While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they’re still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a lot of that money is going to very popular new publicly-owned competitors.
But there’s another major worry: a report last July by the Wall Street Journal (paywalled) showed huge swaths of telecom cabling installed years ago was coated in lead, posing significant health concerns. Telecoms like AT&T and Verizon have tried to downplay the issue, which is predicted to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 billion to remedy.
Enter the EPA, which now says it has expanded a “high priority” inquiry into the problem (read: not a very high priority inquiry into the problem) and what the nation’s biggest telecoms are doing about it. For whatever it’s worth, lawmakers like Senator Ed Markey aren’t pleased that telecoms are only just now getting around to remedying the problem decades after it should have been obvious:
“Lead exposure poses serious risks to children, who are particularly vulnerable to its effects, and is associated with chronic pain in adults, and with miscarriage, stillbirth or premature birth during pregnancy,” Markey wrote in his letter. He also noted that lead cables could contaminate drinking water.”
This being the U.S. telecom industry, you can be fairly certain that any meaningful remedy to the problem will take years to materialize, any regulatory penalty for failure to fix the problem in a timely manner will border on the meaningless, and all remediation costs will, inevitably, be passed on to consumers in the form of price hikes on already expensive broadband access.
