[Davisgig] AT&T Wants $100 Million From California Taxpayers For Aging DSL

[Patrick Fish]

Article:
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Wants-100-Million-From-California-Taxpayers-For-Aging-DSL-136565

AT&T is asking California taxpayers to give them $100 million so that AT&T
can provide several parts of the state with unreliable, slow and expensive
DSL service. As Steve Blum’s blog notes, under Assembly Bill 2130 (written
by AT&T lobbyists), AT&T would receive $100 million from state taxpayers.
In return, AT&T would only need to provide 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps
upload and would have little to no oversight over whether the $100 million
is even being used for the DSL service. According to Blum, AB 2130 would:

1. freeze the current California Advanced Services Fund (CASF) broadband
infrastructure subsidy program,
2. authorise the collection of $100 million more from taxpayers,
3. distribute it according to byzantine rules that all but guarantee that
the money would go to AT&T to spend as it pleases, while
4. tightening its monopoly stranglehold on rural residents.

Currently, the California Public Utilities Commission says that 1.5 Mbps
upload is the minimum acceptable speed in order to receive state subsidies
under the California Advanced Services Fund. Therefore, AT&T wants taxpayer
money for a service that isn’t even deemed acceptable under current state
rules.
This type of move shouldn’t surprise anyone with knowledge of AT&T’s past.
For years, AT&T has taken billions from federal and state governments in
order to provide a DSL service that AT&T has no interest in upgrading,
instead wanting to fill in coverage gaps with the company's LTE network. In
most areas, AT&T is making it abundantly clear that it's giving up on DSL
and fixed-line broadband entirely, and were one to do an audit (which will
never happen), it's guaranteed they'd find billions in past subsidies that
never resulted in tangible improvements.

Whether it is pushing the FCC to keep the National Broadband Map from
listing prices, fighting competition wherever possible, or lobbying hard
for little oversight over how AT&T uses federal taxpayer money, both AT&T
and Verizon have quite the history of taking taxpayer money and providing
little to nothing in return.
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