AT&T Shoves Long Neglected DSL Customers To Wireless, Insists That’s Good Enough

A few years ago AT&T, a company that tried to cheap out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given 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, broadbandprivacy rules, or approving a wave of doomed mergers were all supposed to unleash untold innovation, job creation, and network expansion? Yeah, AT&T doesn’t either).

They’ve also lobbied relentlessly to crush small telecom operators that dared to compete with it. And they’ve consistently been subsidized by the government to keep older copper lines (still heavily used by the nation’s elderly to call their grandkids or 911) in service. All the while, they’ve been found repeatedly guilty of “redlining” — or refusing to upgrade poor and minority neighborhoods to fiber despite untold billions in government assistance.

Three years after unceremoniously hanging up on them, and AT&T is finally shoving its long-neglected DSL customers to alternative options: namely, wireless technology that’s still not really a full symmetrical equivalent of fiber. Not all of these neglected customers get the option; only ones that live in areas where AT&T has adequately upgraded its wireless network:

AT&T is currently offering Internet Air to a limited set of copper-based customers in places where AT&T has wireless coverage and capacity to deliver a “high-quality” customer experience, a spokesperson told Fierce.

This is, of course, better than nothing. Especially at $55 a month (plus various, obnoxious fees). But it’s still not really the functional equivalent of the fiber networks AT&T repeatedly promised it would deliver all Americans in exchange for a rotating crop of massive subsidies and government favors. Like, say, the $42 billion Trump tax cut the company falsely claimed would create jobs.

This is a company that has absolutely adored hoovering up subsidies and then running off into the wilderness leaving network upgrades half completed, often with absolutely zero accountability. It’s also a company that’s repeatedly not only been caught ripping off its own customers, but repeatedly ripping off the government and the education system (despite being a trusted NSA ally).

As it stands, there are still “carrier of last resort” laws in some states (like California) that make it difficult for AT&T to disconnect older phone and DSL customers who depend on cheaper access to 911. AT&T lobbyists have been busy for years nibbling away at those requirements, effectively stating that less reliable, slower, patchy (and often throttled, something AT&T has a history of lying about) wireless connections are effectively “good enough.”

You’ll notice how the telecom trade magazine linked above mentions… absolutely none of this.

Someday wireless will be a symmetrical replacement for fiber, but it absolutely isn’t yet, despite endless telecom giant pretense to the contrary. Shoving these long-neglected DSL customers at wireless (if they’re lucky) after being paid untold billions to upgrade them to fiber is something countless captured state and federal telecom policymakers would very much love to memory hole.