The State That Wouldn’t Hang Up: California’s Fight to Keep the Old Phone Network Alive
n 1877, Thomas Doolittle strung the first hard-drawn copper telephone wire in Ansonia, Connecticut, replacing the iron lines that had carried Alexander Graham Bell’s earliest calls. Nearly 150 years later, most of the country is finally retiring the last copper in its telephone networks, replacing it with fiber-optic cable and wireless connectivity.
California, naturally, has other ideas.
Much of the state’s copper network remains in place—powered, maintained, and protected by rules written for a monopoly telephone era that no longer exists. AT&T still provides old-fashioned “plain old telephone service” (POTS) to roughly 3% of households in its California territory. Yet the company spends about $1 billion a year keeping that network alive.
The reason is not consumer demand. It is state regulation. And the costs do not stop at California’s border. They fall on customers across the country.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now has a chance to fix that. AT&T has asked the FCC to declare that, once the agency authorizes POTS discontinuance under federal law, California’s carrier-of-last-resort (COLR) requirements are preempted.