Lead legacy could cost AT&T, others up to $60 billion, report says

Amid calls for accountability, one financial analyst firm estimates it will cost up to $60 billion to remove thousands of aging telecom cables covered in lead.

According to the firm, New Street Research, AT&T is squarely in the crosshairs. “AT&T likely has the highest [financial] exposure overall, followed by Verizon and Lumen,” the firm wrote in a recent note to investors.

According to the New Street estimates – which stem from an extensive Wall Street Journal exposé on the issue – there are roughly 48 million homes and offices connected to cabling that still contains potentially dangerous levels of lead. The firm estimates some of those locations will be cleaned up amid government spending to cross the digital divide. But, for the remainder, the New Street analysts estimate a total cleanup cost of $59 billion.

“Regardless of who pays, this will be a major overhang for the ILECs [incumbent local exchange carriers, like AT&T] for some time,” they warned.

Some top Congressional legislators are already moving forward with plans to address the issue.

“The telecommunications companies responsible for these phone lines must act swiftly and responsibly to ensure the mitigation of any environmental and public health effects,” Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) wrote this week in a letter to USTelecom, a trade association for the telecom industry. “This is corporate irresponsibility of the worst kind.”

In his letter, Markey asked the association and its members – which include AT&T, Verizon and others – to identify how much cabling contains lead and where the lines are. And he asked “what plans do the companies have to address the environmental and public health issues posed by the cables?”

A century in the making

The WSJ has published a series of detailed, lengthy articles on aging telecommunications cables that may have hazardous amounts of lead. According to the publication, “telecom companies left behind more than 2,000 potentially dangerous lead-covered cables under water, in soil and overhead. Many more are likely to exist.”

The WSJ noted that US telecommunications companies mostly stopped using such cabling in the 1960s, amid mounting evidence that no amount of lead is safe, whether ingested or inhaled.

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