AT&T Refuses To Upgrade Millions Of DSL Customers To Fiber Despite Untold Billions In Taxpayer Subsidies And Government Favors

Four years years ago AT&T, a company that, for years, cheapened out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a lack of competition.

There are other issues at play too. AT&T has, for decades, received countless billions in tax cuts, subsidies, merger approvals, and regulatory favors (remember how killing net neutrality, broadband privacy rules, or approving a wave of doomed mergers were all supposed to unleash untold innovation, job creation, and fiber network expansion? Yeah, AT&T doesn’t either).

In many states, AT&T has managed to lobby lawmakers into removing any requirement that the company continue servicing these users, many of whom are elderly folks still using traditional landlines used for 911 access. That’s been easier in some states than others. It was caught bribing Illinois lawmakers to pass such “reform.” California’s also been resistant to letting AT&T off the hook.

Last week, AT&T more formally announced what was already clear: it stated it would not be upgrading tens of millions of copper-based phone and DSL customers to fiber. The numbers aren’t insignificant:

“AT&T’s wireline footprint has 88 million locations, said Susan Johnson, an AT&T executive VP in charge of supply chain and wireline transformation.

About 21 million of those have access only to voice service. The other 67 million are eligible for Internet access, and 29 million of those have access to fiber already. AT&T plans to boost its number of fiber locations to 45 million by the end of 2029 but says it isn’t profitable enough to build fiber to the other parts of its old landline phone and DSL networks.”

Again, when AT&T says it’s going to deploy fiber to 45 million people, you should always take those promises with a grain of salt. They’re experts at something I affectionately call “fiber to the press release.” AT&T insists that less affordable, more expensive, and more capacity-constrained satellite or wireless will have to be “good enough” for users left just out of reach.

It’s essential to note that AT&T has received untold billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks in exchange for near-Utopian promises of new fiber deployment. It received $42 billion alone from the last set of Trump tax cuts. It has spent untold millions of dollars lobbying to successfully defang the FCC and eliminate whatever’s left of consumer protections. It’s been accused of ripping off low income programs for the poor and rural school broadband projects.

Nobody’s ever done an audit of AT&T’s fraud, waste, and abuse because AT&T’s a trusted domestic surveillance partner effectively immune from meaningful government accountability. AT&T’s about to get a major chunk of the $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies included in the 2021 infrastructure bill.

Ars Technica kind of just floats over all of this as if it’s kind of an afterthought. The problem isn’t just that AT&T has refused to upgrade millions of locations despite already getting paid for it. It’s also been at the forefront of lobbying for state laws banning towns and cities from building their own affordable fiber networks, even in instances where AT&T refused to.

So superficially you’ll see people say things like “of course AT&T doesn’t want to spend money to upgrade aging lines to fiber, it’s expensive!” But they ignore a very long history of the company endlessly defrauding taxpayers, ripping off subsidy programs, and just generally taking untold billions of dollars for networks that routinely, mysteriously, wind up half completed.