FCC Will Take Hard Look at Rules for Legacy Copper Networks: Carr

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr told reporters Thursday that he will look “very closely” at the state of play on legacy copper in carrier networks. “We have a regime in place where we are requiring carriers to invest billions and billions of dollars into aging, legacy copper networks,” sometimes in parallel with building a modern network, Carr said. “We need to find a way to create the incentives so that we can transition people to next-generation services and incentivize investment in new infrastructure.”

AT&T in particular has moved to shut down parts of its legacy operations (see 2502240025). AT&T CEO John Stankey said in January that the carrier plans to file FCC applications to stop selling legacy products in about 1,300 wire centers, which covers roughly a quarter of AT&T's footprint (see 2501270047).