People still rely on landlines and don’t want to lose them

Living high up in the Hollywood Hills, Peter and Nanci Ellis think of their landline as a lifeline. Most days, cellphone service in their Los Feliz Oaks home near Griffith Park is so spotty that they rely on their traditional phone for medical consultations, job interviews or any call with long wait times. But the landline is also essential in their neighbourhood — which has few roads in and out and is at high risk of fires and earthquake landslides — because it connects to their alarm system and monitors their smoke detectors.

“We need to be sure we can be reached by emergency services, and to be able to reach out” in the event of a disaster, the Ellises wrote last month in a public comment to the Federal Communications Commission. The deadly firestorms that erupted in Los Angeles in 2025, they noted, proved “minutes made the difference between life and death.”

Old copper landlines are going the way of so many other aging pieces of technology as smartphones have become the way many people surf the web, pay bills, watch movies and keep up with friends and family. But some residents of LA and California — particularly those who live in fire-prone areas — are determined to hold on to their traditional phones.

As telecommunications giant AT&T accelerates its push to retire landline service to about 184,000 households and 15,000 businesses across the state, hundreds of Californians have voiced alarm in public comments. Many who rely on copper-wire landlines live in remote rural areas, but some also live in the hills and canyons of major metro areas like Los Angeles, where cell and internet service is patchy and the risk of natural disasters is high.

“It’s unnerving, for sure,” said Sarah Adams, 81, a retired high school maths teacher who lives alone in a Rancho Palos Verdes neighbourhood with only one road in and out. “To be in a situation where if there’s an emergency, like an earthquake or a fire, and my mobile phone doesn’t work, I have no means to communicate with my family.” California law requires AT&T, the largest carrier of last resort in the state, to offer basic telephone service to anyone who asks for it in certain areas. But AT&T, which made $23.4 billion in profit last year, is pushing to discontinue its traditional landline service on or after June 1 next year.

For AT&T, copper landlines have become obsolete technology, much like Kodak film or Blockbuster VHS tapes. The company says only 3% of households it serves in California use its copper system, which costs $1 billion a year to maintain. Discontinuing landlines, AT&T argues, would allow it to provide more households with advanced fibre and wireless technology.

The state has pushed back for years against AT&T’s attempts to cut copper landlines. But the battle has intensified in recent months after the Federal Communications Commission issued a March order that offered telecommunications companies a path to appeal state law, “cutting through the red tape that has both required providers to keep aging copper lines in place and effectively prevented them from investing in the modern infrastructure that Americans want and deserve.” In May, AT&T filed a federal lawsuit against California’s Public Utilities Commission and the state attorney general’s office, requesting a court order declaring the state cannot stop AT&T from cutting landlines. In late June, the FCC approved a petition from AT&T to end its landline service, despite a California order that it must continue offering the service.

The FCC decision does not allow AT&T to immediately discontinue its landlines, said Ryan Johnston, a telecommunications regulatory attorney who works for the Utility Reform Network. The company is still waiting for FCC decisions on two separate applications, he said, plus a federal court ruling on AT&T’s request to bar California from enforcing its carrier of last resort rule. AT&T maintains the transition away from landlines is a yearlong process. “No customer will be left without access to phone or 911 service,” an AT&T spokesman said in a statement. “Nothing will change for customers in areas where there isn’t reliable wireless coverage to support voice calling, like in some rural communities.”

But California regulators and consumer watchdogs disagree with AT&T on what constitutes a reliable replacement. Advocates for utility consumers say that copper landlines are more reliable in disasters than cellular networks because they carry their own low-voltage electricity through the wires and do not rely on local power grids or cell towers that can get overloaded and drop calls. But AT&T counters that copper networks can be destroyed in major fire events, do not hold up well to water and take longer to repair. Modern networks are more resilient in disasters, an AT&T spokesman said, because they can be restored faster and are less vulnerable to damage and copper theft.

AT&T states it will retire copper landlines only in areas where there is reliable connectivity available from AT&T, like AT&T Phone — Advanced, also known as AP-A. According to an AT&T spokesman, AP-A works “just like traditional phone service over our wireless network and meets the FCC’s standards for replacing traditional phone service.” However, Johnston said AP-A was not an adequate landline replacement. A traditional copper line carries power over the line, so even if the power is out at your house and you pick up the phone, you’ll have a dial tone, he said.