Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
AT&T Cellphones The Courts Wireless Networking

AT&T Sues California In Bid To Stop Offering Traditional Phone Service (reuters.com) 120

Posted by BeauHD from the out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AT&T on Wednesday filed suit (PDF) against California officials seeking a court order declaring it does not have to continue offering traditional copper wire phone service to new customers as it vowed to spend $19 billion on modern telecom services. California requires the U.S. wireless carrier to spend $1 billion annually to maintain a century-old telephone network that few use, AT&T said, saying the network now serves just 3% of households in AT&T's California territory.

AT&T's suit named the California Public Utilities Commission and the state attorney general. AT&T said it is committing to investing $19 billion in California as it works to connect more than 4 million additional households and businesses across California by 2030 and added IP-based networks are far more reliable and efficient. AT&T also Wednesday asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to discontinue traditional phone service in parts of California where it has faster, more reliable service available. It also filed a petition with the FCC to declare that California's rules that effectively require AT&T to power, repair and sell traditional phone service, even after the FCC has authorized the service to be phased out, are preempted by federal standards.

AT&T added that transitioning from copper will save an estimated 300 million kilowatt-hours annually by 2030 or the equivalent of eliminating emissions from 17 million gallons of gasoline. The company added that California has already suffered about 2,000 outages from copper thefts this year and it struggles to find replacement parts. The federal government and virtually all states where AT&T historically offered copper-wire service "have now eliminated outdated regulatory obstacles" allowing AT&T to begin powering down its old network and increasing its investments in modern communication technologies, the company said in its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in southern California.

AT&T Sues California In Bid To Stop Offering Traditional Phone Service More | Reply

AT&T Sues California In Bid To Stop Offering Traditional Phone Service

Comments Filter:

  • The energy 'savings' are just moved (Score:3)

    by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Thursday May 21, 2026 @11:47PM (#66155168) Homepage Journal

    Most of the energy consumption is now moved to the customers bill, so there's nothing saved. Just redistributed.

    • Now, with an extra AI infrastructure funding fee and a fee fee.
  • California has ATT by the balls. I want fiber everywhere.

    • Re:Make them pay (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Friday May 22, 2026 @12:21AM (#66155184)
      The US taxpayers paid for this 5x over over the past 20 years.
      • Well, now perhaps we have the leverage to make it happen. I did, finally, just get fiber to my office. 300/300 only, because anything faster is insanely expensive.

      • Re:Make them pay (Score:5, Insightful)

        by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Friday May 22, 2026 @08:14AM (#66155526)

        >"The US taxpayers paid for this 5x over over the past 20 years."

        Not just through taxes, but from consumer bills. Take a guess at what my copper land line now costs me per month. A single line with ZERO features- no caller ID, no 3-way calling, no call waiting. AND with no long distance ability and with restricted number of calls per month (I think it is 50 or something). It is the absolute lowest-end, most restricted POTS option from Verizon. $41.

        And what does my full service T-Mobile cell line, that includes long distance, caller ID, conferencing, unlimited calling, unlimited texting, AND "unlimited" data cost? $42.

        Yeah, something isn't right. Cell towers are very expensive and also require maintenance and upgrades, power and backup and land connections, and there are lots of them. I keep the land line because I have had that number for something like 35 years, it works without power, it is a separate backup for normal and emergency use, and I don't want most people knowing my cell number. Yeah, I can port the number over to IP based, but the POTS land line is far more reliable than my cable company's coax crap, which is my only option. And if I do it through my cable company's plan, it costs almost the same, about $40, so I save nothing. So I would have to use some third party system and buy the hardware. That might be what ultimately happens. I have just been waiting to be pissed off enough :)

    • That seems like the obvious compromise. You can drop POTS when you have FTTH provisioned to an address

      • You can drop POTS when you have FTTH provisioned to an address

        While I would personally love fiber, that is unrealistic. Ensuring a house has some sort of internet connectivity is sufficient.

        • While I would personally love fiber, that is unrealistic. Ensuring a house has some sort of internet connectivity is sufficient.

          The crucial thing is some sort of physically connected, no wireless, connectivity and that there needs to be proper UPS and generator all the way back to the exchange. DSL over copper can be fine, VOIP over Cable TV could theoretically work. Satellite or 5G mobile is not the same. In real life that probably means that FTTH is easier in most cases. The little bit of flexibility of allowing copper for places where nothing else has been laid and its difficult to lay new lines can make a big difference to the c

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by larwe ( 858929 )
            Why do you stipulate wired? No matter how I look at the failure scenarios, wireless seems to be more robust. In the wired scenario, you have local nodes with backhaul to the telco, and from those local nodes you have the last mile to the house. Assuming the last mile is IP and not analog voiceband, you still need battery backup at the customer end for the ONT or modem or whatever "hub" equipment is at the customer premises, even if the customer is using an analog POTS phone plugged into that "hub" as their

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by HiThere ( 15173 )

              Wireless has failure modes that wired communications don't. They probably can't avoid some of the failure modes, like jamming. And there are places where wireless just doesn't reach...which aren't the same as the places where wired can't reach. I used to live in a ... large gully or small canyon. Wired had no problem, but it was essentially radio dead.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by larwe ( 858929 )

                Wireless has failure modes that wired communications don't. They probably can't avoid some of the failure modes, like jamming.

                Jamming is an exotic scenario and a different argument from disaster robustness. An attacker who wants to take out a _lot_ of communications at once can take out infrastructure, which is in some ways cheaper than trying to jam spread-spectrum networks over a wide area.

                As for the "places it won't reach" - sure, there are edge cases in both scenarios. Forcing a telco to keep a specific legacy system alive prevents them from using better solutions to those edge cases. If CA wants to mandate something, they sho

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by HiThere ( 15173 )

                  It's not that exotic. Lightning can jam radio networks, and some places it's not uncommon.

            • Personally I would stipulate fiber not just wired. The communication equipment needs at least a 24-hour backup, and that doesn't happen with cable amplifiers or microcell sites. At the home end, you need at least 500Wh backup for the customer premise equipment to do the same. Maybe the telco can demonstrate 99.999% based on actual utility data and backup provisions, but that should be the design threshold.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by larwe ( 858929 )

                I still don't get it. This approach still leaves all the wireless points of failure in place and adds CPE points of failure. I literally, and not pig-headedly, not understanding why you think it is better to replace the POTS as system-of-last-resort with FTTH rather than by defining wireless to be the system-of-last-resort.

                Perhaps we are solving different problems. I am not trying to bring, nor guarantee, broadband to the masses. POTS doesn't do that, anyway. I am very specifically addressing the problem t

                • Because if POTS is a system of last resort for 1% of the population then it is going to cost >$150/month and provide essentially nothing. I'm advocating fiber (specifically PON) personally rather than POTS as it is practical to get to a similar level of reliability as long as the CPE have integrated batteries sufficient to make it work.

                  Cable cannot do that, and even a full cell site would struggle to match reliability.

                  If the Telcos are forced to maintain POTS it will be done like DSL-- fiber backhaul an

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by larwe ( 858929 )
                    We're still talking at cross purposes, I feel. This whole thread is spawned by the fact that POTS is obsolete, and the thing that keeps it alive is that legislation forces carriers to continue to offer it. That legislation exists solely to answer the question "how do people call for emergency services when there is a disaster?". Carriers want to kill POTS. This makes sense. You are apparently arguing that it is necessary to string a physical connection to the house to get the same reliability as POTS. I am

          • Nah, my Starlink has been nothing but solid. Now, if my specific spot allowed for ANY other kind of service, I'd of chosen that instead. Thing is, where I specifically live, I can't get cable/dsl or even verizon/tmobile for internet. I'm semi-off grid (guest house pushed back from the residence a decent distance, and up a hill) and I'm under a flight path.

            I could hotspot with my phone, but that's capped at 10mb and it's spotty. The flight path causes dropped calls and would certainly drop data packets as we

        • While I would personally love fiber, that is unrealistic. Ensuring a house has some sort of internet connectivity is sufficient.

          This is what they decided in Australia. It fucking sucks. I live in the capital city of Australia, and I have copper to my house, with VOIP for "landline" service. If nobody else in my street is streaming, data rates are OK. In the evenings, when everyone in the street is watching Netflix, I can barely browse the web. When it rains, ping times triple. When it's windy, ping times triple. When the weather is really bad, or some dipshit clicks the wrong button in the back end (happened a fortnight ago) it just

    • California has ATT by the balls. I want fiber everywhere.

      From Google: "The CPUC legally and structurally treats phone (voice) and internet (broadband) as separate services,"

      If AT&T want to get out of POTS, they may only need to switch residences over to DSL for VOIP service. That works over existing copper, it's completely separate from home's broadband. Something along those lines is probably where this is going to go, replacing like with like. Voice to voice, not voice to broadband.

      • Completely separate from a home's broadband? DSL is broadband.
        Getting rid of the original voice over copper (y'know... the phone on the wall that worked when the power is out without you having to have a UPS), basically pushes you to have a cell phone, and that means the cell towers have to have power 100% of the time)... I prefer the days when our houses phone was a thing on the wall between the living room and kitchen.
        Even with cell phones being the norm now, the phone on the wall is/was the failsafe.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by larwe ( 858929 )

          that means the cell towers have to have power 100% of the time

          But you're missing the fact that in the wired copper POTS scenario, the telco's backend still needs to have power 100% of the time; whatever way you slice it, the telco needs to install and maintain backup power systems. And with wires you can't fall back to a different local node if the one nearest you - the one you're wired to - goes down. With cell service, subject to ToF-based protocol limitations, you can possibly handoff to a more distant node if an earthquake, fire, battery failure or Godzilla attack

        • Hard disagree here. I don't miss landlines at all. Ever. Period. Who wants to have to be in a specific location at a specific time to catch a call from someone? Worse, anyone in the house could just pickup another phone and hear your entire conversation. In the older days, this extended beyond just one's own home as well.

          A dumb flip-phone is infinitely better then a land line as far as I'm concerned.

          Yes, landline doesn't need to be charged but that's literally about the only benefit to it. I'm capable of ke

          • If you're not home when someone calls, that's what answering machines are for.
            Someone else picking up another phone and listening in only happened if there was more than one phone, and only if there was someone else in the home.
            With the old landlines, when you went to the store and someone called you, you'd call them when you get home... with cell phones, your phone in your pocket is always ringing or notifying you about something.

            Remember when you could go to a movie and everyone was watching the movie? N

          • My landline worked during every hurricane: nobody's cellphone did. The electrical company was down but the phone was not. I could call 911 when no one else in the neighborhood could. The phone company doesn't want to maintain that even though it was part of the original deal when they were granted a monopoly.

      • I'm older than DSL and was an early adopter.
        Unless the technology has changed recently, DSL has a limit of about 18,000 feet of good wire between the house and exchange, and much less if on a concentrator. Almost all places where DSL might work already have fiber or cable.

        It's not an option for most people in rural areas.
        Also, DSL sucks.

  • 3% without cell service, i.e. no 911 without coppe (Score:4, Insightful)

    by melanopsin ( 10167413 ) on Friday May 22, 2026 @12:27AM (#66155190)
    AT&T is misframing! The 3% live in areas where cell service does not reach. They rely on existing copper lines for emergency 911 calls.

    • The 3% live in areas where cell service does not reach. They rely on existing copper lines for emergency 911 calls.

      DSL provides internet connectivity of existing twisted pair copper lines. 911 works over VOIP.

      • ADSL service is limited to a maximum distance of 18,000 feet (5460 m) between the DSL CPE and the DSLAM -- the 3% live farther away...
  • Ma Bell gonna protect its nearly dead monopoly.

  • ...they replaced copper with fiber

  • AT&T morons (Score:3)

    by kschendel ( 644489 ) on Friday May 22, 2026 @01:12AM (#66155214) Homepage

    Instead of paying lawyers millions to pursue this lawsuit, could not they have put the money into converting that (as they claim) 7% or 3% or whatever TF they want to strand, into "modern" connectivity? Oh, wait, I'm sorry, that would require that AT&T actually do something constructive, not to mention something that would actually incur capital expenditures. Unlike paying lawyers.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by drnb ( 2434720 )
      For VOIP, the existing copper can be converted to DSL. That should be good enough for VOIP phone service. That would be modernization too. Yeah, no 4K streaming, but swapping comparable for comparable might be good enough.
      • AT&T doesn't want to maintain the copper.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Unless they have competition, they will go for wireless "broadband" instead of upgrading to fibre. It's shitty but it's cheap, and they don't care if the service is any good when you have no other choice.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by havana9 ( 101033 )
      If somebody need a classic landline phone for reason there are alternatives. I have FTTH but also a '90s touch tone phone connected to the router and a VoIP number and I could send and receive faxes if i want. They could make an offer to people that still want a landline the phone company could lay fiber and put a router with VoIP. If there's cellular coverage there are cellphones that look like landline phones if one likes it. From a technical standpoint I don't see any reason to stop landline-like servi

    • Phone companies hate telephones like railroad companies hate railroads.

      Fun fact: Sprint was originally Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Networking Telecommunications.

    • AT&T does force these transitions in the rest of the country, often without the customer even being aware. Many people who think they still have POTS to central service are really plugged into a box like one of these: https://www.peplink.com/produc... [peplink.com] that convert their POTS line to cellular. I have a friend whose last gig at AT&T in Virginia before retirement was trying to stomp out POTS. California is not allowing AT&T to do things other states have allowed. Various states have different r

    • 7% or 3% or whatever TF they want to strand, into "modern" connectivity?

      You're assuming the decision is the AT&T's and not some old customer who won't let go of their old landline.

  • POTS advantages (Score:3)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Friday May 22, 2026 @02:57AM (#66155306) Homepage Journal

    AT&T added that transitioning from copper will save an estimated 300 million kilowatt-hours annually

    Yepp, one of the reasons being that POTS will work even during power outages, as long as the central switches are powered. Your VoIP will be down if your house has no power. It probably is more efficient, but that "saving" is also simply shifting some of the power usage to consumers.

    • BT in the UK is getting rid of its last real POTs customers by offering VOIP with power backup. They can even install a copper to fiber conversion in the DSLAM to make it work, in which case they maintain the last mile copper but nothing else. AT&T could find better (defined as more independent of the wireless network and less subject to collapse during emergencies) solutions than wireless if they wanted.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by larwe ( 858929 )
        Note that this isn't quite the transparent plug and play you might think - things that aren't human voiceboxes and ears will notice the difference. Alarm systems, certain legacy home medical monitoring equipment, demand regulation equipment, etc.
        • Most alarm systems can switch easily to cell. I'd recommend it in fact. Much easier for a thief to pull the POTS telco connection before breaking in than to jam the cell. I did my own system after ADT kept raising prices. Initially I did the landline like ADT had setup. Later after the alarmco offered cell for an extra I think 3 bucks a month and I could save 30 I think by dropping the landline, I switched to cell. They sent a little box which connected to the system like the POTS (2 wires plus power/gnd fr

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by larwe ( 858929 )
            Having worked in the alarm industry (Ademco -> Honeywell) for quite a few years, I can tell you that it is a cliche in the industry that alarm systems are installed and left in situ without modification for literally decades. Monitoring fees are dimensioned as pure passive income and a truck roll is the cause of wailing, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth. I was involved in the Great Migration in the mid-2000s when regular POTS started to get VoIP legs in the middle in some of our biggest markets
            • Well that was me. UNTIL. I had ADT, rates kept going up. But the "straw that broke the camels back" was I noted the smoke detectors on the system were flashing the red led instead of the green one. I looked it up, it was faulty. I'm thinking WTF, why am I paying 40/mo to ADT and they can't even tell the smokes are dead. Did some checking, geoarm offered full systems for sale and monitoring for peanuts. It was fully accredited monitoring, so insurance eligible. I put the system in myself, upgraded to 16 chan

        • that this isn't quite the transparent plug and play you might think [...] certain legacy home medical monitoring equipment

          In the case of BT, from reading the literature they sent, this seems to be the exact scenario they support. I think they are basically doing something equivalent to ISDN over IP in the background and thus avoiding almost all problems of incompatibility.

    • You are assuming proper maintenance which is not guaranteed. The phone box is still in my yard, but wires do nothing. The box on the corner got ran over by an 18 wheeler because it's a tight corner and he had a double trailer. It sat mangled for six months before someone showed up, bent it more or less back into shape and used electrical tape to hold it together.

      I dropped my land line before that because Frontier refused to fix it.if it worked at all there was a loud hum on the circuit. So I was finally for

    • My Wifi works fine when the power is down because I put it on a UPS.

      It wouldn't be that hard, it seems to me, to add batteries to WiFi routers. This "advantage" of POTS would suddenly disappear.

      Also, most cell towers do have generators and/or battery backups, so most people do have some kind of internet while the power is out.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        Also, most cell towers do have generators and/or battery backups,

        I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.

    • Dumping POTS absolutely will reduce power consumption, because they won't have to push analog signals through copper over long distances. It's just not sufficient justification for doing it, because that functionality is irreplaceable. We should be keeping some POTS service around for customers out of wireless range, and for alarm systems. A lot of those have gone cellular, and in some case that might be fine, but it's inferior and cellular should be used in addition and not as a replacement. (It can be tex

    • Your VoIP will be down if your house has no power.

      My VoIP is up when I have no power. There's a battery backup in the fibre connection box. The other end of that fiber has the same amount of power redundancy as the land line. There's no technical reason for VoIP to be any less reliable than the POTS.

      Incidentally I've only had one power outage since moving here, but for convenience sake I happened to have my cable modem (yes at the time I had cable, the fibre is new) plugged into the same UPS as my NAS. Imagine my surprise when I found out my power was out

  • Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

  • Of course the carriers want to get rid of the old hard lines. Its physical stuff they have to maintain rather than just bill. On the other hand, when the next disaster hits its likely that the land lines will be the only stuff working. Certainly has been my experience during large scale power failures. Its not just the communications pafh... even IP phones using fibre can do that. Its the central office power that keeps things working. And having the towers be the first thing to drop out when power goes dow

  • Taxpayers gave ATT literally hundreds of billions of dollars to build out last mile high speed internet. Actually, this goes back so far that SBC and even Pacific Bell were receiving this money here in California. Pacific Bell once promised all subscribers would be able to get ADSL by the year 2000!

    ATT (and others, but ATT is the single largest beneficiary) handed this money out to shareholders and executives instead of delivering that access. These phone lines they are trying to shut down now are among those which they promised to deliver high speed internet access to, then never did.

    If ATT were a person, we'd have thrown it in prison for decades.

    The solution to the ATT problems here in California is the same as the solution to the PGE problem: Nationalization. Both corporations are frauds right on their faces; they take the money they're handed, but they don't meet any of their obligations. There is literally no way in which they are doing what they say they are doing. Why is fraud bad for me, but great for AT&T?

    • Why do you hate on capitalism?

      • I'm reasonably certain that was sarcasm, but... mostly because it actually literally kills people, like PGE skipping maintenance for 99 years and burning down Paradise[, CA] or ATT taking away the POTS so people in the hills can't call 9-1-1 since the cellular network doesn't reach them. This is an active issue in my town, which is in Humboldt county CA. I live about a block from the CO, which is absolutely tiny, because so is the town. (It's technically a city but it does not act like one in any regard. We

        • Yeah, I was being sarcastic (or a prick).

          For what it's worth, I generally believe that the state should control vital infrastructure. The management should be transparent and answerable to the people instead of a private corporate board. The privatization of our power grid here in California has been a disaster. While it's true that running an inefficiency bureaucracy is problematic, I see it as no worse than letting a handful of people harvest record profits from millions of rate payers while providing dim

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Nationalization

      Interesting. You know who used that N word a few years ago (and then promptly shut up)?

      Trump.

      • Trump has said every side of every position while being RECORDED except a few times when it's his tell for being too rattled about the issue to take both sides. Sometimes he does it in the same sentence and other times it's some years apart. When it comes to being a pedophile, he never partially admits guilt (as he does with everything else;) which means he knows he is guilty and fears being caught; just like his porn star affair - he doesn't play the both sides blathering game with those matters.

      • You know who used that N word a few years ago (and then promptly shut up)?
        Trump.

        I take absolutely nothing Cheeto Benito says at face value. He is absolutely never trustworthy. You can learn things by listening to him, but not by assuming anything he says is accurate or honest.

  • Lots of rural folk rely on POTS (Score:3)

    by VertosCay ( 7266594 ) on Friday May 22, 2026 @10:46AM (#66155760)
    I'm in Ca and had a land line till just a couple of years ago. Again the /. crowd can't seem to recognize that not everyone lives in a metro area. I have no cell service at my property and had DSL right up to finally getting Starlink. Fuck AT&T, they took the money, they need to follow through with the job. That goes for all the carriers that have promised to install high speed internet for years and never followed through.

  • discontinue traditional phone service in parts of California where it has faster, more reliable service available.

    Some AT&T exec got one bar of signal in your town once. Good enough. Rip down all the wire.

    Honestly, I don't care if it's fiber to the property line. I've got FTTH and it works just fine. But numerous traditional telecoms (like AT&T) abandoned our neighborhood as fiber drew nigh. So, I'm not buying that B.S. AT&T is just trying to monopolize r.f. bandwidth* and is using telephone service revenue to do so.

    *Meanwhile, business, utility and public service bandwith holders are running away from th

  • it's not about power (Score:5, Insightful)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Friday May 22, 2026 @11:17AM (#66155806) Homepage Journal

    POTS lines use very little power nowadays. Decades ago they still used very little power, except when ringing. Those electromagnets hitting big bells did take some juice, but the actual power required once you lifted the receiver is very low. Modern (transistor-based, with piezo tweeters for ringing) are much more efficient, all the time.

    This is about them having to continue to keep tabs on and maintain equipment that they've been maintaining for decades. This isn't about additional costs, it's about them wanting to cut costs by ditching gear that's expensive to maintain and gets far less use than it was designed for. (it's efficient at scale, and the scale has gone)

    I can't say I blame them. Imagine your old house got central air a decade ago, and you still have a window air conditioner in the living room, and you'd like to get rid of it, but the city is saying you can't remove it, and have to keep it maintained and working, and pay for annual inspections.

    The only reason we still see around 4% landline usage is simply inertia. Old people don't want to give it up because they don't like change or learning something new, younger people that have it don't have a reason to get rid of it and see it as a cheap "just-in-case" backup, and there's a really small percentage of people (I'd venture a guess at under a tenth of a percent) that have a good reason to keep it.

    So the question is "at what point do we tell that tenth of a percent to look elsewhere?" There's tons of other good examples, how about leaded gas? or R34 freon coolant? or businesses accepting cheques? or something closer to home on the issue - pay phones on many street corners? Technology moves on, and the longer you wait to move on once the writing is on the wall, the bigger of a personal hassle it's going to be. (I see this all the time with computers, upgrade people! get rid of that ten year old doorstop! I don't care if "it still works", you need to modernize!)

    so the TL;DR of my rant is "it's not about the power use, but the telco doesn't want to come right out and call you a hold-out that needs to get with the times so we can all move on." Power savings looks like something that's "good for everyone" instead of pointing fingers at the stubborn few.

    • Yeah... in your analogy it's not the comfortable people in the midwest with its boring weather and where nothing interesting happens using using or wanting to keep those window air conditioners. To be analogous, the window A/C draws significantly less electricity and has a backup power source that almost never goes down, even when the main power is out. And it's the people in hurricane country where it's 95 degrees and 95% humidity right after the storm passes and takes out the power to the central A/C wh

  • I've lived in CA nearly 35 years now. I gotta say they sure have some really weird, even dumb, laws. Nobody uses landline anymore. Forcing telco companies to support it is just ridiculous. Similarly to how robbing a store of below $950 is not a crime. Illegal to stop someone from robbing your store. Illegal for schools to inform parents that their children were assisted in gender change at school. There're countless other stupid laws that when you hear about them, you must think CA lawmakers eat shit for lu

    • I've lived in CA nearly 35 years now. I gotta say they sure have some really weird, even dumb, laws. Nobody uses landline anymore.

      Apparently you live in a big city, and not in the country (which describes most of California, despite persistent misconceptions) because in my area, POTS service is absolutely necessary for a large percentage of the population, and in particular a big share of those on fixed incomes who don't have the money to change because COLAs don't keep up with the actual cost of living.

      There're countless other stupid laws that when you hear about them, you must think CA lawmakers eat shit for lunch.

      I think you eat crayons while doing paperwork. For someone who's lived in California for so long, you sure don't know shit about it.

  • ATT was given decades of special treatment in exchange for providing service. As a regulated utility, they cannot simply drop service to several million people because it is costly to provide. There are still customers across California who are only serviced by old-school copper wire based telephone service on ATT. Once they have upgraded everyone to the new service, they can discontinue offering the old service -not before.

Slashdot Top Deals

You can't take damsel here now.

Close