AT&T can now hang up on Hopland

MENDOCINO CO., 7/12/26 — On June 29, two things happened to Hopland.

That day, crews working for the state’s Middle-Mile Broadband Network started potholing and drilling under Highway 101 through downtown, threading orange conduit for a public fiber backbone that will eventually run the length of the state.

The same day, nearly 3,000 miles away, a deadline passed at the Federal Communications Commission — and with it, AT&T gained federal permission to stop selling old-fashioned copper landline service in portions of 360 California telephone exchanges. One of them is in Mendocino County.

It’s Hopland.

The highway and the driveway

Start with the fiber, because isn’t that the good news? The Middle-Mile Broadband Network is the public backbone California lawmakers funded through Senate Bill 156 in 2021 — a roughly 10,000-mile open-access system meant to bring cheap capacity to places the private market skipped. The drilling under Hopland’s main street is part of it, folded into the Caltrans rebuild of downtown 101.

Here’s what middle mile means, though: it’s the highway, not the driveway. The network sells capacity to internet providers, tribes, schools and public agencies — not to households. Nobody in Hopland will be able to call up and order service on it. The state connected the network’s first customer anywhere in California this April, nearly five years after the bill passed: the Bishop Paiute Tribe, in Inyo County.

For a Hopland home to see broadband from that conduit, an internet provider has to build the last mile — actual lines to actual houses — and hang its network on the state’s backbone. So far, none has stepped forward. The state’s last-mile construction grants for Mendocino County went to the cities of Ukiah and Fort Bragg and to the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Covelo. Hopland got nothing.

My own reporting on a similar buildout in west Sonoma County shows why nobody does this without a subsidy: connecting rural homes there costs $18,000 to $26,000 per location — with grant money.

So what Hopland has, for now, is what it had in May: AT&T phone and DSL over copper, AT&T’s cellular home internet, a couple of fixed-wireless outfits and satellite. And the first item on that list is the one AT&T just got permission to retire.

What AT&T won, and how

AT&T asked the FCC in May to discontinue what the industry calls plain old telephone service — the copper landline that draws power from the phone company’s own network and keeps working when the lights go out — for about 184,000 residential and 15,000 business customers statewide. Under the commission’s streamlined rules, the applications were deemed granted automatically on June 29 when the FCC let its deadline pass without objection. No commissioner voted; no order issued. The earliest any customer can be cut off is June 1, 2027.

In a statement, the company said it had spent more than a decade trying to modernize its California network and that “updated federal policies recognize the urgency of upgrading customers to more reliable service.”

AT&T officials, speaking without attribution, described a phased, multiyear transition — technicians visiting homes, nobody left without access to voice or 911 service. Alongside its federal filings, AT&T announced a $19 billion California investment through 2030, including more than 1,200 new cell sites.

Even with its last-mile problem, Hopland is the lucky one. It sits on the 101 corridor, where AT&T already sells its cellular home internet, with a state fiber line going in under its main street and, on paper at least, a broadband future. That’s exactly why it made AT&T’s list — the company’s stated logic is to retire copper where customers have somewhere else to go and keep it where they don’t. Copper now serves only 3% of the households AT&T serves in California, the company says, and maintaining it costs about $1 billion a year, according to its federal court filings.

The dead zones

Ukiah, Willits, Fort Bragg, Covelo, Comptche, Elk — none of them are in this round. Not because AT&T loves its copper, but because most of the county fails the “somewhere else to go” test, and California law still forces the company to serve it anyway.

Sheriff Matt Kendall lives between Ukiah and Boonville, and he has no cell service at his house. When the tower goes out, he told a state hearing in Ukiah in February 2024, he falls back on an old rotary phone bolted to the wall. “The kids don’t know how to dial it, but I do,” he said.

“From Gualala to Piercy, you know, I have over 100 miles on 101 and very few places where my cell phone works,” Kendall told the same hearing.

Supervisor Ted Williams, a 17-year firefighter who represents the coast and Anderson Valley, put the mapping problem bluntly: AT&T’s coverage maps are drawn at the census-block level, and “the census block is not granular in this county. You can have a couple customers along Highway 1 and it will show the whole block” as served. The stakes, in his telling, are not abstract: “For an 85-year-old woman, the big call is a ground level fall. It’s terrifying. And that landline in a lot of cases is the only way she has to call 911 for help.”

When the 2017 Redwood Complex Fire severed AT&T’s backbone fiber between Ukiah and Willits, the official after-action report found it was carrying nearly all telecommunications north of Ukiah, with no backup route. Cell service, 911, cable and broadband failed across much of the county at once. The copper that survived, running on its own power, was — in Kendall’s words — “the only thing that worked.”

The 24-hour battery and the two-week outage

The replacement AT&T offers copper customers is a home unit called Phone-Advanced that runs on its cellular network. Regina Costa has spent years examining it. She doesn’t buy it.

Costa is the telecommunications policy director at The Utility Reform Network, the San Francisco consumer group known as TURN. California requires 72 hours of backup power at wireline facilities in high fire-threat zones — the only rule of its kind in the country, and most of rural Mendocino sits in those zones. Phone-Advanced ships with a 24-hour battery, Costa said in a May interview, and AT&T doesn’t disclose what keeps the network behind the unit running when the power fails.

“If you have it at your house and the network dies, that is not gonna do you a heck of a lot of good,” she said. Costa lives in Hacienda, in the lower Russian River canyon country that loses power the way Mendocino does. “We were out for two weeks last year. They’re not gonna last two weeks.”

When AT&T filed the federal package in May, she put it this way: “This is putting people’s lives in danger with no option.”

The part that isn’t settled

What stands between the dead zones and their own retirement list is California’s carrier-of-last-resort rules, which still require AT&T to offer basic phone service to anyone in its territory who asks. The state has refused to lift them — and AT&T is now working to take the decision out of California’s hands. It has asked the FCC to declare the state’s rules preempted, sued the state in federal court and sought relief from its low-income LifeLine obligations.

Comments on the preemption petition closed July 7, with the California Public Utilities Commission and a wave of individual Californians filing against it and industry trade groups lining up behind AT&T. Replies from AT&T are due July 22. A ruling on AT&T’s injunction request could come from a San Diego federal courtroom any day.

If AT&T wins, the “somewhere else to go” test stops mattering — the obligation goes away everywhere, dead zones included.

For now, Hopland lives in the gap between two networks: a public fiber line going in under its main street that no local can buy service on, and a private copper one overhead with federal clearance to die. Much of the  rest of the county doesn’t even have that, especially if the court ruling goes to AT&T.

Kendall saw it coming two years ago. “Right now, this is a gamble,” he told that Ukiah hearing, “and I’m telling you, I am not going to slide my chips forward thinking I am going to win on this one. Someone is going to lose their life over this.”