Today’s AT&T is not yesterday’s Ma Bell by any means. It is, more accurately, the rebranded amalgam of five major pieces of the old AT&T (Southwestern Bell, Pacific Telesis, Ameritech, BellSouth and Southern New England Telephone). The San Antonio-based SBC took on the AT&T name, along with the ’nuff-said’ stock symbol “T” back in 2005 when it completed its acquisition of what was left of a very depleted AT&T Corporation. With eleven of the original 22 Bell Operating companies and a global operation that spans wireless communications, broadband communications and fixed line communicaitions, it is (as this, rather dated, post in Wikipedia calls it) “the largest provider of local, long distance telephone services in the United States”.

To maintain its leadership the company is engaged in a number of initiatives that can only be called transformative. While it has always been a master of manipulating public policy, its lobbyists have gone the extra mile (or perhaps the “last mile”) in the past week by filing these comments proposing that the FCC develop guidelines for killing off POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and shutting down the copper-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

On the surface, the proposal has a certain amount of internal logic. As AT&T’s lawyers explain, it is losing residential customers at an accelerating rate and, as a result, it has to raise the rates it charges remaining residential customers in order to maintain acceptable profitability. Only a monopoly sees the necessity to raise prices in the face of declining demand; and it is very easy to interpret AT&T’s pricing policy as an effort to accelerate the demise of the PSTN. Citing the FCC’s “successes” in coordinating broadcast TV’s transition to digital signals and in helping mobile carriers move from the first generation AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service) to PCS and then digital PCS, it is asking for the Commission to oversee the process of establishing a date-certain for abandoning the existing phone network so that it can dedicate its resources exclusively to extending broadband links to the Internet to 100% of the nation.

As Bruce Kushnick of New Networks Institute points out here, this is a false choice and a spurious argument. There are not “two networks”, there is only one utility and, over the years AT&T and its cohort of common carriers (primarily Verizon) has been compensated for operating its networks at rates that took into account improvements and upgrades – including special funds to extend broadband to every home and business in America.

In a particular telling section of TeleTruth’s memorandum, Kushnick provides the following “reality check:

AT&T, right now has 1.7 million total U-Verse, broadband-TV capable households (AT&T 3rd/q2009). That’s it! They claimed they would have 18 million by 2007 (not counting BellSouth). AT&T now controls 22 states. If AT&T is going to walk away from the utility networks and we leave it up to AT&T to build out their ‘broadband networks’ —one-half of the US is going to be harmed.

So that’s where we’re at in Washington, DC. Policy makers have declared that it is in the national interest to extend broadband access to all the homes in the U.S. Only AT&T has proposed that the best way to do it is to walk away from its existing physical plant in favor of a yet-to-be-constructed resource. In its filing it invites interested parties to comment on the approach. I urge everyone to take an interest.

I called this “Part 1” of our discussion of AT&T in the Age of Ma Google because managing regulators is only part of AT&T’s initiatives in this age of Ma Google and Recombinant Communication. Later today I’ll be issuing an advisory on the many initiatives launched by AT&T at CES, including support of multiple mobile operating systems, developer environments and application distribution platforms announced at the AT&T Developer Summit. It is there that AT&T showed its capacity to support Recombinant Communications development efforts.

Categories: Articles

Tags: AT&T, Recombinant Comunications, FCC, public policy