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The Decline of the Landline
Death Metal writes "The phone network is thus not just a technical infrastructure, but a socioeconomic one. The more Americans abandon it to go mobile-only or make phone calls over the Internet, the more fragile it becomes: its high fixed costs have to be spread over ever fewer subscribers. If the telephone network in New York State were a stand-alone business, it would already be in bankruptcy. In recent years it has lost 40% of its landlines and revenues have dropped by more than 30%."
...Decline of the line!
... keep your landline? we ended up disconnecting our landline ... we were getting charged like $70 for unlimited long distance, the whole 9 yards ... instead we now have a $70 cell phone plan that also has unlimited long distance, the whole 9 yards ... plus I can text message, play games, surf the net, and most importantly it's mobile. I can take it wherever I want. Why would you keep your landline?
If you really think you need one, I suggest getting cell phone and duct-taping it to your wall!
I might have kept a landline, if it weren't for the fact that the only calls that I ever got on it were Telemarketers.
Well what a shame. Dated technology that doesn't do what we want. Of course it's on the way out. And the businesses have no right to survive. If it's a socially necessary utility then the municipality should be running it for the benefit of the citizens (and by some private firm for the benefit of shareholders). Let it die and bring on the new!
Equal Rights, Representation, Education & Welfare
I've been through one too many hurricanes in my life and the one thing that worked when all hell was breaking loose outside was the landline. When all else failed I was, more often than not, able to still get a dial tone.
I haven't had a land-line for about 5 months now. Haven't missed it yet. Each member of my family has thier own cell phone, so we didn't really see the point anymore.
Cell phones are simply far more useful. I live by myself; or did until two weeks ago. Why would one person need two phones? My new girlfriend has her own cell phone, why would we need a third?
My elderly father says "I did without a cell phone for over seven decades, why would I need one now?" I pointed out that they're handy in an emergency, he countered with "my car has on-star". I didn't bother to mention that pay phones have almost become extinct. I pointed out that with most cell phones, long distance calls are free, he countered with the ONLY advantage a landline has -- you can have two phones on the same line. Yes, you can have a three way call on a cell, but it's usually an extra cost for the call, and at any rate Dad's ushing eighty and wouldn't have the patience to use the feature.
When the tornados hit Springfield in March 2006, I would not have had phone service for a week were it not for my cell phone.
He remonds me of my maternal grandfather, who said "I did without indoor plumbing all my life, I don't need it now". Even after my uncle installed a bathroom, Grandpa still used the outhouse.
Free Martian Whores!
The switch from dialup to broadband too, noone needs to have a landline just to connect to the internet anymore.
how do you get back out of the Matrix?
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
All that will happen is that the major telecoms will switch over to being infrastructure providers for TCP/IP-based communications. You may get VoIP through Comcast or Cox, but they'll have to buy their infrastructure from a division of Verizon or AT&T.
These days its getting harder for people to retain a steady profession and have to move quite frequently. This has made it necessary for most people to rely on the mobile phones as their primary line rather than the landline. Many people often have to transfer their landline calls to their cell phones when they are on the move. The limitations of landlines and the socio-economic situation of present is making it hard for people to consider landlines.
Face your daemons!
Here in Northern New England, our telephone company is Fairpoint Communications.
Their billing system is so messed up that the state of New Hampshire will not allow them to disconnect delinquent accounts.
They will undoubtedly be filing for bankruptcy within a year or two.
Fairpoint was not prepared for this. They are a miserable little two-bit operation and have no business even attempting to handle over a million land lines.
Of course Comcast is loving every minute of it.
The timing of this article is ironic for me. My other half is visiting NY (we live in the UK) and just called to tell me her mobile got trashed in an accident but wouldn't have worked anyway as it doesn't support the US frequency bands.
Of course, that call was pretty short, since landline calls from the hotel to the UK are $5.50 for the first minute and $3.50 per minute after that. It's hard to imagine why people would eschew a service offering such clear value for money in favour of flat rate services like writing an e-mail! :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
We keep our landline because we have an alarm system that needs a phone line to dial in and VoIP isn't reliable enough, even if it can carry the traffic. We could probably get a cellular unit for it to use instead, but that's another reason we keep the landline: cellular coverage out in our neck of the woods isn't the best.
Kill it with fiber!
I recently went with a BYOD VOIP provider and have two cordless phones at home.
I have to say that,a side from the occasional QOS hiccup(maybe once ever 5 calls it has a delay), the quality of the call puts my cell phone to shame.
I don't mind using my mobile for quick chats or when I'm obviously not home, but when I really want to talk and listen to a person, I reach for the "obsolete" phone next to my desk. That and the cellphones get way too hot after 30 minutes of talking.
Then again, is the phone even really a landline? Only thing that it and the traditional landline have is that there is a RJ-11 at somepoint.
import system.cool.Sig;
I can't get dsl where I am without subbing to a landline as well. A cable modem isn't really an option either since we have Directv and wouldn't qualify for any bundling deals from the cable company. If I could do dry line dsl I would in an instant, but I get to pay an extra $13/mo for my internet access instead.
Most home-detention ankle-bracelet style monitoring equipment in our area requires a land-line to plug into. In order to be eligible for home-detention, you must have a land-line without "features" such as call-waiting / 3-way calling, etc.
Obviously eventually this will change.
I would still have a landline if the phone company would sell me DSL without me giving them my social security number.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
In the area of New Orleans where I live (and didn't flood), the only way for people to communicate with the outside world was with land lines and old phones which are powered completely off the line (no wall warts).
Much of the cellular system didn't work. The remaining working systems were nearly impossible to use.
I hate using cell phones for more than a few minutes and always use a land line for long conversations. I also need to keep the land line for our alarm systems.
I was amazed to discover that my collection of 40s - 70s rotary dial phones dial perfectly on the Cox Digital phone system.
I know not all companies did this, but in general: if the telcos had not taken all that Government (that is, your) money, that was intended for installing fiber, and used it for other things, they would not be hurting quite so badly today.
Maybe the phone company should rethink the business model and go with DSL. Hell, they have phone lines just about everywhere. Instead of going with "telephone" with the luxury of internet, they should sell DSL with the option of VOIP
Enough people only know my land line number that I certainly won't get rid of it, or at least the number.
Since AT&T is bailing out on Callvantage, my current "land line" provider, I'll probably go with T-Mobile's $10/month box I can plug my home handsets into and have them port my number to that. And it's less than half the price of Callvantage or Vonage -- FTW.
Frankly, I don't want people calling my cell phone. I'd rather have them call the land line. Sure, I can just as easily not answer my cell phone and let it roll over to VM, but half the time I walk out of the house without my CP anyway, so my land line really is the best way to reach me usually.
Beyond the discussion of landlines, my favorite part of the article was actually at the end:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A cell phone is usually much cheaper, gives you more options, less downtime, better service support, you can take it anywhere.
You don't have to take time off your job to babysit the maintenance guy when you have problems, if they even bother to show up. You don't have to expect your phone to quit working every time it rains.
It's more suprising the number of people who still have landlines. Probably mostly for DSL.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2009-08-17-cellphones_N.htm?se=yahoorefer
We replaced it with Vonage for my business (low cost toll-free number was a big factor). And we got a family plan from AT&T for personal calls. My elderly Mom was quite fragile in health, and I stupidly thought that a cell phone would give constant, reliable access. She died very early on a Sunday morning in the nursing home where she had lived for only a couple of weeks. There was a technical problem with Vonage (nothing new--they perpetually mix up the fax and phone lines, and the fax does not ring). So Vonage didn't work. And AT&T had "intermittent outages" during that time frame. I missed telling my Mom goodbye and only knew she was gone at 8:30 a.m. when I got up to check my voice mail. I was 2 1/2 hours too late. In a supreme irony, both our sons and most family members have AT&T, and their phones weren't working, either. I couldn't even call them from the desk at the nursing home when I finally got there. We got a couple of "we're profoundly sorry" communications from the two companies, but somehow it wasn't enough. Odds are a landline would have been just fine. If I had small children or elderly folk in my home, I'd hang on to that landline for dear life. And if anyone here ever becomes ill, I'm having one re-installed.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
In the WW3 scenario a nuke would more then likely be detonated at a high altitude releasing an EMP, all electronics would be effected that are not hardened or inside faraday cages. Natural disasters generally take out phone lines satellite phones are the only chance of being able to communicate. With large power outages the power on the phone line disappears too. The only advantage a landline has is during local power outages but cell phones will work so all that is lost is VoIP unless your router is connected to an ups. What most people have realized is that an extra $40 a month is not buying anything especially now that they can keep their phone number.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The main reason that I dropped my landline was that phone companies have always been a major pain in the ass to deal with. I've never spent more than an hour on hold with any other service provider, but with telcos it seems to be par for the course. The final straw was when I just moved to a different apartment in the same complex and all I wanted was the exact same service that I had in the old apartment. Naturally, they sign me up for MSN, send me a new DSL modem, and try to charge me for the connection fees et cetera.
Not wanting to pay for services I didn't want and didn't order, I called them and, after an hour of explanation, they swore that it would be taken care of. When the next bill came, it wasn't, of course, so I called again. Four months of two-hour long phone calls with various support folks and supervisors later, it was finally resolved. I never wanted to deal with that again; it was a gigantic waste of my time for their fuck up. When I moved, I never ordered phone service again. I'm perfectly happy with a cell phone and my cable internet has been much more reliable than my DSL service ever was.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
They pretty much need to die and just become infrastructure companies--they can make good money renting their copper loops (they get ~$10/mo for reselling dry loops, depending on which state you're in), fiber, colo space, etc, to CLECs and other interconnect companies and the like. They wouldn't have to do much in the way of direct customer service, which they are so famously good at...
Your neighbor's landlines weren't actually landlines, but went through the air - e.g. over telephone poles.
If it goes UNDER the ground, nothing short of a cataclysmic earthquake/landslide should be able to put it out of commission.
Plus, in case of an emergency, it can be used as a power source.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The decline of the landline is not due solely to changing usage patterns and technology but rather due to the anti-customer regulatory and business environment for landline phones.
A poster up thread was perhaps more insightful than he realized when stating that the problem with a landline is that telemarketers keep calling. After the MFJ, incoming toll was highly profitable for local exchanges, and they encouraged incoming toll, and lobbied to protect telemarketers, and fought things like caller ID.
And in the wake of the MFJ, phone service as a business changed from being a benevolent and responsible (if bureaucratic) utility to being a cost-driven race to the bottom. Service suffered. Innovation suffered. Prices for local telephone service went up. In the last few years I've received a disconnect notice for paying my phone bill two weeks late, I've been charged a $60 fee for the company to repair their own facilities (by a CLEC who said it was in their tariff because the ILEC charged them and they had to cover costs), I've had customer service reps hang up on me, and I've had service that was at best no more reliable than that provided 30 years ago.
And for this privilege I pay approximately $45 a week for a basic service bundle including caller ID and long distance. That is slightly more than I pay for my mobile phone. And is it somehow a premium service worthy of a premium price? Most assuredly not.
Technologically, the wired carriers should have an edge. The technologies are identical until the last mile. In the last mile, the wired carrier has essentially unlimited capacity and higher reliability. But that doesn't make up for the poor service and bad public policy upstream.
In my brother's area and my parents area, landlines stayed up for a day or 2 longer than the cellphones. But cellphones came back several days faster than the landlines. And some areas had cell service longer where the telecoms had put in sufficiently large batteries and generators (which isn't required for cell sites).
These old businesses will either have to adapt to changing technology or close their doors. Why couldn't the phone co. offer VoIP solutions of some sort? Or become a host for SIP trunking? It's not like they don't have the lines and the numbers....
Loading...
Oh, sorry, this is /. - I guess it doesn't apply.
We have our home phone for incoming calls only. That's the number we give out to school lists, etc. Once the kids get a little older (currently oldest is 8) and find the wonders of the phone we will probably sign back up for full outgoing minutes.
...that will not go away. At least if it's a high-quality cable.
And that is high-speed low-ping no-radiation/no-wireless-attacks internet connections.
I can see the point for phones. But you will always have faster connections over a real cable. Especially oven an optical one. :)
And in the future, with BluRay-quality YouTube, all shows online, and massive 100 GB game and TV show torrents, this will not go away.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It has its uses, just not for me. I have been landline free for half a decade now and have never looked back. Pretty much two things lead to this:
1) I don't want to pay two big bills thanks. This has a lot to do with how our payment is structured, and how our telcos really rip us off. Reduce the costs, combine billing, etc... if you want to solve this one. Fault is with greedy telcos.
2) I don't want 10 calls a day from telemarketers. Near the end I was getting about twice as many calls from telemarketers as I was real people. Why am I paying for someone to advertise to me and wasting my time and annoying me? Why? Telemarketers have been taking advantage of the system for years and it has gotten progressively worse. Laws need to be put into place. They tried too little too late... and to top it off it is pretty toothless and unenforced with most just ignoring the no call lists. So this is partly the fault of the regulators, and party the greedy telcos again....
I bet if you fix both those issues many will either keep their landline or go back to having both.
Many people can buy a naked DSL now as an unadvertised option, though it isn't always as good a deal
Most security alarms can be set up for internet communication to HDQ
Sound quality I think depends a lot on your carrier/handset/reception. At its best, I think cell calls are better than landline, but at its worst they aren't too good. Landlines in the US are generally consistiently good quality.
Did your cell quit working over the 5 day power outage? If your battery just ran down, why don't you get a small solar or crank charger, or plug it into your car
For comfort, you should get one of those Bluetooth adapters that connects your cellphone to your landline phones. That way you can use the landline phone you are comfortable with, and it will be routed over your cellphone service.
... is going to go the way of the telegraph.
$signature =~ s/$signature//;
If the landline would just compete with the cell network, not as many people would be turning it off.
I mean, if I could make my landline phone ring different tones for different callers, block calls from whoever I don't want to talk to (I'd be downloading the whole range of "Who called me" perpetrators from the internet), forward the phone to another phone remotely, either over the internet or over another phone, have voicemailboxes that would decode the voice, create text, and e-mail it to me at work or text it to me on a cell, and all the other features anyone can think of, then... maybe it'd be useful enough to actually want to hang onto.
I keep it because its WAAAAAY more reliable than my cell, but it could stand a lot of 21st century upgrading.
TFA misses an important point -- what we're seeing is the decline of POTS, not landlines in general. Broadband penetration is increasing; it's long since passed its critical mass and will soon be at a point where we can safely call it pervasive. "Triple play" type services are fast becoming the norm, and we will eventually get to a point where there are two providers in almost every locality: one former "phone company" and one former "cable company" -- although the differences between the two are rapidly becoming irrelevant.
The days of having "a phone line" are indeed drawing to a close. We are now entering the era where you simply buy a big digital pipe from one of the carriers in your area, delivered as a piece of coaxial cable, fiber optic cable (if you're lucky), or twisted-pair (if you're unlucky), and telephony is simply one of the services delivered over that pipe.
The true endgame, which I hope we see soon, is the dismantling of the PSTN as we know it -- where central offices become little more than colocation centers for telecom gear; telephone numbers will represent nothing more than an address on the network.
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Aren't we already reminiscing about the days of not having to say, "Hello? Hello? You're breaking up... can you repeat what you said?" Half the time when someone calls, I have to tell them "Let me call you back on a landline."
I guess this is no different than the current generation of kids getting used to heavily compressed music (mp3s) over earbuds.
I occasionally need to call friends and family who are out of the country, international calling on cell phones is prohibitively expensive (to say Mexico) so we use the land line, which keeps costs down (we can get a deeply discounted rate from Verizon).
Give me the features that VOIP providers like vonage provide on a landline, and I'd gladly use it. Granted, you can't do everything, but basics like voice mail, email notification, and all the '*' services (call forwarding, repeat dial while busy, etc) shouldn't cost so much. Give me what vonage does for even $2-$3 more a month, and I'd gladly use my landline again, as that is definitely more reliable in case of power outage, being on a different physical line than my ISP, etc.
I'd like to comment on DSL. A lot of people are saying "get naked DSL", and you can certainly do that, but nonetheless the infrastructure of phone lines still needs to remain in place for people to get DSL. The article doesn't address this at all and I think they should. Maybe the infrastructure will remain for the use of DSL.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
I'm thinking that the vast majority of high speed internet is delivered over wire. So with the fall of POTS we have a successor.
The King is dead! Long live the King!
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Copper wire is an outdated technology by at least 20-30 years and yet the telcos have not upgraded infrastructure. The public has said fuck it realizing that wireless offers greater mobility and there's rarely any point in having two phones.
In the foreseeable future, wireless Internet (via either IMT-* or 802.* methods) will make DSL obsolete as well, and the only reason for the telcos to continue to exist will be to maintain the lines
IFO keep a landline b/c it offers unlimited call minutes including long distance at all hours to an entire 4-person household at a price much less than equipping the whole household with cell phones and a comparable level of service. Not everyone is as cheap as me.
The only fear I have of people ditching the landline system is that, ultimately, right now, all our current wireless services interconnect through it. Your cell phone call ultimately feeds into a landline trunk. If that system gets neglected, your wireless service will degrade despite your belief that you are "wireless". I suppose eventually those systems will move off landline dependency, but knowing US wireless upgrade speed, it'll be slow and painful.
(And then we'll all get cancer from the massive amount of RF floating around everywhere, but that's not important.)
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
1. Uh, wow. They use the internet and can tolerate dialup? Many people can get naked DSL for less than a basic phone line and internet provider.
2. They need Google Voice. Give granny the GV number, and program GV to send her straight to voicemail. Poor granny!!!
Hurricane Ike took our power for a week (we're in west Houston, thankfully). After the first few days there were generators connected to all of the exchange boxes. If we were all lesser people those generators would have been stolen fast.
Since they also provide voip, you can specify your account wide 911 location with them. If your phone doesn't have GPS, 911 will instantly get your home address.
i was going to go on a huge rant but what ever
just think how much truth there was to star trek in the day
kirk to scottty beam me up
"cell phone any one"
that lil pda thing that they would walk around with and type on and push stuff
smart phones pda
its all coming true
Unfortunately not Pots!
The demise of the land line and the emergence of lossy based wireless or packet switched voice is a further erosion of communicative quality not only in a technical sense but in a philosophical sense.
We are communicating more but saying less thats meaningful and whose meaning is often misconstrued or has to be repeated ad nauseum to be sure both parties understand. Beyond that much of it is meaningless chatter.
Welcome to Generation What?
I would ditch my landline in a heartbeat. Scratch that, no, I would drop every AT&T service I have. Us apartment residents, however, have painfully few choices- in most cases, just one- for telecommunications providers. My particular apartment building doesn't offer any internet or telephone provider except AT&T. Of course, there's no way for me to opt out of a land line if I want a wired internet connection. In essence, then, my $30/month DSL line, for which I have no alternatives, costs me $53 and I never see any benefit from having the land line.
I suspect that the number of landline accounts would drop significantly if telephone companies would allow DSL without a telephone account.
Yes, MP3 is a truly, stinkingly, horribly, worthlessly wrong codec to use for human speech over a packet switched network for a dizzying number of reasons. It just wasn't optimized to transmit specifically human speech frequencies at very low bandwidth requirements. Additionally MP3 was never designed to be a streaming protocol and latency would be stupidly awful.
There are biologists, speech scientists, audiologists, physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists that have spent tens of thousands of hours optimizing the several good codecs for transmitting voice over low bandwidth connections.
And using WAV would be an insanely terrible idea too. If you use one of the good speech codecs, and raise the bitrate a bit above the bottom of the barrel rate most telcos are using, you'd have what sounds like CD quality voice conversations at maybe one fiftieth the bandwidth requirements of MP3 or WAV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Speech_codecs
I'm not trying to harp on you, I'm just suggesting you should do some indepth research if you are really interested in this.
I saw "artificial or prerecorded voice", had a feeling of disbelief, and looked for the statute myself. As written, it would appear to discriminate against people who use a speech synthesizer to communicate, like Stephen Hawking.
Fairpoint was never prepared to handle the entire northeast. The were in discussion for, what... a year? I'm glad I switched to cell only. The only good thing Fairpoint does is provide Internet. They've taken massive losses here in Vermont. Land lines are a dinosaur. Only very rural areas use land lines (and make no mistake, there are plenty of those). You'd think Fairpoint would focus on those areas, but they're so strapped for cash, they can't.
All I know is, Verizon is a shitty company for cutting and running. They left Fairpoint holding the bag, in a dieing industry. Everyone suffers but them. Fuckers.
Federal requirements regarding load capacity for land line networks is higher than that required of cell networks, significantly higher. So as the land lines fall away be aware that the cell phone network will fail under approx. a 50% total capacity, whereas a landline network was required to support 80%. So don't start screaming during the next disaster when the cell networks are down in the first 5 seconds, and the land lines which would have in the past still functioned begin to fail under the load....
Who ya gonna call...NOONE
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
One thing I've not seen mentioned, it might be buried in a lower score comment thou, is the impact that having/not having a 'land line' has on your credit score.
Now I'm pretty fuzzy on the details of how exactly it works. Especially given that I'm sure each of the big three credit reporting companies have their own rules. But at one point I remember that if you did not have some sort of land line that your credit score took a hit on that fact alone.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Landline...what's that again? Home? Nope, two cell phones. Work? Nope, VOIP. I haven't used a landline telephone at home or work this century. I'm not sure this even rates as "surprising" or "news".
I own a small CLEC and today AT&T told me to use dial-up to get a daily usage file from them. Now I have to find a modem that works with Linux and figure out PPP scripts.
Replace the copper with fiber optic and you will have new customers again. Besides you can run all you need over IP network.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
It amazes me how people could give up their land lines, when the alternatives are an order of magnitude more unreliable.
Guess what, I live in the Bay Area, not in a desert somewhere. I pay 60$ for Internet service from Comcast. It is pretty fast (10Mbps). And yet, I get an Internet outage at least once ever week. Sometimes it last an hour, sometimes more. I would be a complete idiot to give up my land line and rely on cable.
DSL? Well, it needs a fucking land line doesn't it?
Cell phone? Are you fucking kidding me? I get several dropped calls every week, plus the quality is substantially inferior to the land line.
And my land line? It works all the time every time. It is the only thing that works people!! It even works when the power is down. Have you lost your minds?
So, I live in one of the most "civilized" places in the planet, and yet I have no alternative to my land line. I don't know where and how the people without land lines live, but it must be in another dimension (or at least another country).
Funny, I'd forgotten they even existed until I saw your post. Ditched my land line years, I so do not miss getting those frickin calls. Getting on the Do Not Call list helped, but we still got some.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Read this article. Basically, 911 system wasn't designed for cellular/cell phones.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I only have a landline for my DSL internet. I got a $5 monthly cost for the line and then the cost of the DSL. The prices on the landline to call are pretty steep so I never attached a phone. The only problem is when the phone company or internet company keep trying to call you but get disconnected signals. Hehe, it would have been funny except they owed me money...
The main reason to keep a landline, in this day of mobile telephones, is to get your name and address in the telephone book so people can find you.
Or am I missing something?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
The clear implication of the summary is that POTS service is terribly expensive relative to cellphone services. Is that REALLY the case, where actual costs of operation and maintenance are concerned? If cellphones are indeed now almost more ubquitous than landlines and so much cheaper to operate, why is it that I can afford a landline but not a cellphone?
The benefits are too numerous to list for being untethered from a res land line, most importantly I am single, travel out of town 50+ days a year and have an innate fear of public telephones. Verizon reception has been unbelievably good in over 10 states, even in rural areas of Western Carolina and the Northwest backwoods.
Also, US West was my landline provider in the 90's, anyone who remembers their unjustified billing practices back then(or participated in the class-action suit) knows what a shit operation they ran. Can't say anything personally about Qwest since the merger, but I have to ask: will Nacchio ever start serving his sentence?
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
That depends on what type of network you are on. AMPS (almost unheard of now) and GSM (AT&T, Sprint, most of Europe) have pretty crappy sound quality and are prone to call dropping. The various incarnations of CMDA have much better sound quality and are more stable.
It also depends on the design of the phone. Flip phones that place the mic close to your mouth have much better sound quality than sliders or PDAs where the mic is closer to your cheek than your mouth. Bluletooth headsets are just pure crap for soudn quality. The hardware and firmware in the phone makes a difference too; how good the noise cancellation and voice tokenization.
Haven't had a land line since 2005. I was still able to connect to 911 when crazy girl-friend (ex) was over-served at the local liquor dispensary and started breaking everything in the house. Now have Google Voice tied to cell number. Makes for convenient communications control. I give the GV# to all that I do not want calling my cell. I can always check calls via GV web.
Aweeeeee, they charged us and otherwise fucked us (consumers) over for years for what should have been a free basic human need and now they whine about diminishing subscribers. I can hear the violins in the distance. They can blow!
The situation for New York State telcos is not as dire as TFA makes it out to be. The telco I work for hasn't lost anywhere near 40% of its lines nor 30% of its revenue. Less than 5% in fact. It's one of the majors.
That said, I still don't have a land line, even with the employee discount. (Hence, anonymous.)
Two reasons I know why a landline would still be necessary. I know that in some municipalities, if you are an employee of the state, such as a police officer, they are required to have a landline. Another is that if you get arrested, the collect call you get to make can only be made to a landline, making friends with landlines worth their weight in gold. Wanted to add in a couple things that the crowd here might not be aware of.
Many times I text as a matter of politeness. If I have a short message that I don't want to interrupt someone over, but is more urgent than an email, I'll end a text. It's crazy conveniet. It's also useful when you have a 'sideband' during a phone conference.
Sure, pure voice is best when the needs of communication are rich, but it starts to feel 'heavy' when you telework closely with somebody for long.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
There's "easy" solution: You are a telco with declining number of subscribers on landlines. So, just take those billions of dollars you got few years back to upgrade your network to deliver next generation broadband speeds. Use them to upgrade old telephone lines into new "packet tubes" and migrate your old telephony system onto those new "tubes". And here you go: one infrastructure which is going to make you money as ISP *and* which will allow you to operate the "old telephony network" almost for free.
Something similar to what has been used for allowing analog TVs to receive digital TV can be used to connect old analog phones into new digital network.
Unless I'm mistaken and/or too optimistic. :)
hany
Traditional POTS have battery backups at the PX to avoid the power-outage scenario. Likewise, I've seen a number of cell towers lately with solar cells and, I'd guess, battery backup inside the buildings. I know my cell has worked during wide power outages in the area, thus the reason for my suspicion.
Locally, phone service is offered over bridged VoIP now that they've got fiber to most exchanges - as near as I can tell. You use a normal analog handset, but the switching box that goes to the telco sends it as VoIP. Internet and phone service will go out while Cable TV stays up. I suspect as people 'consolidate' service under a single provider, and providers start offering "communication packages" (phone/internet/TV) universally, we'll see more of this; it cuts a lot of the cost of having to support analog.
Honestly, with the large communications racing each others' stock prices to the top (er...), it's only natural that there'd be no redundancy or communication device fallbacks in the case of an emergency. Batteries and the like to maintain any such thing are expensive to maintain, and if it's one relatively small cost they can cut out, it's one more cent they can offer their stock purchasers. For consumer and most commercial communications, it doesn't make a whole hell of lot of difference anyway.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Their prices were competitive with services like Vonage or Comcast. I am using Vonage because my only landline option was Verizon and they are horrible. Base rate of the phone was around 50 bucks a month then every phone call outbound was a charge. So my bills were running over 60 and sometimes 70 bucks a month!!! Sorry that is just way too much. Vonage 33 bucks with taxes plus I can control those pesky telemarketers and people who are blocking their telephone number from getting through. Try to get that with a landline. Not without paying a premium. To prevent telemarketing calls keep your phone number unlisted, sign up for the do not call registry and when you don't know who is calling don't friggin answer it. Took less then a month and no more unwanted calls!!!
Our neighborhood took a direct hit. POTS never hiccoughed. Yes, we've got a couple of phones that don't require power to work, such as a beautiful shiny black 500 series Western Electric phone with a rotary dial.
Cell service became spotty when the cell tower near Chatham Rd and Wabash was out of operation. We were without power for a week and cable/Internet for 10 days. I love my generator. It came in handy for the ice storm, too.
We plan on keeping POTS for the present. Our alarm system uses it, too. Yes, we also have cell phones.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
It just doesn't seem to be worth my time and money. Why didn't they upgrade their infrastructure years ago?
Why are so many of you worried about emergency communication? If you were really concerned you would get ham radios and learn how to use radio nets. During Katrina I was sending and receiving messages and in some cases even directly talking to my relatives in the affected area over the 20 and 60 meter bands. Land lines are not good in emergencies, they are pretty much a waste of copper and a hold over from the days before fiber. We use it because its there, we use it because there are no install costs, when the install costs of fiber come down, copper and POTS will go the way of the BBS. Some people may still use them, and they are novelty, but they waste time when compared to the new technology. We should embrace progress. Also one more note, The vo-coders are the problem with the cellphones, the land line is still digital its just got a higher quality vo-coder. Soon we will have more cellphone bandwidth and we can use more pipe per call for voice, we just have to demand better sound quality in our phones and let our dollars speak. If we keep buying mediocre products there is no incentive to change them.
Faith_Healer -- The antethsis to almost everything, and the worlds worst speller.