AT&T Sues to Get Out of California's Copper Landline Requirement
AT&T is suing to challenge a California regulation that mandates the maintenance of copper landlines. The company argues that the outdated network is costly and vulnerable to theft, while also draining energy resources. AT&T is seeking a court ruling to prioritize federal orders over state regulations regarding the retirement of these networks.
- ▪AT&T claims it spends $1 billion annually to maintain its aging copper telephone network.
- ▪The lawsuit aims to overturn a California regulation requiring the company to keep these landlines operational.
- ▪AT&T plans to invest $19 billion in California to expand its fiber network and improve wireless coverage.
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| Original publisher | PCMag |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcmag.com/news/att-sues-to-get-out-of-californias-copper-landline-requirement |
| Publication time | Thu, 21 May 26 18:41:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-21T19:11:35.680Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-21T19:11:35.680Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | c7_e18cWCZig |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
AT&T is suing to overturn a California regulation that requires the carrier to maintain old-school landlines for customers in certain areas of the state. The carrier argues that it’s spending “$1 billion each year to maintain a century-old telephone network that almost no one uses.” Plus, it's "an easy mark for criminals—California has already suffered about 2,000 outages from copper thefts this year—and drains the power grid of over 100 million kilowatt-hours each year."AT&T is suing officials with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, saying it can’t withdraw the copper-based landlines due to local regulations.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCMag.
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