Thread regarding AT&T layoffs

att was subsidized from taxpayer money to provide communications. they are suppose to provide a public service - a utility. it wasn't suppose a 2000% profit company. how att thinks they can pick and chose who to serve is criminal IMO.

Those farmers and rich exec's with country homes bring in more profit than you realize thanks to the Universal Service Fee that every customer is charged. If we didn't have to serve rural areas, customers could save this $36/line each year.

@tws....partially true in theory...reality is there are thousands of those farmers down the dirt road(not to mention all of the subdivisions on the edge of town) with a $50/month pots line on a copper cable that we've been going out a dozen times a year to patch for the past 30 years. We could have cr@pped a gold plated Central office out there cheaper than what we spend on maintenance just to provide poor unreliable dial tone. Fiber could have been paid for 1000 times over in countless areas like this across this country.

The good thing about the rural and underserved areas is, that once a carrier gets the service out there, you have a customer for life because nobody else wants to do it(i.e the pots line). Out there, you are not constantly having to get into price and service wars because there is no true reasonable apples to apples competitor(gig fiber w/ uverse tv vs Hughes net & DTV).

If you've got customers that want to hand you a check every month for the next 50 years and you can't figure out how to make money off of them, it sounds like a poor management issue.

Not true at all. Some customers cost more in maintenance and support costs than they bring in revenue, that's just a plain fact. Similarly, no one wants to to lay out fiber to serve a single farmer 100 miles from anywhere so he can have $50/mo Internet. Best to get rid of these (C)an't (R)ealize (A) (P)rofit customers and leave them to the kinds of businesses who do want to serve them, maybe AOL at 128 Kbps.