AT&T Picks Two Areas for Advanced-Services Test

AT&T proposed offering digital-only telephone service in towns in Alabama and Florida as it moves toward abandoning its aging copper-wire network and escaping the US regulation that goes with it. The regional experiments will help regulators decide whether AT&T and other telephone companies will be allowed to stop offering traditional wired phone service as customers migrate to wireless and Internet-based communications.

The experiments are to take place in West Delray Beach, Florida, and Carbon Hill, Alabama. In rural Carbon Hill, which began as a coal-mining community, about 55 percent of subscribers will be offered only a wireless system, according to AT&T documents. All customers in suburban West Delray Beach trial are to be offered wired and wireless services, the company said. AT&T chose Carbon Hill, where 21 percent of households have income below the poverty line, in part to address challenges of changing systems in a poor, rural area. AT&T initially will ask customers in the test areas to switch to the new technologies. In a separate phase that would require US approval, the company would stop offering plain old telephone service to new customers, said Hank Hultquist, AT&T vice president-federal regulatory. “We want to make sure our customers are comfortable with the new services,” Hultquist said. Later, the company wants to switch all customers to the newer technologies, he said.