from the comes-around-goes-around dept
While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they’re still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, their cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a lot of that is going to very popular new publicly-owned competitors.
But there’s another major worry: a new report by the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) showed huge swaths of telecom cabling installed years ago was coated in lead, posing significant health concerns. In response, AT&T did was AT&T always does, which was basically pretend that none of it was real:
Based on information shared by The Journal, it appears that certain of their testing methodologies are flawed and one of the companies responsible for the testing is compromised by a conflict of interest.
But the pressure is on to remove and re-install any lead-coated cabling, and the mounting costs of such a project (estimated to be somewhere around $60 billion) pummeled already reeling telecom stocks for most of last week:
The telecom stocks were already having a rough year. Over the past 12 months, including today’s results, AT&T’s stock is down 34.1 percent. Verizon is down 37.4 percent over the past year. Lumen and Frontier are down 84.2 percent and 52.8 percent during the past 12 months, respectively.
There’s some irony here given that the telecom industry has successfully engaged in one of the most successful lobbying campaigns in recent memory. The Trump FCC was basically a puppet for industry, and the Biden FCC has lacked any competent voting majority thanks to both inherent fecklessness and the industry’s assault on the nomination of Gigi Sohn. Lobbying couldn’t conquer reality, though.
With AT&T’s network being the oldest, they likely face the greatest costs. And while consumers will inevitably be the ones to pay for it (either through higher rates or the government bailing AT&T out with taxpayer money), maybe we could instead use some of the money AT&T reportedly stole from the U.S. school system to fund the repairs instead?
Filed Under: dsl, health, lead, networks, phone, public, telecom
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