A bill that would ease the requirement for telephone companies to offer traditional landline service in Kentucky’s urban areas passed out of a House committee Thursday.
This is the fourth consecutive year that the bill has been proposed. Kentucky AT&T president Hood Harris said during a hearing on the bill that the state has waited long enough to upgrade its telecommunication laws.
“We’ve been waiting to modernize our laws for three years now and we’ve seen investment in technology bypass the commonwealth on its way to neighboring states that have already modernized their communications laws,” Harris said.
Opponents, like Kentucky Resources Council Director Tom Fitzgerald, say it is too early for lawmakers to remove landline protections because alternative connections often do not work well with home security systems and some health monitoring services.
“IP-enabled wired service and wireless services don’t support when there’s an outage they’re not independently wired," Fitzgerald said. "And so if you don’t have battery backup, you lose telecommunications at the very time when it’s most critical to have it.”
AT&T contends that if it didn’t have to maintain as many landlines, the company would be able to invest more money in wireless and internet-based technology in rural areas.
Harris says the bill would not take landline service away from existing customers.
