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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."
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?"
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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.
It also means that 6.2% of Americans aren't getting gouged or ripped-off by the telcos.
" 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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
Yes, it does.
What the fuck have we been paying that universal service fee for?
---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.
That means 19 million Americans don't have to sign up for the "Do Not Call" list.
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'
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.
The reason I don't have a phone is that when I built my house, the regional bell would not hook up a new phone service unless I provided them with copies of 2 of the following 3 documents: drivers license, social security card, birth certificate. I explained to them that the grocer and gas station and numerous other businesses don't demand to keep my personal information on file in order to allow me to buy from them. The woman I was talking to informed me that if I wanted a phone I didn't have a choice in the matter. I begged her pardon but I do have a choice. Bye bye Ameritech. You've lost a customer for life. I found I am much happier without a phone anyway. In the year and a half since then I have not had one telemarketing call disturb my dinner or television shows and I have other things I can spend $30 a month on like high speed internet access.
https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx it's well worth the minimal time it takes. The vast majority of telemarketers respect this list, and don't call you. The reason is that they can face severe fines if they do. There are always a few morons, and it won't get rid of those, but you can expect to see 95%+ of the calls go away. The main ones you'll recieve are from companies that you do bussiness with, they are still allowed to call you.
Also, you should check on the requirement of a line for the security system. Normally security systems that use such a feature use a seperate copper pair for their transmissions, thus a phone line shouldn't really be necessary.
"The communications industry contributes to a national Universal Service Fund that underwrites uneconomical service in sparsely populated areas, but it has yet to be activated in Louisiana, said Curtin, leaving BellSouth stuck with the tab. But the Louisiana Public Service Commission said it expected to reimburse BellSouth out of a new state service fund next year."
Last I checked *I* contributed to this becuase the phone
companies feel the need to be reimbursed for the cost of
business of their (near) monopolies. That LA would consider further reimbursing HellSouth is galling.
He had been living at his cabin in the woods for 4 years before he got a phone line. It was only 1/2 mile, but 10K$ 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.
Kind of like blogs, really.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
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.
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.
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