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Louisiana Towns Going High-Tech
wolverineinspector writes "Mink, LA is finally getting telephone land lines after the neighbouring communities got theirs in 1970. In the article they also say that as many as 6.2% of US homes don't have phone service - that would mean that 19 million Americans don't have wired phone lines available to them."
almost 90% of the population dont even use ground line phones.
I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. - Catcher in the Rye
Just because 6.2% of people don't have wired phones doesn't mean that the service isn't available to them. A lot of people ditch their wired lines and just use their cell phone.
Their first call:
"Hi. Got Skype?"
Slashdot - Mutual Assured Discussion
surely they have cell phone signals there... why bother with a land line? how are they going to recuperate the capital cost?
Just because 6.2% of people don't have wired phones doesn't mean that the service isn't available to them. A lot of people ditch their wired lines and just use their cell phone.
I'm guessing it's bad credit.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Costs too much, not worth it for telco at $46,000 per customer.
" 6.2% of US homes don't have phone service "
Does this include the number of people who have cellphones that dont want a land line.
Or how about the people that just dont want a land line. Or get digital phone service from their cable provider.
TruePunk | Games
So much for Canada being the great white north.
It's spelled bayou.
Welcome to a 3rd grade reading level.
"Yes, the telephone is not everywhere. In fact, televisions are more common in American homes today."
So guess what?
Cable is about to explode with services.
Check out vonage.com
Get yourself connected.
$10 for equipment
$15 per month unlimted North America calling.
Say goodbye to the phrase, "Long Distance".
Then say hello to, "TiVo, Replay and MythTv" while your at it.
maybe 3rd grade in Cajun land.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
probably meaning land or cell.
I didn't have a land line either until I finally bought a house. Now the only reason I have it is because it's required for the security system. What a waste, every call on the land line is a telemarketer...about 6-10 a day.
My mother lives way out in the country, and the local telco quoted her an obscene price to run a landline to the house. Unfortunately, she lives too far from the highway to get decent cellphone coverage. She ended up having to pay it.
I have to believe, though, that if the people of Mink, LA really wanted phone coverage some company would have wanted to sell it to them. I guess it wasn't worth it, until now, for just fifteen homes.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
In the USA, there are Rural Telecommunication (and electrification) Acts. I'm not sure about new construction, but I know that in rural Texas if you have an old isolated homestead in need of telephone service, you can call up the nearest telco and they'll string out lines no matter what it costs. It all gets paid for by federal grants.
The only catch is the telco territory boundries. Sometimes two telcos will bicker over who gets to (or who has to) string the lines. A vist to your state's public services commissioner will get things moving though.
I'm guessing you're young......
Before a cell phone could fit in your hand, it fit in a bag. There was the big transciever, and a handset on a cord. Most people couldn't afford the batteries for them, so you used it plugged into your car's cigarette lighter. I recall my family having one in 1989 i think.....
They're analog, and usually 3 or 6 watts, so you've got a much better chance of getting a signal out in BFE.
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
That link would roughly be right. It was basically the phone they installed in a car, but instead placed inside of a bag. The company I work for had a couple back when I first started, that were in a nice leather case, not canvas. They used what was basically a camcorder SLA type battery (12V, 1 or 2AH) and had a built-in cigarette lighter plug for when you were actually in the car. The ones we had were analog, don't know if that style survived long enough for digital versions to exist...
In reality, except for the portability issue - they were certainly bulky to just carry around everywhere - I far preferred using them over these miniscule things you get nowadays.
The latency would be horrible. You'd have to end every sentence with "over". May as well just use a CB Radio.
Whaaaaaa?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Yes? Hello?"
"Hello! I am calling you to inform you of our wonderful new product line, introduced this week. Would you care to take a little time and hear more about it?"
"WTF ?!?"
"I see. Sorry to have bothered you. Have a nice day, ma'am."
Consider that Nielson would probably have done telephone surveys to determine these statistics, how exactly do they calculate how many people don't have phones?
"Hey, call Floyd and ask if he's got a phone!"
Who's Floyd? What's his number?
I don't know, but there must be a Floyd. Hmm, not in the white pages, so he must not have a phone
So don't call him, but when you call him, ask him if he has a T.V.
Can you say Reductio ad absurdum kids? I knew you could!
It means "No Secrets"
From the article:
Apparently, life around there is incredibly boring too. From the descriptions the article has of the inhabitants, I can't imagine their phone calls being very thrilling. hanzie********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
The truth is that there are plenty of homes in the US that aren't even on the electric grid!
i ng-l/ms g00481.html
/ 2004/12/03 /grid.html
as of 1994 100,000 homes
http://lists.cohousing.org/archives/cohous
How-To
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network
I was talking to a tech friend of mine the other day. He said about 40% of the homes where he came from didn't have electricity! This was in Id, USA... Crazy eh?
Sure the fines proposed are dumb, but it seems wrong for public service companies to be able to pick and choose who gets which service.
Means large parts of the united states probably wont see broadband in this decade because it's not immediately profitable for their providers.
I dont see why the government can't set goals for broadband availability since it'll cripple the US if parts of it fall behind Europe and Asia.
We didn't get telephone service to my home until 1971 or so.
Before that, if we needed to make a telephone call, we had to go to my grandmother's house.
More often, we'd call my grandmother on the radio and she'd place the call for us.
Bullshit. And cajun isn't a language.
Yes, it does.
What the fuck have we been paying that universal service fee for?
baiue
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-01-20-no-ph ones_x.htm
---The Federal Communications Commission does not keep track of places without phone service, but a survey released in October found that 93.8 percent of American households had telephones of some sort
Was it a PHONE survey? Please dont say it so..
Maybe.
"Thanks for calling, I'll find a telephone booth and call you back." When your paying a dollar+ a minute, it adds up.
Don't forget, Christmas is coming, and I check my list twice!
Really, closer to 6.5: http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Checking a few articles, it looks like you've been trolling every other story here on Slashdot (for moderators: just browse at -1 threshold, and look for comments containing "China", or the same link from the parent post). Can't you read the title: "News for Nerds" ?
If you really feel strong about the subject, just go make your own site, or contribute to other sites on the subject, okay? Slashdot moderators will have spotted this by now, and just mod you out of sight, so you're wasting your time. Otherwise, get a life!
(some ugly namecalling deleted)
it's 25 bucks, not 15 per month. 15 only gets you 500 minutes. I guess that's enough if you have a cell phone or live in your parents's basement and have no friends.
Both plans come with callerID, 3-way calling,repeat redial,etc.
The BEST feature that I actually use is making Vonage ring my landline AND cell phone at the SAME TIME when I am receiving an incoming phone call. What's the big deal? You will never miss an important phone call and will have the option to answer landline (save cell minutes) if you are near your phone or use your cell as a remote caller id - no need to answer, just look to see who is calling. And of course you can just answer the cell if you are nowhere near your house.
1) they can't afford it - it's a sad fact but many poor people simply cannot afford a phone, even at subsidized rates.
2) they use cellular
3) they don't want a phone
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
For you and I no doubt, but service is not free to those without the means to an end.
Is it they can't have land lines, or they choose not to. ~6% unable to get it is far greater than 6% who choose not to get it.
What's a TelePhone? *goes back to whirting letters and useing his Telegraph*
Insert Pithy Quote here.
As a resident of the state of Louisiana, I can tell you that there has NEVER been cell service on most of I-49... which is mostly just forested area. I can remember driving my sister to college back in the mid-90s (when my dad had a humongous cell phone w/ a battery pack)... there wasn't service back then, and there still isn't service now.
Anyone have any ideas where the remaining people live? I'd like to move there. I can feel my blood pressure lowering just thinking about it.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
most folk'll always had a phone, but then again some folk'll aren't cleetus the slack jaws yokel /fiddles
So how long will it be before someone in Mink gets AOL dialup?
Thats the "Call Hunting" feature.
;-)
Anyway, the $15 is from another service.
(Didn't think anyone was paying attention.)
My mistake, but it's strange to use a word from a different language that looks like a misspelling of an English word.
I think the headline was supposed to be sort of sarcastic.
blog & fiction: jd87
If they don't have phone service, then let them get fiber to the premises.
</bad marie antoinette joke>
It's the opposite of cheaper, but every one of those people should be able to get telephone service...
All they need to do is get two-way satellite internet service (Admittedly not cheap), and then subscribe for VoIP. The benefit of course is that since they're not technically in any area code, they can pick any area code and join it.
Yes, satellite has high latency (Something like 500ms minimum), but on a telephone half a second of delay isn't really noticeable. The only question would be if the VoIP app would be able to handle the latency.
I suppose the rest of the country thinks that most of Louisiana is swampland full of hicks, and certainly we have our share of them but probably no more than any other rural area of the country.
My friends up north who have come to visit find it amazing that we occasionally have alligator roadkill or find them in our back yards after really heavy rains (if you live next to the bayou generally). _I_ was amazed to find out that apparently it's a southern thing that we have alcoholic daquiri shops with drive through windows.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Whatever happened to the "Universal Service Fund" we pay for on our phone bills? Isn't that supposed to cover the cost of running phone lines to people who choose to live in the middle of nowhere?
slashdot missed this story by the better part of a week ;) (check the date on it!)
The posting's title was obviously sarcastic.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Cajun is a culture, cajun French is a language/dialect.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I had a 2nd line for a period of time. I was waiting for DSL or cable modem in my neighborhood. I never put a phone on the 2nd line, but I gave out that number to any business that asked. I didn't care. I certainly wasn't going to give them my unlisted number. I tried calling it once... and it just rang and rang. No voicemail, nothing. Perfect. I wish I had an idea of how many telemarketers or even auto-dialers tried that number. I still use it today. I know no one has it... several businesses use a phone number as a lookup.
-- No sig for you!
Next, they'll probably think that you are a retard.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
In Australia, the government is going to sell Telstra, the national telco, subject to there being a sufficient standard of service in rural areas. I think Telstra should be divided into its core services ie. the national network, owned by the government, and its non-core services like adsl, expensive premium phone services and suspect expansions into Asia. At the moment, Telstra is (almost) the only provider of adsl, and it charges competing companies as much or more for wholesale adsl as it charges customers retail.
Back on to topic: a nationally owned core-network company would have no problem sending out landlines, especially to a community of fifteen houses. In comparison, when cable television was belatedly introduced in Australia, two competing companies strung up their cables in many places in Melbourne until they ran out of money. So there is a duplicated service in many places (especially now the two programming providers have merged and are showing the same thing), and no service in many places. If I answer one of the fliers in my mail advertising Foxtel TV, and give my inner-city medium density housing address, I'm told that "the satellite service is available to your address, Sir". The objectives of a private company are to make a profit and provide service, wheras a public company should provide service and then (perhaps) make a profit.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
This reminds me of when Clinton went to the Navajo Reservation and promised that all the Navajo kids living there would get and internet connection in their home for education. Of course, since ~50% of the Navajo living on the rez don't have electricity, let alone a phone line, there was quite the discussion as to how this was going to happen.
Eventually the BIA built a powerlines out to most places and gave them a wireless network.
Is it in any dictionary? Having lived in Louisiana almost my entire life, if I had ever seen the word I might be more inclined to believe the original poster who can barely string a sentence together and doesn't even live in LA would know a single word so esoteric that not even Google has ever heard of it.
My god... someone actually using BFE in a comment. All this time I thought I was the only one who used the term.
Stay tuned for new sig...
Yes, I know. However, saying learn Cajun, is a bit like saying, learn American.
https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx it's well worth the minimal time it takes. The vast majority of telemarketers respect this list, and don't call you. The reason is that they can face severe fines if they do. There are always a few morons, and it won't get rid of those, but you can expect to see 95%+ of the calls go away. The main ones you'll recieve are from companies that you do bussiness with, they are still allowed to call you.
Also, you should check on the requirement of a line for the security system. Normally security systems that use such a feature use a seperate copper pair for their transmissions, thus a phone line shouldn't really be necessary.
-dameron
"The communications industry contributes to a national Universal Service Fund that underwrites uneconomical service in sparsely populated areas, but it has yet to be activated in Louisiana, said Curtin, leaving BellSouth stuck with the tab. But the Louisiana Public Service Commission said it expected to reimburse BellSouth out of a new state service fund next year."
Last I checked *I* contributed to this becuase the phone
companies feel the need to be reimbursed for the cost of
business of their (near) monopolies. That LA would consider further reimbursing HellSouth is galling.
He had been living at his cabin in the woods for 4 years before he got a phone line. It was only 1/2 mile, but 10K$ was a pretty steep price to pay and have polls sunk and trees trimmed. He used a cell phone but that was rather expensive and even with a monster cell antenna on the roof, if there was a cloud over the house there was no reception. He ran off of gas and a generator for 2 years and put solar power in. Just recently he had power lines run out to his house.
For me, it's cheaper to use a cell phone than a land line. Plus with cellular number portability, I can take my number anywhere I move to and not have to worry about giving a new number out to people.
~ryan
PS I live in VT.
Glad to hear from a satisfied Vonage user. Looking at reviews over the internet, you see so many pro's and con's. I was all set to jump on VoIP when they decided to let SBC control prices on the critical internet-to-POTS connection. I was taking a step back to see how Vonage/Packet 8/et al responded pricewise.
No man's an island, unless he's had too much to drink and wets the bed.
depends on where you are really. i live in lafayette, and the whole "prep" thing hit a few years ago. i also see many posers. but in the smaller towns, it gets countrier. and with governor blanco trying to get broadband more accesable, that stereotype might just change.
You can be whatever you want to be - even furnature.
Hey, I'm not saying it's not a good thing - just telling it like it is (actually, I'm likely to be Jim Urbanite moving to the country in 3-5 years when I sell my city home). Personally, I wish the FCC would approve some of the reliable wireless link hardware so that we could all save some money on providing service to people way out in nowheresville (me included it that so happens) - and they'd get their service installed faster too.
Full-Featured GPL Web Hosting Control Panel
The math in the post is wrong. Several people live in one house, so the population affected is probably much smaller than the cited number.
-b., whose uncle's phone number in Poland was "Lacko 42" until 2001.
This is so NOT flamebait. I live in a reasonably large town (70-80,000) in the city limits I think. I can't DSL so Comcast has free reign to charge me $55/month. I want some technology goodness too!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If by young, you mean under the age of 40.
I'm 35, and I've never heard of a "bag phone". I've seen huge cell phones in cars or briefcases. Then in the past 15 years I saw the smaller, but still huge brick cell phones. But in any of those cases, people just called them "phones". And none of them were in "bags".
I'm guessing you're talking about people carrying around car phones or briefcase phones in a bag, but the closest I've ever seen to a "phone in a bag" was the phone in the briefcase.
Maybe it's a regional thing, not just an age thing...
That's high tech? By that standard a calculator would be science fiction!
I read in the local paper last year about some guy trying to get a wired line from the local phone company (Verizon) and they told him it would be about $35,000 or so to hook him up, due to there being no local phone network in the area. Far as I know, he's still without a phone though he said he was going to start his own phone company. That's the last I've heard of that story. Still waiting for him to start his own phone company, too. ;-)
Case you're all curious, this is not Louisiana, but Northeast Michigan where spots of no land lines aren't unheard of and cell phone service is poor to nonexistant. Basically, I live in a forest and the area is very sparsely populated, but the hunting and fishing is good, girlwatching is a favorite pastime, and you're pretty much guaranteed a White Christmas.
I imagine there's quite a few places in the Upper Penninsula that don't have phone service either as a lot of it is definately undeveloped forestland out there. However, I can't answer anyone that question for sure.
What the hell, they are going to pull copper pairs to each of those houses ???
couln't they just pull a 10GE fiber and each house would have had a 1G internet connection, with phone and catv ???
pfff pathetic
Amish in the City have telephones.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
It was basically the phone they installed in a car.
Actually the Motorola Bag phones were the exact same thing they installed in cars. The only key difference is the fact that bag phones were configured to use 1.1watt IIRC, didn't come with a car antenna, and came with a clip that could use just about any acid camcorder battery. If you knew which pin to ground you could configure the unit to 1.1watt or 3watt. There was a TDMA 800 version but from what I'm told they are hard to find. I'm also told there was a digital brick phone but I know nothing about it.
They are not exactly in fashion these days.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
There are added advantages to land lines over cell towers. Granted cell phones have added mobility, but you get hit with overage charges and service contracts. Land lines (once they're installed) the service is cheaper, you can have broadband (at a much cheaper rate than wireless broadband) and during bad weather, provided your lines are underground, you still have good service. Also, living in Louisiana, there are certain are very difficult to get good coverage, whether it be land or wireless, just because of the geography and the sparse population.
That said, there's a lot that it interesting about how the Amish regulate technology. My family used to buy milk (the unpasturized in-a-jug sort) from them, and some members of my family provide medical services to some of them.
I think you get the emphasis slightly wrong. While there is a "sanctity of the house" sort of thing going on, it isn't that simple. What is important is continuity of worship, maintenence of the community, and the notion that most of the world is out to get you. And, honestly, the third part of that isn't unreasonable, if you wrap your head around the first part, and then the second follows. There's also a notion of severance from the worldly-world; they participate, in recognition of physics, but would rather not, and as a compromise, enforce a barrier built out of arms-length dealing, clothing, and behaviour.
To be honest, they're my favorite cult, if I had to pick one. Menonites can be(and are, in places) a lot worse, and Adventists seem to spend a lot of time on the separation issue, to the pain of the adherents. I haven't had much contact with others, but we can all read about them.
For the record, I'm an athiest by faith, an agnostic by thought, and mostly interested in mathematical abstractions, which inform my worldview in much the same way that religion does for others. So what do I know, I'm a kook, as these things go.
I forget what 8 was for.
Broadband? Direcway? ROFL. I knew someone who used them and her connection was horribly unreliable, and had uplink comparable to a 28.8 modem. She's on DSL now, but they didn't offer it then.
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Maybe it's a regional thing, not just an age thing..
I'm guessing you're talking about people carrying around car phones or briefcase phones in a bag, but the closest I've ever seen to a "phone in a bag" was the phone in the briefcase.
Ebay image of bag phone
Another image of bag phone
Yes, Motorola took their car phone and put it into a bag, added a bracket that plugged directly into the db-25 pin port on the phone's transceiver allowing collection to both a small camcorder battery and a hook for the phone's handset. They were typically configured to I believe 1.1watt operation but could be configured to 3watt. I saw them for sale just about everywhere that handheld phones were sold but as you can imagine there is little reason to get a big bulky bag phone if you had good reception with a handheld.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Seriously how many times in the past year have I dreamed of a place with nothing electronic in it...no phones, computers, TV's ETC.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In past surveys, one of the major reasons that people do not have telephones is financial. Poor people often have bad credit, the telephone company wants all old bills paid before restoring service, the telephone company wants a large deposit, the head-of-household is unable to control usage of the telephone by other family members and visitors, and the cost is unpredictable. A typical scenario is that a household gets a telephone, the service gets abused for long distance and other premium calls, the household gets a large bill that they can't pay, the bill doesn't get paid, resulting in termination of service and a poor credit reference. Restoration of service would be expensive and would just setup the household for another cycle of abuse and disconnection. As a solution, some people have suggested requiring the telephone company to offer a fixed-cost service that would have permanent blocks for long distance and premium calls. The bill would be guaranteed to be $X a month, no matter how the phone was used.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
My company approached the state about installing multiple towers around town and in a couple of locations outside of town to deliver broaband internet to Mink - over which we could deliver phone service through VoIP. I never heard from anyone after the 2nd email when I outlined my proposal... Business as usual. If it doesn't conform to the "old way" of doing this... forget it.
Still, the exciting part thing that is not mentioned in this article is what is being done elsewhere in LA. All over the state, little communities are jumping on the wireless broadband-wagon, er bandwagon, um... well you get the idea! I predict we'll see some exciting things happen in LA in 2005 as more and more communities embrace the technology that is available.
In LA, on every phone bill, there is a tax levied to provide funding for the telcos to deploy service in areas that are so rural they will never recoup their investment. BellSouth will simply draw money from this fund to pay for this. So in reality, the taxpayers of the state have already funded this... it's just a matter of pulling the telcos away from the big-city feeding trough and get them to provide basic telephone service to a small, rural community.
Laissez les bons temps rouler!
Moderation -1
100% Troll
I don't know which word you didn't understand, TrollMod, but I lived in Louisiana for years. That post is "+1, Funny".
--
make install -not war
Most likely, it stands for "Bum Fuck Egypt."
vi ~/.emacs
At this point that would actually be a decent idea. Why run landline phone service when running new fiber would be about the same and could provide Internet (and they could use VoIP).
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Before I moved to Minneapolis, I lived in out-state Minnesota where I was aware of several pockets of people living "off-grid." They did not have phone service or electric service. In some cases this was by choice, the residents didn't even work at getting these services. I personally did without wired phone for many years (and didn't have a cel phone either).
These things are not necessities, they are options. In some cases, people don't want them. In other cases, companies don't want to go to the expense of delivering the service.
Living off grid or without a phone, does not mean you are a luddite. Today, you can power your home with generators or solar power and you can have a cellular phone (if there is service in the area). In some remote places there is a rural radio telephone service. This is used when the expense of delivering phone service via wire is too costly. It is like high powered analog service.
My favorite fishing lake has no cellular service, even my work-required "nation-wide" pager won't beep when I am out there! This is part of what attracts me to this particular lake. On one end of the lake, there is a small community of cabins that do not have electricity. They seem to like it that way. They all have nice boats and those terrible jet-ski's and all sorts of other toy so it is not like they can't afford it.
I *live* in BFE.... the SoCal desert!
Tho formerly I lived in what I called BFSiberia (Montana).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Baloney. LEO satellites like Iridium totally rock.
Too bad they have no hope of paying for themselves
due to the concentration of population in large
killzones, erm, i mean cities.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
like i just said- stereotype
You can be whatever you want to be - even furnature.
I really think everybody should get to do what he wants to do - free country and free people etc. But just tell me how you earn your living, please ? Just curious ....
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
People complain about Universal Service Fee because it's an operating cost of your telecoms company yet they don't roll it into their advertized monthly rate.
...
Imagine subscribing to slashdot and having them bill you for:
Bandwidth Fee $0.39
Admin Salaries $20.31
It's a cost of doing business and should be rolled into the cost that's presented to customers. I'd also argue that sales tax and CRV should be rolled in, as in europe, since it makes instore prices a lot clearer.