AT&T today announced that their first "IP transition" trials as the company eyes shutting down its copper networks will occur in West Delray Beach, Florida (Kings Point) and Carbon Hill, Alabama. According to an AT&T announcement, these locations will be the sites of multi-year trials with FCC oversight aimed at studying the impact of migrating away from copper networks and the PSTN.
A core focus of the trials will be to test how severely moving away from copper POTS and DSL will impact consumer ability to reach 911 services, as well as the impact on a range of technologies including home alarm systems.
The FCC voted unanimously back in January to begin conducting these voluntary trials to ensure a relatively smooth and reasonable transition away from the PSTN. The push for such trials began in earnest after Verizon refused to repair the DSL and copper POTS lines of hurricane Sandy victims, instead forcing them to instead use an inferior wireless-based product known as VoiceLink, which doesn't work with alarm systems, has numerous glitches, and doesn't provide data connectivity.
Verizon's insistence that this was "good enough," and the immense public backlash to that claim, forced the FCC to admit that this transition might need a regulatory guiding hand.
In an FCC announcement, the FCC stated the carrier deadline for the voluntary trials was February 20, followed by a public comment period ending March 30. The FCC insists that the process of ensuring a smooth transition away from the PSTN will be guided by four major principles:
Public safety communications must be available no matter the technologyAll Americans must have access to affordable communications servicesCompetition in the marketplace provides choice for consumers and businessesConsumer protection is paramount While the argument that copper networks are outdated and should be updated to modern technologies makes sense on its surface, there's tens of millions of subscribers who are currently still using POTS (and most importantly DSL they'd prefer to keep) and whose phone carrier has no intention of upgrading them anytime soon. Companies like AT&T and Verizon have their eyes fixed squarely on more profitable wireless, and have argued that wireless alone will be good enough for these users.
As such, AT&T and Verizon are making the rounds attempting to gut regulations so they can hang up on DSL, pretending that this is a step into the future -- when many users will actually lose options. As DSL is turned off, those users' only option becomes either heavily capped and expensive wireless (if they can get it), or a suddenly emboldened cable industry who'll raise rates in the face of even less competition.
While the FCC is doing an admirable job at least discussing the technical impact of such a transition, they're once again not paying much attention to the competitive side of the equation. Factor in Comcast and Time Warner Cable's merger, alongside of AT&T and Verizon backing away from huge swaths of unwanted regions, and the end result is going to be already fairly-tepid U.S. competition -- getting potentially quite a bit worse.