still matters. It's the only thing available for many.
I'm 11 miles from the Googleplex and there's no cell, no cable, no fiber and PG&E is out 12 days a year during summer and winter. AT&T's landline is our only assured connection to the outside world and they even plant generators up the road during the winter to keep it alive during power outages. Our neighborhood's only other connection, a WISP that relies on radios mounted a couple hundred feet up tall redwoods, is unreliable during these widespread power outages.
We've got AT&T copper and HAM and that's how we reach the sheriff in emergencies, like the raging wildfires of the last few decades. And we've got it good for being in one of the wealthiest counties in the state with nearby population centers. The rural north and big parts of the central valley don't even have the WISPs and often can't drive 5 minutes to a signal like we can.
"Just drop a $10 kit" is either magical or lazy thinking.
The problem is that there are customers outside of mobile range. Mobile is also less reliable than landlines and that matters for people in rural areas with flaky mobile service.
Article is just using “hang up” in a colloquial sense. Cute, but unnecessarily confusing.
"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.
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.