AT&T reported to the FCC about the progress of its transition of customers from a traditional TDM network to an all-IP network. AT&T had undertaken two trials of such a conversion in Carbon Hill, AL and Delray Beach, FL.

These were voluntary trials. AT&T had advertised widely and asked customers to move to the new IP-based services. In Carbon Hill 36% of residents and 28% of businesses voluntarily moved to the new service. In Delray Beach the numbers were similar with 38% and 25% converting. AT&T reported there were no reports of degraded service, including the transition of business customers to IP-based Centrex and similar services.

Since the trials were announced AT&T has also grandfathered Centrex and TV1-Analog Video service, meaning they will take no new orders for the services. The company also asked the FCC’s permission to discontinue 13 legacy services that are obsolete. This includes products that most people never heard of like 4-wire and voice-grade telemetry and various alarm bridging services. The company also has asked permission to discontinue six operator services including collect calling, person-to-person calling, billed to third party, busy line verification, busy line interrupt and international directory assistance.

These trials need to be put into perspective. From a technical perspective there is no reason to think that transitioning these service from TDM to IP-based technology wouldn’t work because a lot of the rest of the telephony world made that transition years ago. Cable companies like Comcast and anybody operating on an all-fiber network has been offering IP-based telephone products for many years. AT&T’s offerings include many products that are strictly copper-based, such as the legacy products they want to discontinue.

And that leads to the whole purpose behind these trials. AT&T wants to move customers off old copper networks to either a landline or wireless IP-based solution. Since the company’s goal is to tear down copper, the vast majority of such transitions will be to the company’s cellular network. A miniscule percentage of AT&T’s customers are on fiber – particularly residential customers since the company has launched very little FTTP in that market.

The trials are largely the result of what happened to Verizon on Fire Island a few years ago after Hurricane Sandy. There Verizon didn’t replace destroyed copper but moved people to a cellular-based service. But unlike these trials, which were meticulously slow and careful, it seems that in many of the Fire Island cases Verizon did not offer equivalent services to what they had offered before the hurricane. Apparently things like burglar alarms, medical monitoring devices, and other services didn’t work on the new wireless connections.

The FCC has already granted these big telcos the ability to tear down copper as long as they follow customer notification processes. My guess is that after these trials are blessed by the FCC that the companies will begin ripping down rural copper all over the country.

I expect that many customers are going to be unhappy when they lose their copper. Anybody who has traveled in rural areas understands that cellular coverage is often spotty, or even non-existent. Customers are worried about being cut off from telephony services inside their homes. It’s a legitimate concern for somebody with poor cellular service and with little or no broadband options, like we see in millions of rural homes and businesses.

But the time is coming soon when these transitions will not be voluntary like was done in these two communities. The big telcos will issue the legally required notices, and then they will proceed to shut off and tear down the copper. In doing so they will have undone the original FCC’s goal set by the Telecommunications Act of 1934, which was to make telephone service available everywhere. There are now going to be homes and communities that are going to be cut off from a workable alternative to make reliable voice calls.

I honestly never thought I’d see this happen. But I guess it was the pretty obvious end game after it became clear decades ago that the big telcos were not going to properly maintain their rural copper networks. We aren’t too far from the day when copper telephone networks join the list of other technologies that outlived their usefulness and are a thing of the past – at least for the giant telcos. There are still other companies like Frontier and Windstream that are fighting to extend the life of their copper, but we’ll have to see what the future holds for them and their customers.