Originally Posted By: eljefino
On copper phone lines we paid a few cents for "universal service" to bring phones to everyone.
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I think the Obama-era FCC(don't turn this political, please) gave AT&T and Verizon the green light to stop maintaining their copper at a "minimum service level" in 2014-2015, and this happened right about the time that AT&T was about to buy out DirecTV alongside deprecating U-Verse and Verizon announced that they won't build out FiOS anymore with more divestitures to Frontier. I know CenturyLink has also expanded in former Sprint/Qwest/Embarq areas and I think they bought out Level3.
AT&T and Verizon are still maintaining copper in major population areas - lots of businesses still use T1s for data and voice(and in security-sensitive applications, a T1/satellite link is pretty darn reliable), xDSL is still being sold(and AT&T U-Verse is fancy VDSL). But in rural areas, there isn't much of an financial incentive to keep copper working, even though it's already dodgy bringing in DSL to those areas since AT&T had to install remote terminals for that purpose. A friend lives near the Sierra Nevadas and Comcast won't build out to his house, AT&T can only offer 1.5-3Mbps ADSL to his house. And even cities have dark zones - the lawn bowling club I'm a member of even though it's 200ft from a main street can't get Comcast or AT&T U-Verse VDSL/Fiber. Just ADSL through the POTS.