AT&T wants to abandon its landline telephone network across wide swathes of California, including Alameda County.
But critics are trying to block the move, arguing that for older Berkeleyans loath to buy new hookups for broadband, or those who live in areas with spotty cell coverage, those copper wires are the only connections their homes have to the outside world. And when cellular coverage crashes, as it often does during wildfires and other emergencies, landlines can become the only means of communications for entire neighborhoods.
AT&T submitted its request to the California Public Utilities Commission in March 2023, seeking to be relieved of its obligations as “carrier of last resort.” That designation requires a provider to offer “basic telephone service, commonly landline telephone service, to any customer requesting such service within a specified area,” according to the commission’s website.
AT&T has argued that the requirement to offer landlines is out of date. The company says its copper-wire network is heading for inexorable obsolescence, that the work and cost of maintaining it will prevent it from building out broadband networks elsewhere in California and that the requirement gives other providers an unfair competitive edge.
A spokesperson for the commission told Berkeleyside that an administrative law judge is expected to rule on AT&T’s application within a year.
Meanwhile, the commission is taking public input on the proposal — thousands of Californians have written in so far, pleading with the utility regulator to continue requiring AT&T to provide landlines.
There have also been six forums on AT&T’s application, and two more virtual events are scheduled for Tuesday, at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. Those who wish to watch can do so online, but anyone who wants to offer comments must call in at 800-857-1917. The passcode is 6032788#.
In Berkeley, AT&T’s application has startled neighborhood organizations and captured the attention of the City Council, which approved a resolution Tuesday opposing it.
AT&T is the largest carrier of last resort in California, according to the commission. The area where it is asking the commission to lift its obligation includes all of Berkeley and Oakland, as well as most of the rest of Alameda County.
“In general, phone service can be pretty spotty up here,” said Carol Curtis, a Berkeley Hills resident who keeps a landline in case power goes out in the neighborhood, cutting her off from her home wifi, which is how she typically talks on her cell phone. “If my cell phone’s out, then that’s my only source of knowing what’s going on.”
In Curtis’ neighborhood, a dozen or so residents are equipped with walkie-talkie style radios for extreme emergencies. “The idea is that, if communications went down, that we could communicate with the neighborhood,” Curtis said. But that stopgap depends on a few people with radios being able to relay information to hundreds of households in the area.
“I don’t quite really understand why it’s so hard for them to maintain the landlines,” Curtis said. “They don’t care, they don’t really want to maintain them.”
Jim Hynes, who chairs the Grizzlies Firewise community in the Grizzly Peak neighborhood, said it would be a mistake to allow AT&T to withdraw its landline service.
“There have unreliability issues with the cell phone networks, we also have the issue that there’s a lot of people in the community that don’t have cell phones,” Hynes told Berkeleyside. “They’re basically elderly people, 65 and over, and either they never got cell phones or they don’t use them and they’ve always been conditioned to use landlines.”
Hynes, a former public administrator who now teaches organizational development and urban design issues at Golden Gate University, said AT&T’s approach to the landline issue had been heavy-handed and had completely ignored what communities may have wanted.
“They definitely don’t demonstrate any compassion or care to this community,” he said. “I can’t say more emphatically how important it is for this community to have landlines.”
He also said that AT&T even trying to abandon their landline network had taken him by surprise and that he expected the Public Utilities Commission would push back.
“Why would they capitulate against the public interest to support a corporate entity like AT&T?” Hynes asked.
Councilmember Susan Wengraf, whose district comprises several neighborhoods in the hills, authored the council resolution opposing AT&T’s application. Councilmembers Sophie Hahn and Mark Humbert co-sponsored the resolution.
With Pacific Gas & Electric Co. regularly conducting power shutoffs in the hills during wildfire season, Wengraf wrote, landlines “are the only form of reliable communication.”
Fire Chief David Sprague also opposed AT&T’s request. Losing the old-fashioned landlines “in the region before reliable alternatives are in place creates an unacceptable degradation of public safety for California’s residents following a seismic event, wildfire or other natural disaster,” Sprague wrote in a statement that accompanied Wengraf’s resolution.
Brandon Baranco, an area manager for AT&T for Alameda and several other Northern California counties, pushed back on the notion that the company was simply leaving customers without phone service. Baranco told the City Council in a public comment at Tuesday’s meeting that AT&T’s request is the first of many regulatory steps that will allow it to develop “a plan to transition the remaining copper customers to modern-day technology.”
In its application, AT&T said it would continue to provide service for a limited time even if its application succeeds, and that in any event, most Californians already rely on broadband or other more recent innovations for voice calls.
“It is a fact that our copper network will fail — not if, but when,” Baranco said. “The parts needed to repair the copper network are no longer being made. It is our ultimate goal to make sure the residents of Berkeley and everyone in the state has the most reliable, resilient and modern network that they rightfully deserve.”
Berkeleyside Associate Editor Nico Savidge contributed reporting to this story.
