Gov. Jerry Brown Can Save Us from a Wireless Disaster

Governor Brown, please help California by vetoing CA State Bill 649.

This post refutes the words written by SB.649 sponsor Sen. Ben Heuso in an 10/5/17 OpEd Piece in the Sacramento Bee, entitled Jerry Brown can help bring a wireless revolution. Below, we have annotated Sen. Hueso’s words with responses from Scentists for Wired Technology (‘S4WT’).

Hueso: Gov. Jerry Brown can bring the Wireless revolution to California by signing Senate Bill 649.

S4WT: Sorry, Sen. Heueso. The wireless revolution has already occurred over the last 25 years and coverage is already complete for 98% of the US population — including California. As we learned in 3/2/17 Federal testimony at the US Senate, "97.9% of Americans can choose from three newtwork operators [Wireless carriers] and 93.4% can choose from four [Wireless carriers] plus more than a dozen virtual [Wireless carriers]."

There is no need for Gov. Jerry Brown to sign SB.649 and many good reasons for Gov. Brown to veto SB.649 — which is an unjustified power grab by and an unnecessary subsidy for Telecom firms, including AT&T, Verizon/Frontier — firms enjoying the benefits of their ‘Public Utility’ status as Carriers of Last Resort (COLR), without completing the copper to fiber-optic upgrades that were promised and already financed by decades of fees on landline telephone bills. Instead, these firms are looting their regulated Wireline entities to enrich their unregulated Wireless entities and hurting the public good. This is corporate power run amok, and the FCC, State of CA and the CPUC are all enabling and abetting these actions.

Instead of gifts to these Telecom firms, the Governor can protect Californians by vetoing SB.649, and then directing his friend, Michael Picker — the friend that Brown appointed to the position of President of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in 2014 &mdash to order financial audits and investigations of these Telecomm firms.

Hueso: Telecommunications access is a necessity in the modern world, so much so that governments around the world pay to subsidize wireless deployment.

S4WT: Telecommunications access (by Wireline) has been a necessity since the invention of the telegraph and the telephone — and still is because, unlike Wireless, only Wireline telephones reliably provide 911 automatic address detection and actually work in extended power outages caused by emergency disasters, like the devastating California fires that spread far and wide to over 190,000 acres since 10/8/17 — instantly crippling the fragile, Wireless cellular telephone network . . . while Wireless copper and fiber-optic cables, buried in the ground continued to operate during the disaster.