AT&T Wants $100 Million From California Taxpayers For Aging DSL (dslreports.com)

An anonymous reader quotes an article on DSLReports: AT&T is asking California taxpayers to give them $100 million so that it can provide several parts of the state with unreliable, slow and expensive DSL service. Under Assembly Bill 2130 (written by AT&T lobbyists), AT&T would receive $100 million from state taxpayers. In return, AT&T would only need to provide 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload and would have little to no oversight over whether the $100 million is even being used for the DSL service.

Comments

Universal Service

[Etherwalk]

In the old POTS system, there was a standard where calls in cities and business telephone services overcharged heavily in order to subsidize the much more expensive rural phone lines, so that everybody in the country had a MUCH better chance of being able to afford a phone line if they wanted to.

In theory that is probably the argument behind this--but in practice it is probably just that AT&T paid them a few million in donations and want a hundred million steered toward AT&T.

AT&T had $5 BILLION free cash flow in 3rd quar

[smooth wombat]

I checked AT&T's corporate site to see how dire their cash situation is. If this company is asking the taxpayers to foot the bill for upgrading their network then they must be in serious trouble.

According to AT&T's press release dated October 22, 2015, AT&T had $39.1 billion in consolidated revenue, up 19% from the previous period (primarily due to the DirecTV purchase).

They also had $10.8 billion in cash from operations and $5 billion in free cash flow.

Apparently making a few billion dollars in a single quarter equates to not being able to spend $100 million to upgrade their own equipment. Who would have thought?