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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%."
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.
Why do I keep my landline?
DSL
My security alarm needs it
The sound quality is far better than any cell I've ever had
During my 5 day power outage, my landline still worked
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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.
Yes, to all of the above.
Another big one is comfort. Talking on a cell phone, even the best high-end models, for very long is just uncomfortable for me. Cell phones are fine for quick "Hi, honey, I'm at the grocery and I can't remember if we're out of butter" calls, but with friends and family scattered all over the country, I spend a lot of time on one- or two-hour calls and I've never used a cell phone that I can tolerate for that long. I can't believe I'm the only person who finds this to be so.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You don't need voice service on your landline for DSL. If Qwest told you this(they tried to tell me this), they lied.
Newer GE Security alarms support cellular networks, although this does increase your monthly monitoring bill by $30 or more.
Got me there, hard line voice quality is very good. As for reliability, I've never had a long term outage on any cell carrier or a land line so I can't differentiate the two.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Or this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/cell-phone/8928/
From the wonderful people at ThinkGeek
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Two things. Diesel and a generator.
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).
Where is this cell phone with less downtime?
I can think of ONCE in the last ten years where a landline hasn't been working. And that because the entire town was knocked out due to a severed cable (and cellphones were knocked out too.)
Cell phone outages are a daily occurrence.
And what problems for the maintenance guy? It's two pieces of copper. What is mysteriously failing for you all the time?
Landlines, for me, Just Work.
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
Wire centers have huge ass diesel generators and enough fuel to run for days. Those batteries are really there just last until the generator is up and humming, plus a bunch of leeway should there be issues with the generator.
Also, that cell tower at some point feeds into a wire center anyway, so if the wire center is down, your cell tower is dead in the water.
Your VoiP phone? It goes back to a wire center somehow. Cable system? Take a guess. Wouldn't it be better to connect directly to the wire center with a regular POTS line than slip several points of failure in between?
>run your engine for several hours to do so.
No you don't. Just leave your ignition in the accessory position (not run) with the phone connected to the car charger. A car battery could power an iPhone for weeks before you'd need to start the car to charge the battery.
There are streaming digital formats specifically designed to carry the human voice clearly, with low latency, at obscenely low bitrates. As another poster said, MP3 is a terrible format for this. The problem is telecoms have lowered the bitrates beyond the prudent level for decent quality, so they can squeeze ever more calls onto the same pipe.
I absolutely hate VoIP.
In the event that the power goes out, the battery backup box lasts longer than a material power-outage. This past winter, we had a (relatively, for the area) large snow storm which knocked out my power one night. Because I had FIOS, I had to have the battery-backup box (I was renting the place, so I didn't bother to raise a fuss with the tech and have him leave the copper phone connection.) When I wanted to make a call the following morning, the battery backup box is beeping and I have to hit a button to allow me a (hopefully) 10 minute phone call. After that, the battery's dead and no more calls.
Fast-forward a few months: My girlfriend's parents were in France for a 2-week vacation (their 25th aniversary.) The weekend after they left, our area had a "severe" thunder storm. Nobody quite knows what happened, but when we checked on their house later that week, we discovered the following:
1) Their landlines were down
2) Their internet was down
3) Their security system was down
The culpret: their FIOS box in their garage was fried.
Despite receiving my undergrad a few years ago, I love my POTS line (I have moved to a new place since the past winter.) The sound quality is great, I don't have to worry about my phone going down if the power goes out in my neighborhood, and it allows me to have a lower cell-phone plan (which subsidises the cost of the landline.)
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.
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 ?
In some ways, the distinction between VoIP and traditional business phone systems has been blurring anyway. For the last 20 years or so businesses have gotten their phone lines via T1/E1 trunks which then go into a computer switching system (PBX). In the past, those switching systems ran custom/proprietary software, but now, you're starting to see them run things like Asterisk. Nowadays, people will either push the POTS service down to the ISP and receive SIP trunks (i.e., VoIP) in return, or else add SIP trunks via their existing Internet connection and run the gateway service themselves (that's what we're doing). Business phone connections haven't really been "plain old copper" for a long time.
Okay, nobody really answered your question about MP3 so I'll give it a try:
- Cellphone voice calls are limited to about 5 kbit/s.
- For comparison that's just one-tenth the speed of a dialup modem. In fact it's barely above reading speed (1 kbit/s).
- In order to achieve such low bitrate, they use a codec specifically designed for human speech.
Neither MP3 nor AAC nor AAC+SBR, which are designed for general-purpose usage, would produce anything intelligible at such a low rate, so rather than improve quality, you'd actually make it worse. Yes you could expand the bandwidth to 20 kbit/s in which case AAC+SBR would work, but phone companies don't want to do that because they'd then have 1/4th as few calls per tower. They prefer to maintain the current 5 kbit/s rate.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
It's funny that *having* to replace phones every few years is seen as progress when 30 years ago a phone could last twenty years and work right every time. I still have a twenty-year old phone that I keep around for when the electricity goes out at home.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.