AT&T’s Supreme Court: senior executives sitting together in judgment of landlines at Wednesday’s analyst conference.

Yesterday, at least a half-dozen AT&T senior executives sat lined up in a perfect row to present Wall Street with the company’s vision for the future.

There were no consumers in attendance, just a group of Wall Street investors and analysts that braved the latest nor’easter to attend.

At issue: what to do about AT&T’s landline network, particularly in rural areas. Earlier this year, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, still smarting from a regulatory slap-down of his plan to acquire T-Mobile USA, ranted his disapproval of federal regulators for nixing the deal and then reflected on AT&T’s rural customers who still cannot buy broadband service from AT&T.

One of Stephenson’s strongest arguments in favor of merging with T-Mobile was it would facilitate a rural broadband solution. With that off the table, Stephenson seemed at a loss:

“We have been apprehensive on moving, doing anything on rural access lines because the issue here is, do you have a broadband product for rural America?,” Stephenson said. “And we’ve all been trying to find a broadband solution that was economically viable to get out to rural America and we’re not finding one to be quite candid. That having been set aside, now we’re looking at rural America and asking, what’s the broadband solution? We don’t have one right now.”

Now AT&T claims they do, and miracle of miracles, it turns out they never needed the buyout deal with T-Mobile after all.

AT&T’s solution is good news for urban, suburban, and exurban customers who will benefit from billions in additional investments to beef up the company’s U-verse platform. Those with access to U-verse TV, broadband, and phone service will soon find maximum speeds available up to 75Mbps — important at a time when cable companies are moving to 50-100Mbps premium service tiers. Those without access to U-verse, bypassed by its recently completed initial buildout, now will have a chance to see the service in their communities.

For more exurban and near-rural areas, AT&T has a positive plan to rid customers of the scourge of painfully slow ADSL service, better known simply as “DSL,” which AT&T pitches at speeds typically 10Mbps or less. In more rural areas, it is often much less.

By using additional fiber and using D-SLAM technology to reduce the amount of copper wiring between the phone company and you, AT&T’s IPDSLAM service will dramatically improve speeds for customers languishing with 3Mbps service to upwards of 45Mbps. But for now, AT&T won’t roll this out as a full-scale U-verse service. Because maximum speeds are lower and network variability is expected to be greater, AT&T will instead pitch this as a broadband and landline phone service package. Customers will be marketed satellite dishes if they want television service bundled in.

Although not as robust of a platform as U-verse will soon be, it still represents a major improvement over DSL, which is now barely tolerable for today’s online multimedia experience.

But AT&T’s “good news” may not be so great for its most rural customers, who either have the slowest DSL service or more likely no broadband at all. Those customers have waited years for AT&T to invest in upgrades to finally connect them to the Internet, but AT&T’s plans have gone in a very different direction.

AT&T’s rural solution is to take down the existing landline network and move everyone to its wireless cell phone service. To implement this proposed solution, AT&T will aggressively invest in rural cell sites within the 22 states where it supplies landline service. The company claims 99% of its customers will be able to access a 4G LTE signal within a few years.

Phillip “Are you following this shell game” Dampier

But here is where things begin to get dicey.  AT&T told investors it has no current plans to differentiate rural wireless customers from their urban counterparts. In larger cities, a smartphone and data plan is not necessarily a necessity — customers can still access a landline to place urgent calls or find a home broadband plan that does not carry the kinds of restrictive data caps wireless plans deliver.

Rural landline customers often pay low rates for their home phones, primarily because their local calling areas are generally far more restricted than in larger communities. The base rate for rural phone customers can be around $10 (before taxes and fees) in some areas. The base rate for AT&T’s wireless service starts at around $40 for 450 talk minutes or $19.99 for anchored, wireless unlimited calling home phone service (with a $36 activation fee and a two-year contract) that works with your existing home phones. Both represent rate increases.

Wireless data plans are notoriously expensive and limited. Verizon’s plan for home broadband users is priced at $60 a month with a 10GB limit. Less expensive plans with limits 25 times greater (or unlimited) are available from wired broadband providers. If the customer wants a smartphone for their data and home voice calling, bundled plans start at $85 a month with a 1GB usage limit.

With these prices, it is no surprise AT&T is promoting this as great news for the company. But we’re not so sure the average rural American is going to be pleased treated like a second class citizen with high priced, usage-capped Internet access.

As victims of Hurricane Sandy also found out last week, the venerable landline also enjoys a reputation of working after disasters strike. Unlike a fallen tree knocking down a phone line in the backyard, should AT&T’s wireless network fail in a storm, it would potentially leave hundreds, if not thousands of customers without service. Repair crews could take days to reach damaged facilities. That actually happened to Frontier Communications in some parts of West Virginia where heavy snows and tree damage made travel nearly impossible.

But there are important clues to what AT&T is really up to in regulatory filings that accompanied the showy presentation AT&T put on in New York Wednesday.

AT&T Has a Plan — Move Customers Away from Low Profit, Low Growth Landlines to High Profit Wireless/Deregulated Broadband

After the two hour presentation ended, AT&T posted a copy of its proposal sent to the Federal Communications Commission.

Reviewing the 24-page document is a classic case of  déjà vu. Once again, after the rhetoric is set aside, AT&T is back, peddling the same case to retire landline service and the regulatory obligations that accompany it. Only now, it has a carrot to dangle in front of regulators — significant investments in broadband expansion.

Although the private sector has invested well over $1 trillion in broadband networks, much remains to be done. As of 2010, roughly 14 million Americans, residing in rural and other high cost areas where the broadband business case is tenuous at best, still lacked access….

[…] Carriers such as AT&T are stepping up to do their part. In fact, just today, AT&T announced a $6 billion investment plan to expand and upgrade its wireline network to bring robust IP broadband services to millions of additional locations in its legacy footprint.

[…] AT&T makes this announcement with full confidence that the Commission will continue to implement the National Broadband Plan’s vision of removing regulatory impediments to efficient, all-IP networks, including obligations that could require carriers to maintain legacy facilities and services even after they have deployed new, IP-based alternatives.

I guess they didn’t need T-Mobile after all.

Translation: We used to bypass 14 million Americans, leaving them behind because it was unprofitable to serve them. But now we’re going to invest some additional money. But before you get that investment, we need you to agree the landline is a relic and (largely unregulated) IP-based networks are the future. We are not going to run both, so if you want all of this investment, you have to let us abandon our regulatory responsibilities and commitments to rural customers.

AT&T even tried to calm investor fears about capital spending increases, arguing the potential payoff of discarding landline service opens up a new era of earnings, both from shifting customers to AT&T’s highly profitable wireless service at a cost of double, triple, or more what customers used to pay the phone company, and a platform to sell them even more services later.

A number of Wall Street analysts disagreed, panning AT&T’s wireline investments as unproven.

The Broadband Coalition, a group of competing telecom providers, called the entire affair a smokescreen:

AT&T’s announcement today that it needs regulatory intervention from the FCC in order to invest in IP technology is a re-run of a tired ploy to leverage the company’s dominance. AT&T only invests in order to respond to competition, and competition is made possible by the very pro-competitive policies that AT&T seeks to eliminate.  The Broadband Coalition members have invested billions of dollars to bring the benefits of IP to American consumers from coast to coast.  But if AT&T gets its way, competition will largely disappear, investments will dry up and consumers will suffer.

Former Congressman Chip Pickering, coalition spokesman, stated,  “AT&T is simply trying to use its belated roll out of IP technology as an excuse to rewrite the telecom rules to its advantage.  We already know that AT&T’s claim that IP will somehow alter the laws of economics and lessen its dominance is patently false.  Clearly, AT&T’s proposed changes are not necessary to achieve widespread IP deployment, but the retention of competition policy is.”

Consumer groups accused AT&T of lying to federal regulators when the company argued the T-Mobile acquisition was essential to accomplish their plan to expand wireless service to 96% of the U.S. population. A year later, the company now claims it can deliver 4G wireless service to 300 million Americans and 99% of its landline service area without breaking much of a sweat.

CNN:

AT&T insists that it wasn’t being disingenuous with the regulators. Things changed, the company says, pointing to the 40 new spectrum deals it signed over the past year. The FCC recently made available some spectrum that wasn’t on the table when AT&T was negotiating its T-Mobile takeover.

“We chartered a new path,” AT&T spokeswoman Roberta Thomson told CNNMoney on Wednesday.

That’s precisely what the FCC — and industry analysts — believed would happen.

Now What

For now, rural customers need not worry AT&T will put their entire rural landline operation up for sale, potentially selling off a large number of  customers to companies like CenturyLink, Frontier, Windstream or FairPoint.

Rural America’s new home phone?

But AT&T’s lobbying machine will soon descend on state legislatures to win regulatory approval of their “abandon landlines” agenda. AT&T has a carrot for those legislators as well — a promise that states that hurry to rubber stamp AT&T’s wish list will be first in line for “investments.”

“We are going to have to see 21st-century regulation for 21st-century investments like this,” said AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson. “I think what you’re going to see is that these investments will go first to those states where you have good line of sight to good regulatory authority to do some of the things we’re talking about here.”

The implications for rural customers are profound if AT&T wins permission to scrap the landline network. Despite assurances from AT&T this is a technology argument, in fact it is more of a campaign to rid themselves of regulatory and consumer protection rules that have been around for decades. The type of technology used makes all the difference. Landline providers are usually compelled to provide reasonable, affordable, universal service for all Americans. Broadband, IP-based, and wireless networks now exist largely in a deregulation free-for-all where AT&T can do as it pleases, serve who it likes, and charge whatever it wants.

Considering AT&T’s current business plans, that sets the stage to worsen the newest digital divide — one pitting urban areas with faster, advanced, and more competitively priced networks against rural America, consigned to expensive, usage capped wireless service that may or may not work when a natural disaster strikes.

The only way this plan works for consumers is if common-sense service obligations, consumer protection, open access for competitors, and mandated equivalence of service is part of the package. Without it, AT&T will get exactly what it wants: a regulation free lifestyle, an expensive wireless network that rural residents will be forced to use for basic telecommunications, and cost savings and revenue opportunities AT&T will use to bolster its own profits, while cementing its monopoly position in the rural communities of 22 states where it operates.

The Charleston Gazette

While the eastern seaboard begins to assess the damage of several feet of water invading New Jersey and New York, West Virginia continues to contend with several feet of heavy snow left by Hurricane Sandy. More than 8,400 customers and climbing have reported service outages to the state’s largest phone company — Frontier Communications, which has crews contending with storm-damaged infrastructure ranging from widespread power outages to downed trees and utility lines.

Although parts of the state anticipated heavy snows from Sandy, cities further south including Charleston were unprepared for the wallop of wet, heavy snow that was expected to remain further to the north. Sandy’s heaviest precipitation bands were on the west side of the storm — bad news as far west as central Ohio and Kentucky. While temperatures remained in the 50’s further north, the cold core of Sandy resulted in precipitation falling largely as snow in the Appalachians.

As of noon, more than 200,000 homes in the state remain without power, which also impacts Frontier Communications’ operations.

Sandy knocked out power to at least 32 of the company’s 230 central offices in West Virginia, but the company reports all but three are still running with the assistance of backup generators — some acquired after last summer’s derecho, which knocked out power at half of Frontier’s switching offices.

Frontier says it is trying to get the remaining three switches back in operation, but some remote locations remain inaccessible because of poor roads and downed trees. Tucker County is reportedly among the most difficult to reach.

West Virginia’s Panhandle region has an estimated 1,000 customers without Internet service as of yesterday, particularly in hard-hit Jefferson, Berkeley, and Morgan counties.

Although customers may find their landline phone service working, broadband service could be more intermittent because of power outages affecting remote terminals that help extend service into rural locations. Those are vulnerable to electricity interruptions which Frontier’s Dan Page reports are widespread across the state, with the exception of the Wheeling area.

Frontier won’t say how many customers in West Virginia are currently without service, but noted many will have to wait until power restoration efforts are complete. Frontier’s crews have secondary priority and will repair services after electric service crews move on.

The storm impacted Frontier customers all the way west to Indiana, where fewer than 1,000 customers were without service in the Terre Haute area.

Any customer experiencing trouble with their phone or Internet should call Frontier at 1-877-462-8188, option 2 to request repair (or 1-800-921-8101). Repair technicians are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Deregulation likely means higher phone bills for CenturyLink customers in Arizona.

CenturyLink has convinced Arizona state regulators local phone service is now competitive throughout the state, allowing the company to raise rates with less regulatory oversight. But some consumers are wondering how deregulation benefits them.

“Once again the phone company has sold us another bill of goods in Arizona,” says Tucson ex-CenturyLink customer Miguel Gonzalez. “First Qwest and now CenturyLink told us that deregulation would bring rates down for phone service, yet both companies fought for years to raise, not lower prices.”

Under the plan approved by the Arizona Corporation Commission, CenturyLink will be able to raise its residential rates up to 10 percent per year, so long as the rate increases do not exceed 25 percent over three years.

Arizona residential landline customers have paid roughly $13.18 for standard urban phone service since the 1990s, when Qwest was the local phone company. Now CenturyLink is free to raise those prices $1.30 a month in any of the next three years or up to $3.30 overall, even as customers continue to disconnect service across the state. Business customers face potentially higher rate hikes — 15 percent annually or 25 percent over three years.

Regulators expect the company to file for a rate increase before you finish reading this article.

Oddly, both CenturyLink and some members of the commission called the change a victory for consumers, despite the likely higher rates to follow. The plan won approval in the Republican-controlled body in a 4-1 vote.

“It should be a win-win for the consumer (and the company),” said Democrat commissioner Paul Newman, who represents southern Arizona and voted for the plan with reservations. “That’s yet to be seen, but I hope it will be.”

The Arizona Daily Star reports CenturyLink will not be able to charge different rates in competitive and less-competitive areas, which consumer advocates say will protect ratepayers in areas where wireless coverage is poor and cable companies do not compete.

CenturyLink said it needs “rate flexibility” to compete as people disconnect landlines and head for cell phones and cable company “digital phone” products. Although the company did not elaborate, it argues the right to raise rates will allow it to compete more effectively with dominant cable operators Cox and Comcast.

Prior to deregulation, CenturyLink was allowed a guaranteed rate of return based on the true cost of providing landline phone service. The company also guaranteed to provide phone service to any Arizona resident inside of its service territory who asked. Under the terms of the new agreement, CenturyLink will now enjoy more rate flexibility, but will continue serving as the phone company of last resort.

“I’m still scratching my head about how the pointy-heads in Phoenix believe that raising rates makes you more competitive with cable and cell phone companies and not less,” Gonzalez says. “I guess it’s the same kind of New Phone Math that CenturyLink uses to try and keep the customers that are slipping away from them faster than ever.”

Gonzalez says he pulled the plug on CenturyLink last August.

“They offer nothing compelling to me when I can get a better price and better service with more calling features from the cable company, and now they offer even less.”

McAdam

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam wants you to spend more with the phone company, and if his vision of Verizon’s future comes true, you will.

The company’s newest CEO spoke on a wide-ranging number of topics for the benefit of Wall Street investors at the Guggenheim Securities Symposium. A transcript of the event delivers several newsworthy revelations on the company’s future plans.

McAdam rose through the ranks of Verizon Communications with a specialty in the company’s immensely profitable wireless business. His predecessor, Ivan Seidenberg, spent his career at Verizon Communications working with the company’s legacy wireline (landline) network. While Seidenberg envisioned a new future for Verizon’s landline business with an upgraded fiber optic network called FiOS, McAdam maintained a different vision having run Verizon Wireless as a profit-making machine since 2006. McAdam believes Verizon’s future earnings and focus should be primarily on the wireless side of the business, because that is where there is serious money to be made.

“The first thing I did when Ivan sort of named me as the Chief Operating Officer was we had a very well-defined credo in the wireless side,” McAdam said. “We created it when we first came together in ’99 because we had seven different companies and we knew we had seven different cultures and we needed to tell people what it was we were really looking for. So we created that document. We spent a lot of time on it. We do a lot of reward and recognition as a result of it and that culture really took root in wireless.”

McAdam’s leadership also aggressively challenged the long-standing telephone company philosophy of earning a stable, predictable profit as Verizon did when it was a regulated monopoly. Instead, McAdam shifted the work culture towards an obsession with shareholder value.

“We took the top 2000 leaders through what we call ‘Leading for Shareholder Value’ and that was really a cultural shift for us because, if you think about it, the wireline side of the business has come out of the defined rate of return culture and we left that competitively a while ago. I am not sure we left it culturally,” McAdam said. “So we have been far more pushing why do you make that investment, what is the return on it, what is the priority of that investment versus another investment.”

Verizon’s Plans to Abandon Rural Landline Customers – Sign Up for Our Expensive LTE 4G Wireless Broadband With a 10GB Usage Cap Instead

Some of the most revealing commentary from McAdam came in response to questions about what Verizon plans to do with its enormous landline phone network, dominant in the northeastern United States.

In comments sure to alarm rural Verizon customers from Massachusetts to Virginia, McAdam clearly signaled the company is laying the groundwork to abandon its rural phone network (and DSL broadband) as soon as regulators allow. Dave Burstein at DSL Prime estimates that could impact as many as 18 million Verizon customers across the country.

“In […] areas that are more rural and more sparsely populated, we have got [a wireless 4G] LTE built that will handle all of those services and so we are going to cut the copper off there,” McAdam said. “We are going to do it over wireless. So I am going to be really shrinking the amount of copper we have out there and then I can focus the investment on that to improve the performance of it.”

Elsewhere, in more urban and suburban areas, McAdam also wants Verizon to purge its network of copper.

“The vision that I have is we are going into the copper plant areas and every place we have FiOS, we are going to kill the copper,” McAdam said. “We are going to just take it out of service and we are going to move those services onto FiOS. We have got parallel networks in way too many places now, so that is a pot of gold in my view.”

In other words, McAdam would shift money spent maintaining and upgrading rural landline service into the company’s wireless network in rural America and its FiOS network in more urban environments, both of which will improve profits. FiOS allows Verizon to pitch television, broadband, and phone service in one profitable triple-play package, while also discontinuing standalone DSL service. Rural customers pushed to wireless LTE for broadband will face onerous usage limits and more expensive service for phone calls and broadband. Using Verizon’s LTE network for video would be prohibitively expensive.

McAdam hints the company has used its lobbyist force to make preparations to abandon rural customers first in Florida, Virginia, and Texas where state regulators approved legislation that eliminates the requirement Verizon serve as “the carrier of last resort.” That law required Verizon to deliver landline phone service to any customer in its service area on request. With that provision stricken in those three states, Verizon can abandon any landline customer it chooses after serving written notice.

McAdam said he intends to continue lobbying other states to adopt similar deregulation, and chided legislatures in both New York and New Jersey for “being backward” because they have repeatedly refused to allow Verizon to walk away from its rural customer obligations.

Burstein thinks the changes in progress at Verizon will be a disaster for affordable rural broadband.

“This makes a mockery of ‘affordable broadband,’ especially when Verizon and AT&T are boycotting the plan for discounts for poor schoolchildren,” Burstein says. “The detente between telcos and cable companies means the prices of modest Internet speeds (3-15 megabits down) are typically going up from $30-45 to $55-70.”

Burstein also notes the change spells disaster for competitors who sell DSL service over existing phone networks.

“Nationwide, alternatives to the telco/cablecos have less than 5% of the residential market but in some areas they remain important,” Burstein says. “The most interesting, Sonic.net in California, offers unlimited calls and Internet up to 20 meg for $50/month, 20-50% cheaper than AT&T.”

“High prices, unacceptable service choices and further rural depopulation are bad policy,” he adds.

Verizon still earns enormous revenue from its remaining landline customers, revenue McAdam hopes will be replaced by selling business-focused services instead.

“Cloud [service] is continuing to pick up for us. Security is I think going to be an even more important play for us as we go forward,” McAdam noted. “I think these large enterprise accounts, offering them kind of a global service with those up the stack […and…] applications on top of it drive it as well. So there is a number of pieces in the portfolio that I think will take us up and more than compensate for some of the falling off of copper-based services like DSL and voice and that sort of thing.”

Verizon’s Unionized Employees Are Wrong-Headed Defending Verizon’s Landline Network

McAdam also blamed the company’s unionized employees for remaining loyal to the company’s traditional role in the landline business.  Unions like the Communications Workers of America continue to push Verizon to expand its FiOS fiber optic network in more places, but the company has left its FiOS expansion on hold, diverting investment into its wireless business. Both McAdam and the union agree the days of copper wire networks are numbered, but McAdam hints that union concessions (and fewer unionized employees) are required before the company will again expand FiOS.

“Our employees see that it is not sustainable to keep having copper plant out there. You really can’t invest in it; it is difficult to maintain it; and they want to see us improve on FiOS,” McAdam said. “And when I am out in the field, the techs and the reps will be the first to point out kind of some of the dumb policies I call them that we have around the business. Well, a lot of those are based on rules that were negotiated with the union back in the ’60s and ’70s.”

“So we have to get the union leadership to understand that if the company is able to be more flexible in meeting customer needs then we can grow things like FiOS, which will provide good long-term jobs,” McAdam added. “Will it be the same number as what we had in the past? No.”

Verizon’s Enormous Offshore Bank Accounts: Waiting for a ‘Business-Friendly’ Administration to Let Them Bring the Money Back, Tax-Free

McAdam also signaled investors that the phone company’s profits massed in overseas bank accounts are going to remain in place until they know who wins the next election. Verizon wants to repatriate some of that offshore money, but they want to do it tax-free.

“Everybody is kind of waiting to see who controls the Senate and who controls the White House and they are waiting to make those — you have got to understand what the tax situation is going to look like, so we are all waiting to make those investments,” McAdam said.

‘Share Everything’ Lays the Foundation to Monetize Your Data Usage… Forever

McAdam is a big supporter of the company’s new Share Everything wireless plan, which charges smartphone owners $90 a month for unlimited voice calling, texting, and a small 1GB bucket of data that he is convinced customers will be prepared to spend more to enlarge.

“If I know that I have an intelligent home that I can get to any number of ways. If I know that I can do everything I want in my car that I can do in front of my TV set or my PC or on my tablet, I think it just takes away a lot of the restraints,” McAdam said. “Is it going to cost them more money? Yes, but it will probably shift their wallet spend from other things that they do individually into this sort of a bucket of gigabytes. And so I think it will be a significant [revenue] stream for us.”

FitchRatings, a credit ratings agency, agrees in a new report.

“The new pricing structure taken by the industry leader is a disciplined pricing action that could create more cash flow stability longer term within the wireless industry,” the credit ratings agency said last week.

Fitch notes data services are increasingly becoming a larger source of revenue for wireless phone companies. In the first quarter alone, data revenues at Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA — all carriers that abandoned flat rate wireless data plans, grew 19% year over to year to $14.2 billion. That represents 41 percent of the companies’ service revenues.

Despite assertions from Verizon that the new plans deliver convenience and better value for subscribers, Fitch found they actually represent a substantial price increase for many customers.

“These increases are sometimes material, depending on whether the legacy rate plans have low recurring charges for text messaging or calling minutes. As a result, prices have generally increased for new subscribers,” Fitch reports.

Fitch warns investors Verizon is likely to lose customers over its new pricing strategy, and experience a slowdown in new customer growth as well, at least until competing carriers realign their pricing and plans to be similar (or match) those Verizon introduced last month.

The Days of Your Subsidized Android/iPhone May Be Numbered

McAdam’s vision also includes a re-examination of device subsidies as customers increasingly depend on wireless devices. McAdam previously indicated the wireless device subsidy was designed to get customers to adopt and embrace new technologies, and as adoption rates have soared, the need to keep discounting technology that customers depend on diminishes.

He echoed that sentiment at the Guggenheim Securities Symposium, noting that Verizon this month abandoned subsidies on tablet devices. For McAdam, discounting wireless technology serves one purpose: to quickly establish a new business relationship with a customer that probably would not buy their first device at full price.

But McAdam recognizes changing the company’s subsidy that customers expect to receive must happen gradually. It has already started, first by eliminating early upgrade discounts, then by dropping the company’s loyalty discount “New Every Two” plan. Now, the company will only allow grandfathered unlimited data plan customers to keep those plans if they agree to forego any subsidy on their next smartphone.

“If you look at the telematics industry today [services like OnStar], the car companies subsidize a device that goes into the car. So I think that we have a tendency over the years to sort of look and say, oh, something is going to happen very quickly,” McAdam said. “Things have a tendency to evolve over a long period of time, so I think you will have some devices, like the tablet today, that [are] not subsidized and you’ll probably still have certain devices that are because you want to establish that relationship with a customer and that is the easiest way to get there.”

Verizon Wants You to Use the Cable Industry’s Growing Wi-Fi Network

McAdam’s vision also offloads as much of Verizon’s 3G and 4G traffic to other networks as possible. Ironically, one of the biggest networks he hopes customers will use instead of his are the growing number of Wi-Fi services offered by his competitors in the cable industry.

“It is interesting that a lot of people have said, well, I can’t believe you’re going to partner with [cable companies],” McAdam said. “You are not going to use their Wi-Fi are you? Well, of course, we are. I mean we want to shift as much onto FiOS or onto the fixed network where we can and then provide — use that capacity to provide those higher demand services like video.”

McAdam added he does not want customers sitting in their homes watching video over his LTE 4G network. He also wants that traffic shifted to Wi-Fi.

“So our thinking going forward as we talk about kind of the ‘One Verizon’ approach is we want to use every network asset we have and if that means jumping onto FiOS or using the cloud services for mobile as well as fixed line, using security across all of our different access technologies, we want that network to be seamless and that is what our CTO, Tony Melone, is driving hard on in the business right now,” McAdam said.

One preview of that thinking at work can be found on Verizon Wireless’ hottest new device — the Samsung Galaxy S3. Verizon’s version of the phone browbeats customers with prominent menus that encourage Wi-Fi use wherever possible. The phone’s persistent reminder has become a pest according to many of the phone’s owners, who consider both the message and the difficulty keeping Wi-Fi shut off obtrusive.

Verizon’s partnership with large cable companies including Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Bright House Networks originally involved the acquisition of excess wireless spectrum cable companies originally intended to use to compete with the mobile phone industry. With the cable industry abandoning those plans, the proposed collaboration involving Verizon Wireless grew to include cross-marketing each other’s products and services, and now apparently includes sharing the cable companies’ growing Wi-Fi networks.

Verizon Believes The Future of Telecommunications Needs to Be In the Hands of Two Companies — Verizon and AT&T

A point of shared belief between market leaders Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is that excessive competition just does not make sense. Both believe federal regulators have it all wrong when they push to maintain the level of competition that still exists in the telecommunications business. When the Department of Justice effectively pulled the plug on a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, Stephenson was outraged and, in one investor conference call, launched a tirade against regulators and suggested that AT&T would throw in the towel on expanding rural broadband in a retaliatory move.

McAdam and Stephenson both believe that competition in telecommunications represents wasted investment, inefficiency, and value destruction.

“I think the fundamental problem here, and it is sort of like fighting gravity I think, is that it is so expensive to build these networks that you are not going to support seven or eight carriers,” McAdam told investors. “I don’t — frankly, I think you’ll be lucky if you can support three in a healthy environment.”

But McAdam recognizes that if it achieves a wireless duopoly with AT&T, it must be a benevolent one, or else the marketplace abuses the wireless industry has a track record engaging in will invite regulatory scrutiny.

“We have a tendency to create a great club and hand it to our detractors and say please beat me with this because we do some dumb things like fighting some of the number portability and trying to push a direct wireless directory,” McAdam said. “I mean there are things that have really upset customers and that invites regulation. So I think the industry has the responsibility to act in the best interests of the customer as part of the mix with a shareholder, but I think there is always going to be the battle with regulation.”

McAdam admits he is uncomfortable with the fact the Obama Administration has allowed the regulation pendulum to swing more towards enforced competition and checking the power of dominant carriers in the marketplace. He prefers the Bush Administration’s “hands-off” approach that allowed both Verizon and AT&T to snap up smaller competitors with scant regulatory review.

McAdam believes the Obama Administration’s FCC and Justice Department is slowing down wireless investment, innovation, and the industry’s ability to earn profits at a time when unemployment in sky high and increased investment will help drive the economy forward.

The Communications Workers of America says when it comes to “stealthy” bills like S.B. 1611 that deregulate telecommunications in California, “no price is too high — no lie is too big.”

AT&T and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are back again fighting for more deregulation of California’s telecommunications industry with a bill that will strip oversight of vital telecommunications services and stop punishing bad actors that leave customers without telephone service, sometimes for weeks.

California legislators are typically not responsive to the wholesale deregulation efforts that seem to draw support in more conservative states, so AT&T’s lobbyists are trying a more “incremental” approach in the state. But AT&T has also inserted “stealth” language into the bill that would dismantle consumer protections, allow companies to abandon unprofitable landlines, and strip away important oversight “checks and balances” needed to ensure good service.

Sen. Padilla’s top corporate contributor is AT&T.

S.B. 1611 illustrates that AT&T can buy its way into any legislator’s office, Democrat or Republican. The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Alex Padilla (D-20th Senate District) has received more contributions from AT&T than from any other corporation in both the 2006 and 2010 elections.

The bill ostensibly claims to limit its scope narrowly to “Voice over Internet Protocol” (VoIP) and “Internet Protocol enabled service.” That brings to mind services like “digital phone service” from cable companies or alternative telephone services like Vonage, magicJack or Skype.

S.B. 1611:

The bill would prohibit any department, agency, commission, or political subdivision of the state from enacting, adopting, or enforcing any law, rule, regulation, ordinance, standard, order, or other provision having the force or effect of law, that regulates VoIP or other IP enabled service, unless required or delegated by federal law or expressly authorized by statute. The bill would specify certain areas of law that are expressly applicable to VoIP and IP enabled service providers. The bill would provide that its limitations upon the commission’s regulation of VoIP and IP enabled services do not affect the commission’s existing authority over non-VoIP and other non-IP enabled wireline or wireless service….

To the layperson who generally believes services like Skype and Vonage might not deserve the same oversight as AT&T, Frontier, or Verizon — which provide Californians traditional landline service, consider Section 2 (a)(2) of the bill, which describes and defines VoIP and IP enabled service as anything that:

“Permits a user generally to receive a call that originates on the public switched telephone network and to terminate a call to the public switched telephone network” and “any service, capability, functionality, or application using existing Internet Protocol, or any successor Internet Protocol, that enables an end user to send or receive a communication in existing Internet Protocol format, or any successor Internet Protocol format through a broadband connection, regardless of whether the communication is voice, data, or video.”

This “narrow” deregulation bill just grew as wide as the Gulf of Mexico and can realistically allow any phone company in California to ignore state oversight and regulation forever.

Traditional telephone companies increasingly utilize exactly these technologies for calls placed over ordinary landline phones. Using broadband service to engage in two-way communications also qualifies. With this kind of defining language, virtually every telecommunications service in the state of California would win near-total deregulation and walk away from important oversight. The California Public Utilities Commission certainly understood the implications of this bill when the majority of commissioners came out in opposition to S.B. 1611.

Goodbye Universal Service: S.B. 1611 Allows Phone Companies to Abandon Rural and Economically Distressed California Communities

Several public interest groups also discovered language in the bill that is a perennial favorite of AT&T — eliminating universal service requirements that assure every citizen that wants a telephone line can get one. S.B. 1611 lays waste to Section 709 of the California Code which guarantees: “our universal service commitment by assuring the continued affordability and widespread availability of high-quality telecommunications services to all Californians.”

With that language gone, the state’s phone companies can unilaterally decide to abandon the customers they no longer want to serve. That could spell disaster in rural northern and eastern California, and leave low income residents with nothing but a dead phone line, unable even to call 911 in an emergency.

One AT&T Lobbyist for Every California Lawmaker

The importance AT&T places on influencing lawmakers is readily apparent when one realizes there are at least 120 AT&T lobbyists working in the state capital Sacramento, one for every California lawmaker.

But when one considers the track record of California phone and cable companies in the last few years, is less oversight and regulation the right answer?

• Verizon Sued for Providing DSL Speeds (Suitable for VoIP) They Can’t Deliver
• AT&T Gouges California With 25% Rate Increase
• California Landline Nightmare: Residents in Bakersfield in Tears Over Lousy Service
• Southern California Power & Phone Companies Blamed for Devastating Wildfires
• Verizon Bills Dead People: We’ll Settle for Half Because She’s No Longer Among the Living
• Frontier’s Goodbye Kiss: A $680 Final Bill for a Departing Customer
• Calabasas Residents Annoyed by “Corrupt and Deceptive” Charter Cable; Time Warner Cable Also Called Out
• Time Warner Cable Guy Arrives Late to Service Call, Leaves Claiming Homeowner Had “Bad Air”
• More Frontier Problems: Californians Wait Months on Refunds for Disconnected Landlines
• The Many Challenges of Charter Cable: Rate Increases for Seniors, Bankruptcy, Employees Attacked, Customers Hassled
• AT&T’s California Gold Rush: Company Lobbyists Spread the Money Far and Wide

“SB 1161 is a stealth vehicle for the gradual deregulation of telecommunications in California,” the Consumer Federation of California declared on their website. “Consumers need the CPUC to have the power to investigate complaints of bad service or unfair charges on bills, regardless of the technology used to provide phone service.”

Call to Action!

Consumers across California need to get on board immediately to stop S.B. 1611. You can file online opposition courtesy of Free Press, but it is far more effective to also directly phone your own legislator and leave a message to urge this bill be defeated. It literally takes only 2-3 minutes to call and the money and phone service you could save will be your own. Use this district finder to contact your representatives.

S.B. 1161 is scheduled for hearing in the Assembly Appropriations Committee this Wednesday, so time is of the essence!