I just made a rather disturbing finding. AT&T’s U-verse service — its broadband, internet and TV service — is a copper-to-the-home service. More importantly, it is a fiber-to-the-press-release. Going though hundreds of blogs and articles as well as AT&T’s state and federal testimony and filings — including AT&T’s recent FCC petition to close down the Public Switched Telephone Networks, (PSTN), AT&T never once mentioned that AT&T’s U-verse is a copper-based PSTN service. U-verse uses the same, exact wires that have been in homes and offices for decades, even though AT&T is claiming that the PSTN is “too old” and needs to be “retired,” closing down about 50 percent of their 22 state territories’ utility networks.
AT&T has also told anyone who will listen that the company needs to “transition” the PSTN networks to an “all Internet protocol network” to make “Voice Over the Internet Protocol” (VOIP) work.