re: #29 BeenHereAwhile

Lauren Weinstein
@lauren@mastodon.laurenwei…
***** California PUC officially rejects
AT&T proposal to be relieved of landline responsibilities *****

With their vote today, 4-0 with one recusal, the CPUC today officially rejected AT&T’s proposal to be relieved of carrier of last resort responsibilities in a long running proceeding. While this does not prevent AT&T from modernizing their equipment to other technologies, this is widely viewed as a pushback to AT&T’s efforts to pretty immediately kill landlines in the state and relieve itself of responsibilities to provide universal telephone service in all of their traditional service areas. Public interest in this proceeding was enormous with a massive number of public comments (their site stoppe counting at 5000), overwhelmingly negative to AT&T’s proposal.

The Commission also voted to begin a proceeding to study if and how the last resort responsibilities should be updated to take account of technological changes. So this will definitely be a continuing story.

As you probably know, I was firmly opposed to AT&T’s proposal, and I want to thank everyone who let the CPUC know how they felt about this situation.

I suspect there will come a day when traditional landlines are no more. I know some folks still swear by them but they are getting less and less common as people increasingly use VOIP and cell phones.

Don’t expect the telecoms to stop making requests to kill POTS.