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

[Douglas A. Walter]

Other than one hearing, this bill is waiting for a big push (or for someone to notice and mock it). I don't know too much about Assemblymember W. Quirk, and why he's working with AT&T on this.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB2130

On Mar 28, 2016, at 1:27 PM, Patrick Fish wrote:

> 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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“Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.” -- Elizabeth Alexander

Doug Walter • dawalter at dcn.org • (home address)





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