It’s been clear for many years that the big telcos are looking for ways to walk away from legacy copper networks. Big telco copper is getting old and most was built in the 1950s and 1960s. All of this copper is far past the 40-year expected lives that the telcos claimed when they built the networks. Even old copper can be made to work if it was well-maintained, but the big telcos stopped doing routine maintenance on copper decades ago. For years, the big telco maintenance policy has been to patch problems without improving or fixing network issues.
In some cases, the big telcos have gone through the formal FCC process of formally retiring copper. This requires giving customers a 90-day notice that copper will be deactivated and providing customers an alternative to copper. For example, Verizon posts notices of copper retirement on this web site. There have been no announced retirements this year, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Verizon was active last year, like in this September notification for Massachusetts. CenturyLink has made similar notices in parts of Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.
In all of these cases, Verizon and CenturyLink made the announcements in communities where the carriers can provide fiber-to-the-home. It’s a natural technological progression to replace old copper technology with new fiber, and customers who lose copper to move to fiber have little room to complain.
But what about all of the places where the telcos never plan to offer fiber? There are still huge areas, including big parts of major cities where the telcos have no plans of migrating to fiber. What will happen to folks in regions where the copper is rotting past the point of usefulness, like is described in this article from last year in Fauquier County, Virginia? In that county the copper barely works for voice, which is sadly becoming the norm and not the exception.
There is nothing the big telcos can do with copper that has gone past the point of no return. No telco is going to replace bad copper and none of the big telcos are going to extend fiber into rural America or into urban neighborhoods where construction is too expensive. Verizon might be replacing copper with fiber around Boston, as indicated by the above filing, but the telco has no plans for building fiber in western Massachusetts, Cape Cod, or the many other places in the state where it never built FiOS fiber.
We might have gotten a glimpse into Verizon’s strategy when the company recently unveiled a 4G fixed wireless product. This 4G Home product promises to deliver 25 Mbps broadband using the 4G cellular network and Verizon could point to this product as a justification to abandon DSL over copper.
On paper, the 4G Home product will outproduce rural DSL, which typically has speeds well under 10 Mbps. But the Fauquier County article pointed out another ugly truth – much of rural America has poor cellular coverage to go along with outdated copper. The 4G Home product is not going to work for homes that are more than a mile or two from a cell tower. 4G Home is not going to be a reasonable substitute for DSL in communities like the towns on Cape Cod where the density is too high to support a lot of subscribers using 4G data as a landline data substitute – even a small customer penetration would swamp the 4G LTE network in populated areas.
AT&T has a similar fixed wireless product it introduced during the past year as the solution for meeting the company’s rural CAF II requirements. I’ve been tracking this product on the web and still don’t see local articles or chatter from many folks who have changed to the wireless product. AT&T has implemented this product to satisfy the FCC (and to keep the CAF II grant funding), but for some reason the company doesn’t seem to be pushing the product very hard.
The bottom line is these telcos will have to walk away from copper at some point within the next decade for the simple reason that the networks will stop functioning. From what I can see, both the FCC and many state regulatory commissions refuse to acknowledge that copper is dying and keep pretending that the telcos can somehow make this work. These networks are dying. The telcos might toss a bone to regulators by halfheartedly offering a wireless substitute for DSL. But the telcos are under no obligation to offer a replacement if the copper dies. Sadly, we’re going to look up five years from now and find a lot of rural homes without a telephone line and a cellular connection. There was a time when that was unthinkable, but it’s the coming reality.