Don’t confuse copper wireline infrastructure with the services it supports. That’s the message from the California Public Utilities Commission to the Federal Communications Commission. In comments regarding possible changes to federal wireless and wireline telecoms regulations, the CPUC said that the "FCC’s assumption that copper has outlived its usefulness is overstated"…
Copper technology is not inherently obsolete. Copper was originally used for telecommunications because it could serve as the backbone of a universal voice network: it was cheap to install, easy to use, and readily available. When the voice network expanded to provide broadband capability, new copper technologies were invented to provide data services and the internet to homes and businesses, using the existing architecture and infrastructure. Meanwhile, telecommunications carriers have gradually pushed fiber technologies further out from the core (where its capacity was well-suited to the big traffic requirements of interoffice communications), but fiber-to-the-home is not yet ubiquitous. Many carriers—especially those without a wireless affiliate—provide high-speed service to the home using either fiber or copper. For example, advances in the G.fast protocol have led to carrier strategies for serving multi-dwelling units using the existing copper loops. And some services—certain credit card readers, alarm systems, closed captioning, and emergency services, for example—still rely on copper technology. In a transitional technical environment like this one, all of these technologies—copper, fiber, wireless—should be used to their fullest. The FCC’s conflation of “fiber facilities” with “next-generation services” masks the difficulties that may arise if copper retirement is approached hastily.
That’s a position that four of the five CPUC commissioners agree with – they voted to approve these comments at their meeting on 15 June 2017, with commission president Michael Picker abstaining.
The comments also pushed back against federal preemption of California’s utility pole and right of way regulations, pointing out that the CPUC "currently has three ‘pole and conduit’ proceedings open". Under federal law, individual states can opt to regulate pole access and other telecoms policy themselves. California is one of twenty states that has done so.