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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%."
... 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.
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.
Strike the telephone exchange in the town and you end its ability to communicate with landlines. If you have to disable the wireless networks, it would require you to take down several centers to isolate a place.
Face your daemons!
Kill it with fiber!
Grandpa still used the outhouse.
Man. I hate SBC/AT&T as much as the next guy, but even I think that metaphore was pretty harsh...
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.
In the case of the landline and a lot of other technologies, I agree. Who needs buggy whips when everyone has one of them thar newfangles automobiles?
On the other hand, some very useful technologies have died. At four years old the linked article is a bit dated; car stereo knobs have made a comeback, for instance. But when your power goes out in a January ice storm, you're going to wish you had a gas gravity furnace with its power pile.
(I followed that article up with Good Riddance to Bad Tech. Who needs eight tracks? I always hated them!)
Free Martian Whores!
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.
Who needs WW3 to realize the value of land lines? Did you not watch War of the Worlds (the George Pal version)? Remember the scene when the power failed and the phones were out, also? Normally the average power failure does not affect the landline phone system because it is on a different electric circuit. Anyone who truly wants to "stay connected" in an emergency needs to consider that very likely the landlines will still work after a power failure, and continue to work even after the cell phone batteries die and cannot be recharged. (Even if you had a solar-power battery charger, what of the power for the cell towers?)
It may be OK for the landlines to be removed from service (lotta copper there, to recycle), but only AFTER the wireless networks are robust enough for people to stay connected in emergencies.
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
Phone lines get power from the grid. You are correct that when the power goes out, the phones continue to work, and that is because they have massive banks of submarine batteries at the various exchanges to provide power for when the power is out. These batteries will not last forever, likely somewhere around 24 hours. My cell phone has a 5 day standby time (in theory)and I can charge it from my car.
I guess I am arguing that land lines aren't as robust as you might think they are. You cell phone battery will likely outlast the battery at the local exchange. Also, if there are major fiber breaks, it might take longer to restore land line service, becuase a lot of cell phone towers use wireless backhauls... Just my $.02.
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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).
Not necessarily. One of the first targets in most WW3 nuclear scenarios is landline switching facilities, in order to disrupt the command, communication, and control of the opponent. Because of this, "dynamic adaptive routing" technologies, in which telecom links can be dynamically routed around failed links and/or nodes, is viewed in the US as a strategic technology the export of which is controlled -- see 5A991.c.9 in the Commerce Control List (p.8).
Nonsense, ham radio is far superior than land line, it gives the sound quality an earthly vibrant texture, unlike the harsh undertones of the land line.
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.
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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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
> It may be OK for the landlines to be removed from service (lotta copper there, to recycle),
> but only AFTER the wireless networks are robust enough for people to stay connected in emergencies.
No no no... it's never OK for landlines to be removed from service. It's the only way to get in or out of the Matrix! We don't stand a chance against the machines without it!
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?
most have backup generators and most urban areas have more than one tower. Redundant power + redundant towers + microwave transmission = high availability. Now that isn't 100% true all the time in all areas, but living in a hurricane state the only problem with the cell towers was they were jammed up from over use because all the landlines go down.... keep calling and you will get through. Wireless also has the advantage of being able to add extra capacity during an emergency by bringing in portable cells - they do this at many sporting events. They can be run right from the bed of a truck with a gas generator and a satellite or microwave link.
Get a web developer
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.
"Anyone who truly wants to "stay connected" in an emergency" ...needs to get an amateur radio license and appropriate equipment to keep their batteries charged.
They should also obtain a CB radio, also wonderfully useful (just for listening) if they travel.
Get two CBs if you want a local connection. I also have a couple of inverters, and misc. cables, car battery terminals, etc so I can swap batteries from my vehicles to keep them charged.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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.
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 ?
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).