AT&T responds to discontinuing traditional land-line phone service in Lincoln County, potentially leaving as many as 2865 Lincoln County residents without phone service.
Hi Kim,
Thank you for your patience. Following is a statement that can be attributed to an AT&T spokesperson:
“Our transition is a year-long process, and no customer will be left without access to voice or 911 service. We’re working with our customers to upgrade their copper-based service to newer, less expensive options like AT&T Phone – Advanced. As part of that upgrade, copper-based service will be discontinued in Tennessee. We are committed to working with our customers during this transition.”
Additional:
- It is getting increasingly difficult to support our customers using copper-based services given the age of the technology, reduced reliability, and frequent copper outages many times caused by theft. Upgrading our customers to newer services is critical to helping ensure they remain connected to more reliable services.
- We have newer, high quality services that may be less expensive, like AT&T Phone – Advanced and Wireless, so we are discontinuing traditional copper-based services to customers in these areas. All current customers can keep their existing service until it is discontinued.
- We’re working with our customers to help upgrade and will notify them multiple times. Some customers in these areas have already transitioned to AT&T Phone – Advanced.
- If a customer moves to AT&T Phone – Advanced and it does not work according to technical expectations, we will work with them to address any of their concerns.
- We’re doing this in incremental steps with the FCC. The FCC approved AP-A and AT&T Business Voice as adequate replacements for traditional copper-based landlines.
- Across our footprint, orders for traditional landline voice services have decreased 96% since 2014.
- Only 1% of eligible customers are still using legacy copper voice technology.
Thank you,
Kyle Loomis
AT&T Corporate Communications
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