I read that T-Mobile was thinking about buying the fiber assets of UNITI, which includes the fiber assets of Windstream. Regardless of whether that sale happens or not, it made me wonder about what happens to the customers served by copper who don’t go with a sale. Copper customers would be those served with telephone copper who are buying traditional TDM telephone service, DSL, and T1s and related products.

The concept of buying only fiber customers from an ISP seems to be a new industry theme. Lumen sold its fiber customers to AT&T but retained the copper customers. We know Lumen’s stated plans when it sold fiber customers to AT&T. The company publicly said it would retain and care for its copper-based consumer services since they continue to provide a strong ongoing financial contribution to the company.

But will they really? I have to think that a lot of Lumen markets were a mixture of copper and fiber, and that a lot of the technicians and much of the support apparatus for caring for these customers will leave with the fiber customers. I could be wrong, but I find it hard to imagine that Lumen will provide a robust maintenance crew to take care of the copper customers. This seems even less likely for a smaller company like Windstream. Will the remaining company really want to keep the entire company structure needed to take care of copper customers? That’s not only technicians in trucks, but it means somebody to man the central offices, somebody to field customer service calls, somebody to take technical service calls and dispatch repairmen.

I have a hard time picturing a telco willing to retain all of these functions to care for a fraction of their previous customers and for a shrinking customer base. This would also mean having to keep technicians who understand copper. I already know that all big telcos have lost most of their experienced copper technicians to retirement. I have a hard time envisioning technicians willing to go to work for a telco that only owns copper – there would be no upward mobility to learn newer technologies, and the job is guaranteed to end when the copper is eventually decommissioned. Does anybody really want to be a Lumen copper technician?

It seems buyers of fiber customers don’t want the hassle of buying the copper networks and then having to go through the process of disposing of the copper and disconnecting customers. It’s fully understandable that a company like T-Mobile wouldn’t want to take on that burden with UNITI. The FCC recently changed the rules to make it easier to dispose of copper customers, and as part of that order, the FCC overrode any state regulations related to disposing of copper customers. But the FCC did not eliminate all regulatory rules related to owning a regulated telephone company, and I’m sure that one of the  motivations for a company like T-Mobile not to take copper customers is to avoid getting dragged into that regulatory world.

Windstream and Lumen got some recent help from the FCC when it said that companies with copper networks can ‘grandfather’ their TDM products, meaning they don’t have to sell services to any new customers. While the FCC order didn’t use the term, this means the end of the carrier of last resort responsibilities for telcos.

I would not be surprised to see Lumen or other companies stuck with a copper-only network take the path of milking any remaining revenues from those customers, but doing nothing to retain or maintain the customers. For example, if a copper customer has a technical issue, they might be dropped instead of trying to fix the problem. This kind of approach would keep revenues for a while while eliminating most of the cost of keeping and operating a copper network.