said by steevo22:Now they'd rather not have to fool with us, but after they have been paid for all those years they can't walk away now. They were given FREE easements on all our property to run their business. I charge for that easement. If they want to go back and unwind 50 or more years of regulated payments I want to go back and bill them for those easements. And I am expensive.
They were paid for telephone service, at a regulated rate of return for the first 30 of those 50 years. And they fulfilled their obligation -- they provided telephone service to the people who paid them.
How do you propose the telephone companies take back the telephone service that they provided to their customers over the past 50 years? With a time machine?
said by steevo22:They are still receiving payments, you know. Connect America. That USF fee on your bill, that you can do nothing about except just pay it. It goes to those same companies.
The purpose of Connect America is to provide broadband to rural areas (which may be DSL). The purpose of USF is to provide rural and other underserved areas with telephone service.
Neither is to provide fiber in Fullerton, California -- a city with a population of 135,000. You may pay these fees to your phone company, but that doesn't mean they've signed up to build any fiber. In this case, they're just a tax collector.