QUESTION AT&T shutting down your rural line?

[KNERD]

My mother has lived in a slightly rural area for the past 20 years with telephone service provided by AT&T (formerly SBC, formerly Southwestern Bell, Corp). They do not provide internet due to it's ruralness. With the FCC's change in in rule about having to maintain the copper lines, her land line will be shut down come July 2026. In fact her phone line barely functions right now due to the in ground copper lines are under water due to flooding in the area.

My sister is switching her over to some Verizon wireless home service as that is the only cell service which can even reach that area.

Anyone else getting their copper lines shuttered?

 

[kenn10]

Its coming pretty much anywhere. I have Frontier (now owned by Verizon) and they have begun moving people with land lines onto the fiber service they have just deployed. If you have a landline and order fiber service, you are automatically moved onto the fiber. Their ONU has two ports for telephone lines. Someone said you could no longer order a copper line in our area but I haven't read that. Much of the area can't get Starlink (mountains) or cell service (mountains and lack of towers) so I don't know what the outcome will be for those with copper as the only option.

AT&T and Verizon paid many, many politicians in multiple states to eliminate the requirement to provide service as the carrier of last resort. Since they got it, they're dumping people onto the fiber or a crappy cellular landline (without a battery to keep it going in power outages.)

In my area, cell service is so bad it could not support the home line boxes so I suspect we'll still have a CO switch and copper lines until fiber is fully deployed everywhere in the county. The Frontier techs are always trying to find good cable pairs in the ancient copper cables but no new cables or cable maintenance are going to happen.

However, if AT&T is notifying someone that their service will be discontinued, they are supposed to be offering an alternative via VOIP whether on fiber or cellular. Your mother should have received notices up to six months ago that her copper landline was being discontinued and they would have offered her options to maintain her number and some form of service.

The era of reliable landlines is over.

 

[Samot]

With the FCC's change in in rule about having to maintain the copper lines

It's not only the FCC. The FCC requires that the carriers notify them of what they are doing and get it approved. Each state, however, also has a say in what can happen, when it can happen or if it can happen. This is why AT&T is still serving copper to like 250K customers in California. They won't let AT&T fully retire due to lack of alternatives.

AT&T has aggressively been turning down the Southwest area, seen numerous requests filed over the last couple years. On top of almost all of the states in that area have really loosened their COLR rules, the fact that Verizon can provide service there was enough for AT&T to be able to pull out.