Windstream plans to discontinue local exchange and digital subscriber line (“DSL”) services for some 300 residential and small business customers in the states of Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin, because “the services are being provided on equipment that is at the end of life, it is no longer supported by vendors and replacement would be cost prohibitive.”
It would be wrong to imply too much more than that Windstream has concluded it simply cannot earn a profit from serving those 300 customers. Any consumer customers served by Windstream in those “out of market” areas virtually certainly do not generate a profit.
Few competitive local exchange carrier operations using leased access could do so, either, which is why so few CLECs (except for cable TV companies) serve consumer accounts anymore. That has been the case since about 2005 when wholesale rates upon which the CLEC business rested were raised.
Many small business accounts likewise generate relatively scant revenues, and at low volumes almost certainly also are unprofitable. Those 300 customers imply an average of 25 accounts per state, and are served on all-copper lines leased from another carrier. As you can well imagine, there is scant to any profit in such low-volume ventures, with no owner economics from the network.
That is why competitive service providers mostly have switched to facilities-based services on their own fiber networks.
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