[conspire] AT&T and CPUC

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> I still have a landline going back to when 415 area code include all
> of San Mateo and parts of Santa Clara County.

We'll just have to wait and see the end-result of the CPUC regulatory
process and AT&T's desire to skulk away from public duties.

It may be that AT&T will continue to be the "ILEC" in all of California,
just hiking prices.  It may be that they'll abandon particular
communities and not others.  It may be that some other ILEC such as
Frontier Communications, will take over in places.  Or, CPUC might say
"Hell no."

And maybe the upheaval will somehow hasten the fiber buildout.  All
it takes is somebody's money.

I did FWIW ponder the "keep a landline for emergency fallback" position,
having thought that for many years, and finally discarded that idea
as to our house in West Menlo:  This isn't exactly La Loma out in the
middle of the forest.  If cellular service is ever out, we can
drive/walk/bicycle over to where there's a working tower, etc.  And, if
we cannot do _that_ for some reason, we probably have bigger problems.

Ultimately, we had a landline primarily to prevent AT&T from maliciously
severing our Raw Bandwidth aDSL service if we ever terminated voice service.
Once Raw Bandwidth exiting the market in West Menlo, the monthly hit to
AT&T could no longer be justified.  It was, at that point, just money
being thrown away, so we fired them.