AT&T’s record of delivering reliable landline service has remained an open question for Bakersfield, Calif. residents for more than six months, as repeated outages leave several AT&T landline customers without access to a dial tone.  Even worse, some of the customers impacted have been left without any phone service for weeks on end, including one woman whose life literally depends on a working phone.

Andrea Williams, who lives alone in her Bakersfield home, suffered a stroke and has a heart condition — making access to a phone absolutely essential to her well-being.  Williams is also legally blind, making a cell phone an insurmountable challenge.  Instead, Williams says she has memorized the location of the buttons on her long-standing cordless landline phone, a phone that was out of service just after Christmas and largely stayed that way for three weeks.

Despite having made numerous calls to AT&T trying to get the problem corrected, Williams says no one from AT&T ever showed up.  It took an investigative report from Bakersfield’s KGET-TV newsroom to finally get AT&T to respond.

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Back in December, AT&T in Bakersfield left hundreds of customers without service or cross-connected with other customers’ phone lines.  It all culminated three weeks later in one health-challenged resident breaking out in tears when local TV station KGET finally helped get her service restored.  (5 minutes)

Fast forward to late June, and AT&T’s reliability is again up for a challenge, as some residents in the unincorporated community of Glennville, 30 miles north of Bakersfield, are fed up with repeated outages, even after eight families collectively paid $16,000 to AT&T to extend wired phone service and broadband to their neighborhood.

Around the same time Williams was experiencing problems with her phone line in December, residents in Glennville began experiencing repeated outages of their own.

“I think from December to January, it was 15 times it went out,” said resident Ray Schill.  “From February to now, [the lines have been out] another 10-15 times.”

Residents in Glennville are especially concerned because they cannot count on their landlines, and cell service is spotty to non-existent in the area.

“My major concern is we’re going to have a big problem up here — someone is going to be ill, we’re going to have a fire, someone’s going to die — who is liable,” Kathryn Ervin, a Glennville resident told KGET News.

What happens when residents call AT&T for help?

We get the runaround, says Schill, with promises extending through the months of May, June, and now July 15.

Schill doesn’t hold much confidence in AT&T’s promises, especially after the company responded to an inquiry from the state’s Public Utilities Commission which culminated in his complaint being closed-as-resolved.

Once again, KGET-TV was on the case for the benefit of its viewers, and reporter Kelsey Thomas received a remarkable response from AT&T — the company “couldn’t handle the number of people using the phones in Glennville.” (population: 280)

The company promises to “upgrade its software” to resolve the problem, but could not give Thomas a time frame for when that would be complete.

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KGET-TV gets involved with AT&T once again, this time to help hundreds of residents of Glennville, Calif., who are also experiencing trouble with the company’s landline service.  (3 minutes)

While AT&T and Verizon trade customers back and forth and enjoy fighting it out for “number one” in wireless service, smaller providers like Sprint are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with its two larger competitors, who have access to the best phones, most coverage, and don’t need to discount prices to attract new customers.

Forbes’ financial blog shares its impressions of the anticipated financial performance of the three biggest players in the U.S. market:

AT&T: Still the financial darling of Wall Street, AT&T will see some pressure on earnings from its integration of acquired assets of Alltel Verizon sold to win approval of its merger with the smaller carrier a few years ago.  Since Alltel’s network used CDMA technology, AT&T had to supply free new phones to every customer it acquired, as the GSM network it operates is not compatible.  AT&T is also still dealing with a slow bleed of iPhone customers departing for Verizon as contracts expire.  It will be interesting to see if Verizon’s imminent end of “unlimited smartphone data” will create a last minute rush from AT&T to VZW before Verizon terminates its unlimited data plan Wednesday night.

Verizon: Verizon will achieve the top spot for the number of new customers it has added during this quarter, mostly from new iPhone users.  The end of “unlimited data” could mean increased “average revenue per user” if new customers have to pay for a pricier data plan, but some analysts are keeping a “neutral” rating on Verizon’s stock, concerned about the margin squeeze created when Apple releases iPhone 5 this fall.  Customers off-contract or nearing expiration could jump for the new phone.  With the subsidy Verizon provides to new iPhone owners, it could bring down margins.

Sprint: The biggest challenge remains with the number three carrier Sprint, which had been picking up disaffected customers from AT&T, Verizon, and even T-Mobile.  That growth has since slowed, and now the company is depending on increased revenue from price hikes, especially on smartphones which now carrier a $10-higher price tag.  But Sprint is aggressively trying to hold the line on customer defections, sometimes approaching “giving away the store” in order to keep customers from leaving for AT&T or Verizon.  In addition to accelerating free/discounted upgrades to new smartphones, the company has also increased the number of calling minutes for its Everything Data plan from 400 to 750.

Sprint’s distant-third position requires the company to price its service plans more aggressively than its larger competitors, especially to counter the image it runs a smaller network with less-reliable coverage.  If AT&T succeeds in acquiring T-Mobile, the dominance of AT&T and Verizon will become even more solidified, threatening Sprint’s position as a viable alternative to the larger two.  That could leave Sprint in the difficult position of trying to finance upgrades even as it has to heavily discount service to keep its current customers loyal.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNBC Sprint Going the Distance 4-28-11.flv[/flv]

On April 28, Sprint Nextel CEO Dan Hesse talked with Jim Cramer about his initial impressions of the announced AT&T/T-Mobile merger and how Sprint would cope with it.  (9 minutes)

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CNBC Sprint Nextel CEO Speaks Out 6-9-11.flv[/flv]

Back in June, Dan Hesse was back with CNBC’s Jim Cramer to expand on Sprint’s strategy to deal with a wireless duopoly and how it hopes to compete in a market where two companies would control nearly 80 percent of all American wireless revenue.  (11 minutes)

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So you’re ready to switch from cable or satellite TV to Internet-only video? Beware: many Internet providers limit how much you can download from websites like Netflix or Hulu.  Isn’t that exactly the point?  KRIV-TV in Houston investigates.  (2 minutes)

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Rick Karr at Engadget delivers a sweeping indictment of America’s broadband duopoly in a special video presentation that explores Europe’s leapfrog advancements in broadband penetration, speed, and pricing.  It’s all made possible by technology policy.  In Europe, open access is guaranteed.  In the United States, telecommunications companies won the right to keep competitors off their networks.  The result is a staggering decline in America’s broadband ranking, now below Portugal and Italy.  So what happened to let Europe spring ahead of the United States?  Government regulation.

The game-changer in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands has been government regulators who have forced more competition in the market for broadband.

The market in the UK used to be much like ours here in the U.S.: British homes had two options for broadband service: the incumbent telephone company British Telecom (BT), or a cable provider. Prices were high, service was slow, and, as I mentioned above, Britain was falling behind its European neighbors in international rankings of broadband service.

The solution, the British government decided, was more competition: If consumers had more options when it came to broadband service, regulators reasoned, prices would fall and speeds would increase. A duopoly of telephone and cable service wasn’t enough. “You need to find the third lever,” says Peter Black, who was the UK government’s top broadband regulator from 2004 to 2008.

Starting around 2000, the government required BT to allow other broadband providers to use its lines to deliver service. That’s known as “local loop unbundling” — other providers could lease the loops of copper that runs from the telephone company office to homes and back and set up their own servers and routers in BT facilities.

Today, the UK’s broadband marketplace resembles America during dial-up Internet days, when customers could choose from a dozen or more providers and get substantial discounts or service tailored towards specific needs.  Today, that choice isn’t available from cable and phone companies.  There’s typically just one of each, and your practical choices usually end there. Thanks to Stop the Cap! reader Corey for sharing the story with us.

The video lasts 16 minutes.

San Francisco city officials last night remained in a stalemate with AT&T over the installation of hundreds of utility boxes to aid the company’s U-verse fiber to the neighborhood system.

Since 2008, AT&T has sought to install the metal cabinets — dubbed “lawn refrigerators” by critics — that would house links with AT&T’s fiber network and copper wire connections leading to individual homes.  The plan has been in limbo since the threat of lawsuits and controversy over whether the boxes could reduce the visual appeal of neighborhoods and harm property values.

AT&T’s latest plan, now also on hold, seeks to allow the company to install 726 4-foot-tall cabinets around the city.  That’s completely unacceptable to groups like San Francisco Beautiful, which say the cabinets block public sidewalks and attract graffiti, eventually leading to urban blight.  The group wants AT&T to install the boxes on private property or underground.

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KGO-TV in San Francisco covers the fracas over AT&T’s “lawn refrigerators” — cabinets designed to support its U-verse fiber to the neighborhood service.  (2 minutes)

With the matter generating intense media scrutiny, local politicians have become cautious and a Board of Supervisors vote on the matter has been repeatedly postponed.

AT&T’s U-verse cabinets have been controversial in many areas where they suddenly appear in public rights-of-way, often in front yards.

In Greensboro, N.C., Doris and Dave Robinson learned this the hard way when a tractor, backhoe, and truck appeared in their front yard one morning to install a six foot high metal cabinet with an ominous warning painted on the front telling passersby – “WARNING – AT&T Underground Cable.”

Doris Robinson called and wrote AT&T to no avail, and took their story to a Greensboro television station to warn the neighbors.

“It’s just hard to believe that anyone can come onto our property, put something on the property we disapprove of and leave it on our property,” Dave Robinson told WFMY News. “It’s just not right.”

Doris added, “It struck me as being just terrible to be digging in your front yard and they hadn’t said a word to us.”

In the case of North Carolina, it turns out they don’t have to.  The North Carolina legislature passed laws at the behest of AT&T giving them near carte blanche access to easements established for utilities.  In the past, these have been used for buried and overhead wiring.  Today, they are increasingly used to place enormous metal cabinets, sometimes on the ground, other times attached to a utility pole.  Many have fans that can be heard several yards away.

In California, it will take an affirmative vote by local government officials before AT&T can install similar equipment in San Francisco.

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WFMY-TV in Greensboro shares the story of Doris and Dave Robinson who awoke one morning to find AT&T installing boxes nearly six feet tall on their front lawn.  (5 minutes)