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VoIP And Cell Phones Eroding Traditional Telecoms
Lullabye_Muse writes "Yahoo! reports that telecoms in Europe and U.S. are losing in response to people switching their home phones for cellphones and dial up to cable modems. More info on specific VoIP discussed in latter part of article. The trend seems to becoming widespread, I guess 10 years and all the old wires are gonna start to be taken down."
I still keep my land-line operational, though... I'm beginning to wonder why.
Sigs cause cancer.
Let the telcoms die. I haven't had a land-line phome for 6 months, and I don't miss it.
Of course, cell-phone coverage could be bett--
CALL ENDED
Time: 2:10
Never will copper be phased out by wireless, the old telcos may lose dominance, but until the reliability is there (powerouts, national emergencies, etc), most simply won't switch over to a fully landline free solution.
Nuclear war would really set back cable. - Ted Turner
Because, if there's any industry that's bent over backwards to inspire customer loyalty, it's the telecoms. ...
Yet another example of innovation sweeping the market out from under an industry that's too busy screwing its consumers to notice.
Currently, I don't have a traditional wired phone at the house. There isn't much of a need since everyone at the house has a cell pone.
For me, my job requires a mobile phone and they pay the bill. I'm not even home often enough to worry about having a land line.
I would have gotten one anyway, just for the security, but the phone company wants $80~ (US) to simply turn the bastard on.
Now, if the telecom industry was to try to lure me back, it would simply be with affordability.
I'm not even going to start on all the things I hate about the telecom service, but whats with charging not to have long distance? Someone tell me the logic in this one.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I work for Canada's largest telecom, and this is something that we've been watching for the last few years. VOIP is being launched for business customers all over the country, and even consumer trials are being held at the moment. I'm not sure that landlines will completely disappear, but the impact to the old style telco is pretty evident. Ah, move with the times, I always say!
Most copper installed since the 50's is still being used. In NYC, some of the original lead-jacketed, paper-insulated copper phone cabling is still in service. LEC's (Local Exchange Carriers) should take this opportunity to replace their ancient, widespread infrastructure. Imagine how telco's could dominate the boadband market if they could bring fiber to all their customers.
Contrary to most people think, the major Internet backbones are not anywhere near capacity. Telcos have NO shortage of bandwidth. Their problem is their inability to push the bandwidth people demand over analog copper lines. Fiber solves bandwidth problems and distance problems.
-DJ
I've had Vonage now for about 3 weeks and have mixed feelings on it. I've already had a few outages, and while all the features are nice (Such as the network availability forwarding, where it forwards calls to my cell phone if the voice terminal isn't online), my cable inet service seemed a whole lot more reliable before I got it.
Then again, it may be just the way my network is setup - seems like once or twice the problem has been with my firewall (Smoothwall) just 'locking up' during a 10+ minute long call.
All in all, if I can iron out these minor problems, I think it will be a lot nicer then a traditional landline, and the price is right. I'm just not at the phase where I trust it whole-heartedly, so I'm glad I have my cell as backup
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Of course there comes a time when the monopoly no longer makes and it will fade out. Most customers will benefit but soome (eg. less profitable customers in outlying areas) will lose out.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The trend seems to becoming widespread, I guess 10 years and all the old wires are gonna start to be taken down
What about DSL?
Not everyone will have FITL (fiber-to-the-curb), so the existing copper lines will still have a use.
Chip H.
First, the U.S. telecoms are not "losing." I work for one and it is making more money than ever. Sure land line usage has decreased for the first time ever, but revenue is up as more homes embrace broadband. And don't forget who owns the wireless companies.
Second, the "old wires" are not "gonna start to be taken down." There is a billion dollar infrastructure buried under the U.S. that's going nowhere. And a century of tweaking has made it rock solid. A new generation growing up on wireless phones won't appreciate the five nines of reliability that the PSTN provides, but most of the population is nowhere near ready to give up the phone line that stays up during power failures.
That said, the future is certainly IP based. The phone company knows that and will be well positioned to be the dominant provider. The RBOCs and the cable companies are the only players likely to survive in the broadband and IP-based future.
I'm quite sure that internet access is the main reason we still have so many home phones after all.
Cable isn't that widespread in Europe, satelite links are quite expensive and they require a telephone line for upload. Access via power lines never really took off. There is nothing which beats 2 copper wires running to your house in terms of speed, reliability and price.
Wireless LANs bringing internet access to entire blocks reduces the amount of home phones, since only one POTS is needed to get it online, but (at least over here) we won't see telcos going down the drain before ISPs are offering (cheaper than telco) area-wide wireless access for their services.
I don't need a home phone at all, but my favorite monopolistic telco offers me DSL for a reasonable price. They also charge me for a mandatory phone connection using the same line, but it's still much cheaper than their closest competitor.I don't read replies by ACs.
I just moved. When I was living in an area that was kind of far out of town, I did not have cell coverage at my house. Now, we just moved and we do. So, no landline phone! My wife and I just use our cell phones. Of course, we still have our old numbers which are in a different area code. That freaks people our when we order pizza.
We used to have cable modem and used 802.11b for the past few years. Now, we have a neighbor who has a wireless network called "Linksys" with no WEP key set. So, we don't pay for internet anymore either. I suppose the day they put a wep key on it or shut it down, I will order either cable or DSL (we actually can get either where we live.)
We still have to pay for our cell phones and for electricity, but we're saving like $200 a month without phone or broadband. (Math check: Our old cable company wouldn't sell us broadband without digitial cable and the total price was like $100 a month. Plus, phone bill including long distance since the cell phones wouldn't work from the house and all our relatives live in other states.)
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Actually a real T1 uses 2 pair, one for transmit, and one for receive. A T1 delivered by HDSL uses a single pair up to the smart jack, but it's still two pair (1,2,4,5 on the RJ45/RJ48).
And if you're actually in a CO, trying to trace a circuit between DSX panels, there's a fifth wire, the locator wire, wired in as part of the cross connect. It provides a neat function - when you insert a looping plug in the dsx, lights on both DSX panels come on to tell you where the circuit is.
Sig??? I don't need no stinkin Sig!
We just switched over to VOIP with Time Warner, who also sends us cable TV and Road Runner. They get a big check from us every month. It seems to work about the same except that all those features on the phone (Caller ID etc.) now work. Oddly enough, my old local company sent me a letter yesterday offering about the same deal. Why didn't they send me the offer while I was still a customer?
It reminded me of something that happened a few years ago at work.
We used to subscribe to a Derwent patent publication that listed new patents in the pharmaceutical industry. It costs about $30K a year. I called and asked if they could give us a little break on the price. "No Way," they said. So we cancelled the subscription. A few weeks later, they call up and said that there was a mistake and they could give it to us for only $800/yr. I said "No Way." Pricing in this information busness is funny stuff.
*gasp* businesses adapting to new technology!
The main advantage you now see from the breakup is competition, however feeble, and lower pricing.
Oh, and customer service has always sucked. It's not a new phenomenon.
I happen to like my landline service. When I'm gone or sleeping, absolutely no one can annoy me with their problems, requests, or irritating want to keep in touch, just not on a same-room basis. Also, I find there's something irresistably sexy about being completely lost, I might actually have to [gasp] talk to a real person and not a vibrating piece of cancer plastic making friends with and sterilizing my balls. Slashdot probably isn't the correct place to talk about wanting to be disconnected sometimes, but what are YOU going to do about it eh?
-- Checking emails and kicking cheats `till the day I die.
Now you think 'poor poor big company' because they're forced to service those remote areas and now they aren't getting the growth they have anticipated? WRONG...
These companies are not forced to stick to old technologies. They have decided to stick to technologies for as long as they can, but the telco company could be offering much better solutions to everyone but they were 'comfortable' with the situation. They wanted to milk the old technology for all it had. Instead of spending all the resources trying to install new technologies in everyone's homes, they were trying to squish the new technology. Remember all those attempts at lobbying for internet taxes and things? Those were attempts to make internet more expensive than typical communications so they wouldn't have to change their ways. Their thoughts were, "Why install new technology when we haven't made our projected return on your current technology?". The answer is obviously, "To save your company from being obsoleted by the companies installing the new technologies."
Yup, and it works so-so.
You must use a codec that does not do any kind of compression or acoustic fanagling or it just won't work. I have been sending faxes in and out of our office (up to two at a time in either direction) for the last 3 months now without issue, so long as it only goes one hop to our PRI downtown. Faxes through our VOIP provider are spotty at best but we also have a Canon IR3300 fax machine as our primary fax device... they're the pickiest bitches known to the faxing industry.
"Unfortunatly, I doubt we'll ever see benevolent monopolies (or even corporations) ever again."
If i had the points i had last night, i'd mod you through the roof. This is the most insightful and true statement i've seen today.
i hate to be a defeatist, but fucking christ, who isn't trying to fuck you these days? It's not enough to have a chalet on some remote lake anymore is it? It's not enough to have 7+ figures in the bank is it?
i just grow more and more disheartened that there are no truly benevolent companies in monopolistic positions these days. i won't glorify the "good ol' days" and sure as hell, there were sharks in those days, but i can't help but feel that i'm getting fucked, about to get fucked, or have the research to realize that, yeah, i am getting fucked by some company.
Shit, maybe i'm just out of touch, but i'd hoped that by the age of 26 i'd not be so goddamn cynical and have to watch my back at every fucking turn....like maybe, just maybe, some corps just might give a fuck that i live to next year and buy the next edition. Know what i mean?
Fuck, i already sound like my grandfather and at least he got be 50 before he was an ass about everything.
And which real tech-savy person didn't anticipate this?
Cell phone are the intermediate future, and VoIP (in the real sense, not in the sense that they're still connected at all to the copper wires, but just connected to the real internet) or just plain Data over IP ('cos what else is Voice?) is the future.
Especially with wireless becoming cheaper and cheaper; what's gonna evolve is a free system of comms (wifi mesh, whatever) run by hobbyists, where the only role the telecoms are going to play is maintaining the fibreoptics between continents, large companies and cities which aren't easily connected by wireless (in all it's forms).
What's really surprising is that the telco's didn't see this coming: I have a friend who worked for the largest (formerly only) telco in the netherlands, and hwen I told him about this, his response was..."but....but...that's illegal!?". He really didn't understand the power of public airwaves...and he was in strategic planning too!
The only danger of course is that the telco's will lobby gov'ment to restrict private access to public bands....
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
The old telecom companies are embracing this technology for several reasons:
The consumer wants to head this direction (anyone remember the age of passenger rail in the US?).
It is truly cheaper to provide this service, it's more efficient and may mean increased profitability.
They do know how to provide telephony and know that their customers will trust their offering.
They have not totally besmirched their name yet.
It has never cost telephone companies anything more to send a telephone call across the country or next door. The higher prices they were allowed (by governments) to charge for "long distance" were allowed to enable them to build their infrastructure. The higher prices we pay for cellular service reflects the need of cell phone companies to build out infrastructure so that they can serve their customers everywhere.
Now, telephone companies are finding that there is not just their infrastructure, but a whole new and cheaper infrastructure out there that was built without their investment. Some was paid for by the governments, some was paid for by private industry or other telephone companies. And they can use it -- free! Imagine the increases in profitability when you can sell a service that costs you little or nothing.
Here in the US, one of the reasons why VOIP from telecom companies is so cheap is because the playing field changed. They set up different companies for VOIP and cellular service and these companies don't have labor unions. So not only is the infrastructure cheaper, but labor is cheaper.
I note that BT immediately jumped on this bandwagon. They are, perhaps, the most hated company in the UK because they have held a monopoly for so long and refuse to bring pricing down to more sane levels in favor of keeping profits up. I kind of wonder at BT because they have generated a great deal of animosity in the public they "serve" in exchange for profits that are not visibly plowed into improved infrastructure.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.