In the last blog I wrote about my belief that AT&T and Verizon want out of the rural wireline business. They both have plans to largely walk away from their rural copper networks and replace landline copper services with cellular service. Today I want to talk about what regulators ought to do with those networks.

When these two giant telcos walk away from rural copper they will inevitably harm rural America. While many homes will get the ‘privilege’ of now buying highly-priced cellular-based broadband, other homes are going to find themselves without telephone service if they happen to live in one of the many cellular dead zones. Such homes will not only be unable to benefit from cellular broadband, but if they have poor cell service they will find themselves cut off from voice communications as well.

As somebody who has traveled extensively in rural America I can tell you that there are a lot more cellular dead zones than people realize. And it’s not only farms, and there are county seats in rural America where it’s difficult to get a working cellphone signal inside of buildings.

As part of this transition both companies are going to walk away from a huge amount of existing copper cable. I think this copper cable is an incredibly valuable asset and that regulators ought not to allow them to tear it down.

The copper wire network today goes almost everywhere in rural America. Congressional laws and FCC policies led to most homes in the country getting access the the copper network. These copper wires occupy a valuable space on existing telephone poles – on the majority of rural poles the only two wires are the power lines at the top and the telephone wires at the bottom.

If these copper wires are kept in place they could greatly reduce the cost of building rural fiber. It is far cheaper when building fiber to ‘lash’ the fiber onto an existing set of cables than to hang fiber from scratch. It was this construction technique that allowed Verizon to build a lot of its FiOS fiber network – they lashed fiber onto existing telephone wires. And my guess is that when Verizon decommissions urban copper they are still going to leave a lot of the copper wires in place as a guidewire for their fiber.

If these telcos are going to walk away from these copper wires, then they ought to be required to keep them in place for use by somebody else to hang fiber. Many states might force the big telcos to tear down the copper wires since they will eventually create safety hazards as they break away from poles if they aren’t maintained. But if somebody else is willing to take over that maintenance then it shouldn’t be an issue.

I can picture a regulatory process whereby some other carrier is allowed to come in and ‘claim’ the abandoned wires once they are empty of customers. That would provide fiber overbuilders or rural communities to claim this copper as an asset.

There is some salvage value to copper wires and and it’s possible, but not probable that the value of the copper could exceed the cost to tear it down. So I can see the telcos fighting such an idea as a confiscation of their assets. But these rural wires have been fully depreciated for decades and the telcos have earned back the cost of these copper lines many times over. I believe that by the act of abandoning the wires and depriving some homes of wireline service that the big telcos will have forfeited any rights they might have to the remaining assets.

Anybody claiming the abandoned copper could use it in two ways. First, in many cases there is still existing life left in the copper, as witnessed by Frontier and CenturyLink rehabbing old rural copper with upgraded DSL. Local communities or small carriers could use the copper to bring the better services that the big telcos have refused to do over the last few decades.

But more importantly these wires represent the cheapest path forward for building rural fiber. Anybody taking over the old copper can save a lot of fiber construction costs by lashing fiber onto the existing copper. If our nationwide goal is really to get better broadband to rural America, then offering abandoned copper to fiber builders might be one of the easiest tools available to help the process along.

The big telcos abandoned rural America dacades ago. They stopped doing routine maintenance on rural copper and slashed the number of rural technicians. They now want to walk away from that copper and instead force rural America to buy cellular services at inflated prices. We owe it to the folks who paid for this copper many times over to get some benefit from it and to offer an alternative to the new rural cellular monopolies.