Rural areas fight AT&T's effort to drop landlines

Carrier is pushing to cut copper service. But remote enclaves say it's their lifeline.

- BY YUE STELLA YU AND MALENA CAROLLO

DURING a medical emergency, Cynthia Halliday needed a neighbor to call 911 on his landline because her cellphone service was too spotty.

(CHAD BURMICK CalMatters)

Upon hearing her husband’s call for help, Cynthia Halliday came flying upstairs. He was rushing toward the outdoor deck, gasping for air. He was having a heart attack.

Halliday held him and dialed 911 with her cellphone. The dispatcher answered, but within seconds, she said, the call disconnected due to poor reception. Halliday screamed for help, loud enough for her next-door neighbor Larry Williams to hear and dial from his copperlandline. This time, it got through.

Halliday’s husband did not survive. But on that day in 2018, Halliday became convinced that copper landlines were her best shot at getting help during emergencies, especially where she lives in Hacienda, a tight-knit community deep in the rural forests of Northern California.

Those landlines, however, are what AT&T — the largest copper landline provider in California — is pushing to retire nationwide.

As California’s largest “carrier of last resort,” AT&T is required by law to provide basic phone service, typically copper landlines, to any Californian who asks for it, with lower-income customers qualifying for a discount. It provides 75% of the state’s last-resort phone service, accounting for about 500,000 Californians and 5% of all its California customers.

Subsidies to support copper landlines have declined sharply. Critics say AT&T wants to shed them to avoid their billion-dollar annual cost and boost profits with lucrative services such as fiber.

For the last two years, AT&T has tried unsuccessfully to bow out of that obligation in many areas of the state, spending heavily to influence state regulations and laws.