AT&T Sends Out New Letter On Abandoning California Subscribers -- and
this one shows that their plans are even worse!
I previously discussed in some detail AT&T's proposal to the
California Public Utilities Commission for a mass abandonment of
subscribers across the state, including some of the most vulnerable
ones.
AT&T has sent out a new letter making more explicit their plans to
abandon California subscribers. This version is slightly less opaque
compared with the last one, but is even more alarming.
In addition to their request to eliminate all traditional landline
services to residential, business, alarm systems, commercial
establishments, hospitals, other emergency communications systems,
etc., they now quietly imply that at any time they may decide to stop
providing VoIP services as well. This would of course terminate
services for those residences and businesses who had already converted
to VoIP.
This time they included a map with the recipient's zip code shown and
shaded in to show that, yeah, they want to end these services
throughout essentially their entire service areas across the state.
You need to read between the lines a bit to fully understand their
plan, and you need to know the history.
AT&T originally promised broad deployment of fiber throughout their
service areas. This never happened, and only very limited areas ever
got fiber. That means that all terrestrial voice -- whether
traditional or VoIP -- in most of their areas are delivered by copper.
AT&T wants to abandon their copper. They don't care that millions of
customers depend on their existing services and don't have practical
alternatives across a vast range of situations.
Also of note, since clearly AT&T's goal is to abandon all copper
circuits that they possible can, this would appear to put most
residential and business data circuits at risk as well -- because like
the voice services, most of their data services are delivered by
copper since AT&T never installed the promised fiber.
The depth of AT&T's disdain for California, after being permitted to
operate as an effective monopoly for so many services for so long, is
beneath contempt.
I'll of course have more to say about this as the CPUC process gets
underway.
"Thank you for using AT&T. Now drop dead!"
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
_______________________________________________
nnsquad mailing list
https://lists.nnsquad.org/mailman/listinfo/nnsquad
