It’s clear that even before the turn of this century that the big telcos largely walked away from maintaining and improving residential service. The evidence for this is the huge numbers of neighborhoods that are stuck with older copper technologies that haven’t been upgraded. The telcos made huge profits over the decades in these neighborhoods and ideally should not have been allowed to walk away from their customers.

In the Cities. Many neighborhoods in urban areas still have first or second-generation DSL over copper with fastest speeds of 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps. That technology had a shelf-life of perhaps seven years and is now at least fifteen years old.

The companies that deployed the most DSL are AT&T and CenturyLink (formerly Quest). The DSL technology should have been upgraded over time by plowing profits back into the networks. This happened in some neighborhoods, but as has been shown in several detailed studies in cities like Cleveland and Dallas, the faster DSL was brought to more affluent neighborhoods, leaving poorer neighborhoods, even today, with the oldest DSL technology.

The neighborhoods that saw upgrades saw DSL speeds between 15 Mbps and 25 Mbps. Many of these neighborhoods eventually saw speeds as fast as 50 Mbps using a technology that bonded two 25 Mbps DSLs circuits. There are numerous examples of neighborhoods with 50 Mbps DSL sitting next to ones with 3 Mbps DSL.

Verizon used a different tactic and upgraded neighborhoods to FiOS fiber. But this was also done selectively although Verizon doesn’t seem to have redlined as much as AT&T, but instead built FiOS only where the construction cost was the lowest.

In Europe, the telcos decided to complete with the cable companies and have upgraded DSL over time, with the fastest DSL today offering speeds as fast as 300 Mbps. There is talk coming out of DSL vendors talking about ways to goose DSL up to gigabit speeds (but only for short distances). The telcos here basically stopped looking at better DSL technology after the introduction of VDSL2 at least fifteen years ago.

By now, the telcos should have been using profits to build fiber. AT&T has done this using the strategy of building little pockets of fiber in every community near to existing fiber splice points. However, the vast majority of rural households served by AT&T are not being offered fiber, and AT&T said recently that they have no plans to build more fiber. CenturyLink built fiber to past nearly 1 million homes a few years ago, but that also seems like a dead venture going forward. But now, in 2019, each of these telcos should have been deep into urban neighborhoods in their whole service area with fiber. Had they done so, they would not be getting clobbered so badly by the cable companies that are taking away millions of DSL customers every year.

Rural America. The big telcos started abandoning rural America as much as thirty years ago. They’ve stopped maintaining copper and have not voluntarily made any investments in rural America for a long time. There was a burst of rural construction recently when the FCC gave them $11 billion to improve rural broadband to 10/1 Mbps—but that doesn’t seem to be drawing many rural subscribers.

It’s always been a massive challenge to bring the same speeds to rural America that can be provided in urban America. This is particularly so with DSL since the speeds drop drastically with distance. DSL upgrades that could benefit urban neighborhoods don’t work well in farmland. But the telcos should have been expanding fiber deeper into the network over time to shorten loop lengths. Many independent telephone companies did this the right way, and they were able over time to goose rural DSL speeds up to 25 Mbps.

The big telcos should have been engaging in a long-term plan to shorten rural copper loop lengths continually. That meant building fiber, and while shortening loop lengths, they should have served households close to fiber routes with fiber. By now, all of the small towns in rural America should have gotten fiber.

This is what regulated telcos are supposed to do. The big telcos made vast fortunes in serving residential customers for many decades. Regulated entities are supposed to roll profits back into improving the networks as technology improves—that’s the whole point of regulating the carrier of last resort.

Unfortunately, the industry got sidetracked by competition from CLECS. This competition first manifested in competition for large business customers. The big telcos used that competition to convince regulators they should be deregulated. Over time the cable companies provided real residential competition in cities, which led to the de facto total deregulation of telcos.

In Europe, the telcos never stopped competing in cities because regulators didn’t let them quit. The telcos have upgraded to copper speeds that customers still find attractive, but the telcos all admit that the next upgrade needs to be fiber. In the US, the big telcos exerted political pressure to gain deregulation at the first hint of competition. US telcos folded and walked away from their customers rather than fighting to maintain revenues.

Rural America should never have been deregulated. Shame on every regulator in every state that voted to deregulate the big telcos in rural America. Shame on every regulator that allowed companies like Verizon palm off their rural copper to companies like Frontier—a company that cannot succeed, almost by definition.

In rural America, the telcos have a physical network monopoly, and the regulators should have found ways to support rural copper rather than letting the telcos walk away from it. We know this can be done by looking at the different approaches taken by the smaller independent telephone companies. These small companies took care of their copper, and most have now taken the next step to upgrade to fiber to be ready for the next century.