AT&T is glad to expand service, but wants pesky FCC regulations dropped

AT&T announced a plan to invest $14 billion in expanding its wireless and U-Verse service around the country. At the same time, the company submitted a petition to the Federal Communications Commission asking for an end to the "conventional public-utility-style regulation."

"AT&T believes that this regulatory experiment will show that conventional public-utility-style regulation is no longer necessary or appropriate in the emerging all-IP ecosystem," the company wrote in its FCC filing. "Customers are abandoning obsolescent [time-division multiplexing] services, but AT&T and other incumbent carriers still must be prepared to serve every household in their service territories on demand. Thus, the costs of maintaining those networks remain in place, and every loss of another customer increases the average cost per line of serving the customers that remain." Some industry watchers are worried such a move would make an end-run around existing regulations that require a baseline level of phone service under federal law. If the FCC heeds AT&T’s advice, some fear there will be even further entrenchment of the dominant wired carriers, like AT&T and Verizon, who are pushing more profitable wireless services.