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AT&T Readying For the End of Analog Landlines
nottheusualsuspect writes "AT&T, in response to a Notice of Inquiry released by the FCC to explore how to transition to a purely IP-based communications network, has declared that it's time to cut the cord. AT&T told the FCC that the death of landlines is a matter of when, not if, and asked that a firm deadline be set for pulling the plug. In the article, broadband internet and cellular access are considered to be available to everyone, though many Americans are still without decent internet access."
If I had a reliable VOIP service, I would be happy, but the most reliable thing is POTS. It's simple and it works. I know some people that are just VOIP or just cell phone, but neither is reliable enough to replace my dedicated line - I've tried it, twice, and its just not enough. Plus land lines are dirt cheap.
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Aaah! The delicate irreality of think-tank fueled corporate musings that are mostly thinly veiled attempts at doing away with current regulation and obstacles to pure profitability
Lets stabilize the current cellular service you currently offer before assuming you can handle the onslaught of customers when the 'cord is cut'.
Speaking of handling loads, how are you doing with the barrage of iPhone users?
Before you all jump on me, I am a happy AT&T customer. I am just being bluntly honest.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
Have you seen how much they charge for broadband access via wireless? Seeing as its already normal practice, its a nice way of forcing all those DSL customers to pay by the bite. Not to mention where ever the government mandates an update to necessary infrastructure, a huge hand out isn't far behind.
As far as AT&T is concerned though, I have them, and my calls drop at my house all the time in a city of around a million people. Screw them, course it's not just them, Verizon and Cricket both dropped calls at my house too. A-holes, all of em. Each one of them should change their slogan to "Providing the least amount of service possible to as many people as we can dupe for the most amount of money that the market will bear."
Now THATS a true company mission statement if ever I heard one...
This system has been built up over 100 years, the reality is they want to cut costs and force people to pay more for the same service they get for $29 a month.
Frankly, I don't think they're capable of doing such a thing (technically, yes, they're capable, but I highly doubt they'll want to subsidize Universal Access, particularly with cell service).
decent internet access from many people because it is unprofitable for them to deliver, while still holding on to their granted monopolies in those areas. and then they even go to the extent of saying that they want to cut the landline cords. this basically means a lot of people will not only be without decent internet access, but also decent phone communication. unbelievable bastardiness.
yet, if, any government agency would, god forbid, to step in to eliminate this blatant slighting of citizens, those bastards all start up yelling 'competition' , 'hands off business', 'no government intervention', 'socialism'.
maybe socialism is indeed what is needed. for, apparently, what we have on our hands became an outright feudalism.
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Any proposed replacement must satisfy the following conditions showing it is a true improvement
a) be cheaper now and for the long term for customers
b) be more reliable
c) provide better 911 and other emergency services information
From the above
a) there will not be an initial upfront customer cost over and above current costs.
If it is to be cheaper overall the provider is to eat the up front cost and just delay reducing costs to the customer.
b) things like a touch tone charge are disallowed
c) it must not depend on power available at the customers site
d) digital features like allowing customers to add a digital description containing things like number of house occupants, ages, medial conditions to be sent along with a 911 call should be considered.
There still is nothing as reliable as a plain regular analog telephone line, as engineered by the fine people who used to work at AT&T.
Even though I love my blackberry, I'm going to keep my POTS line for a very long time. My POTS line has worked flawlessly from the day it was installed for over 10 years.
I love this line from the article: "It makes no sense to require service providers to operate and maintain two distinct networks when technology and consumer preferences have made one of them increasingly obsolete."
Lies. The analog portion of the phone system is only in the last mile. The backend of the phone system has been digital for a very long time, and it is ALREADY common to see IP-based backhaul with QOS.
Fax machines and Stand Alone Credit Card terminals require them too. You can sometimes jury rig it to work, but it's a crap shoot....
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All of the valid points/problems in the previous comments aside, at least this would finally put an end to fax machines, eh?
If AT&T wants the FCC to set a date to cut landlines, the FCC should force AT&T (and other corporations) to get the country's infrastructure up to snuff first. We can talk about dates after that.
I've used VOIP for years at both my business and my house - but we still have a landline. Just a few other roadblocks we ran into that weren't mentioned:
I love the flexibility I get with VOIP, I can work from anywhere with a decent internet connection and have all kinds of routing options through my Asterisk server, but we still have our incoming calls defaulting to a POTS line that runs into the Asterisk box. VOIP is constantly gaining ground but it's not there yet.
Or (as I believe would be the case), the phone is powered from house wiring meaning, if your power goes out, you've lost your phone service. If the central office provides the power for the local loop (as is currently done), they have batteries fail over to when their power goes out. Several years ago, my power went out for 3 days. Using an old dial phone which didn't require external power, I still had phone service.
This plan is like saying municipal water is outdated and unnecessary because "everyone" can buy bottled water.
Yes, but analog TV is nowhere near as important as the phone system. It's the difference between not being able to watch a TV show and not being able to call the fire department when your rural house catches fire.
Well, they will not be very confused if AT&T just comes and replaces their local exchange with a version that still serves the same wiring in their homes with the same phone numbers, but handles outbound communication through Internet.
I'll keep my land line at my house active as long as possible.
I have three small kids and I need something absolutely reliable in case of an emergency.
While I do absolutely love modern mobile tech (Droid!), I prefer using a land line while at home. I simply don't enjoy having long conversations on a mobile phone. The newest phone at my house is a Nortel Meridian M9616CW which was (for me) the ultimate geek phone in the mid 90s. They seem to fetch a good price:
http://www.telephonegenie.com/customer/product.php?productid=16149
The rest are all Western Electric, Automatic Electric and ITT phones from the early 40s - 70s that I've collected and repaired. They all work perfectly (even rotary dialing) on the Cox Digital phone service.
As the article mentioned, POTS is preferable in disaster areas. I live in an area of New Orleans that didn't flood in Katrina. The only way I was able to contact people in my neighborhood who stayed for the storm was on their land lines.
In our northside Chicago neighborhood, the ATT-maintained land lines get all noisy and cross-talky whenever it rains.
We can hear other conversations on the line.
We call the 611 number, and they fiddle with it, it gets better. The next time it rains, the lines get noisy.
I'm completely unsurprised that ATT doesn't want to have land lines anymore. They're too cheap to be bothered with upkeep.
The problem is one of market share and costs. At some point, the costs of maintaining POTS will exceed the revenue produced by it. When that happens, or maybe a little before, POTS is dead. It really doesn't matter if not everyone has switched over or not, it will just be terminated.
That is the reason they want an announced-by-the-government date, as it would eliminate the carrier from being the bad guy.
The problem is today end-user vVOIP has no tariffs that require reliability. If Vonage service goes out, so what? Because of the number of hands it has to go through, it is unlikely we are going to see much mandated reliability for VOIP service anytime soon. This means that your "landline" phone is not going to have anywhere near the reliability that POTS service has today, and there will be no regulation that says it has to be.
All in all, this sounds like an interesting, but utterly useless idea. But unless something is done about pseudo-carriers like Vonage and Magic Jack POTS service is doomed.
The world hasn't ended, but for a lot of people I know TV has ended.
Almost all of the ones I know who were affected live in rural areas, and many are older and with fixed incomes. For a lot of them, the TV is pretty much their only source of up-to-date information like news and weather, and they were OK with a grainy picture and a massive rooftop antenna. But that's all over now. They blew their $20-30 on converter boxes and ended up with nothing. The few who can afford satellite TV have lost the local stations they used to rely on for their major news source. Some of the lucky ones have one or two channels left from the four they had before the conversion. A very few have two or three. Most have none. And with broadband unavailable, dialup limited to 14.4k due to telco filtering, no cell signal, and landlines with dialup topping $50 a month, getting information is becoming increasingly difficult.
I'm not saying the conversion was a bad thing, it will certainly open up vast new opportunities for communications. It is a shame, however, that the very people who gave up their old information sources are those who will not be able to take advantage of the new ones that replace them. AT&T/Verizon/Sprint are NEVER going to put WiMax in deeply rural areas, and even if they did many of the people who have lost access to TV could never afford it anyway.
I fear the same will happen with telephone if AT&T gets its way. I realize it's difficult to cost-justify getting information out to rural areas, but at least leave them a phone line.
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In Katrina the power went out, the cell phone towers went down, the police multiplexing radio stopped working. The only communication people had when the water started coming into their homes were their analog phone lines. When everything else stopped working those remained operational. I still remember people calling in to a local radio station (from their landlines) to say that they were trapped in their attic and request help. Getting rid of analog phones is the worst idea I've ever heard and shows that that the people suggesting it have never seen the information black hole that results from a major disaster.
Barring the sudden availability of much better internet access, this is bad news for my parents. They live about 15 miles from the nearest town, which is itself nothing to really speak of. Wireless is available, but they are on the very edge of the service area, so it is unreliable. They've been using a satellite-based service for a year or two, but the latency is terrible. A ping to google takes around 1.5 s (yes, seconds). I haven't tried to call anyone on skype from their house, but I imagine it would be unusable. Their cell phone service is somewhat spotty, as well.
Living in a rural area myself, I'm quite aware of this. Still, every little bit helps when you're trying to hold off a blaze or trying to get a loved one to the hospital.
The FCC Public Notice (TFA refers to a Notice of Inquiry, but links to a Public Notice soliciting comments as to whether the FCC should issue of a Notice of Inquiry) isn't about cutting "landlines", its about replacing PSTN with IP as the implementation technology for telephone service.
But the concern you raise is valid even in that context; issues like usefulness in emergencies (both in terms of 911 service and resilience to power failures and other sources of outages) are things that would no doubt be significant areas if the FCC's investigation of such a transition moves forward -- which I fully expect it to.
The context of the FCC Public Notice is about the transition in the context of the Congressional mandate for the FCC to provide guidance on acheiving universal broadband access and utilization, and transitioning the phone system to IP so that the IP network is the single universal communication network that has to be maintained would make sense as a means of doing that.
Of course, that does raise the question of the kind of common carrier provisions that have applied to the providers of access to the PSTN network because it is the nation's principal universal communication system and frequently and naturally (because of the infrastructure requirements) the subject of regional monopolies, but not (though they are often the same providers) to the providers of IP access.
Yes, I don't really understand what the fuss is about. They're talking about switching to an all-IP network, but telcos have done that already in a lot of the world. Phase one converts the backbones to IP and routes voice over the packet-switched network. Phase two rolls it out into the exchanges so only the very last mile is analogue and the rest is all digital. The final phase replaces the analogue terminals with SIP devices.
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Sadly, my family lives well below the poverty line and we've been struggling to get by since before I was born.
The only internet we can afford is dial-up and that's only possible through a landline phone.
Yes, I know it's slow, but it's what we have and we have to make do.
There is no way my family would be able to continue using the internet at all, if regular landline phone access ceases, and we can't afford a cell phone.
It's ridiculous that because the number of people who are stuck with things like dial-up is the minority in this nation, that we're being bit-by-bit squeezed out of society as a whole.
I don't want to pay more and get more, even if it's better value for the dollar. I want to pay less and get what I think I need. I want to make that decision. I don't want an unholy alliance in which The Government forces me to do what best for The Corporations.
The digital TV transition was different, because when it came down to it, those of us who prefer free broadcast TV still have that choice. (Most of us). We paid a one-time charge for a converter box, less than $20 with the coupon, ZERO DOLLARS PER MONTH, and life goes on. Yes, the transition was bungled, and the FCC lied when they said people who were getting adequate analog reception would get adequate digital reception, but by and large our freedom of choice was more or less preserved.
The important point is not that transition cost was small, the important point is that it was ONE TIME. The difference between what we have now--copper-wired POTS, plus DSL, plus broadcast TV, and the cheapest digital package from the three providers in my area (municipal electric company, Verizon FIOS, Comcast) is at least $30 a month. Not $30: that's $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + ... (Well, due to life expectancy, at least there's effectively a "senior discount!")
And the last time there was a big power outage where I worked, the spiffy new VOIP phone on my desk went out INSTANTLY. (No, in theory it shouldn't have, in theory there was no good reason, I'm just saying what happened). After about 90 minutes, nobody could get signal on their cell phone. (Again, there's "no reason why that should have happened," but it did). The older set of desk phones, which hadn't been disconnected yet, lasted a couple of hours. But the three plain old telephones that were still around, because it was easier to use with the fax machines than with any of the newer systems, were working fine five hours later. And based on admittedly decades-old experience, probably would have been working days later.
They will tell us that they can make the digital infrastructure just as reliable, and during the next big Katrina-like disaster the phones will all go dead and then they will tell us "but that SHOULDN'T have happened."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I can't really see AT&Ts reasoning. The fact is copper line wire pretty much runs everywhere, and by adding some DSL line extenders, much of this could be reused for providing DSL service everywhere for relatively little cost, compared to having to build new networks. So POTS infrastructure can be used to help bring broadband to rural areas relatively cheaply reusing much of the existing infrastructure. Wireless tends to be expensive and slow. due to the limited bandwidth, simply due to the fact everyone in an area is sharing that bandwidth. DSL could probably offer cheaper and faster service more reliably.
Municiple utilities such as water and wastewater depend on analog lines (leased lines) to relay informaion such as levels, and to do simple switching of things on and off remotely. This obviously can be done over internet or cell connections, but there are hundreds of thousands of these connections across the country that would need to be replaced. If we were given a deadline of 5 years, it couldn't be done. And it will be a costly switch in hardware. Though lately the cell and internet solutions are cheaper monthly bills.
If that's how you choose to read AT&T's request... I see:
M. FCC chairman, landlines for consumers make us no money, yet we are legally required to supply them. Can you please make them optional for us? Oh and we'd like not to have to supply fiber-to-the-home at anything less than 10 times the price kthxbai.
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Who said anything about getting rid of emergency services?
We could always replace the POTS networks with some kind of IP based telephony that is on a separate power system from the normal power grid, effectively making it every bit as robust as POTS service if not more so. Then in addition to voice you've also got data.
I'd imagine an engineering solution could be worked up so that you don't even have to replace most of the existing copper wiring, it would just be a matter of replacing the equipment at the head end and replacing all of your phone handsets. If you're feeling nostalgic for your old phone, there already exist converters that bridge the DTMF/pulse dialing to VoIP anyways, and they're cheep too.
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In parts of Europe, voice phone service has been digital for a decade or more, using ISDN. ISDN voice is 64Kb/s uncompressed, so you get digital audio for the last mile in the same format as the rest of the phone network, and with no packetization lag. ISDN was supposed to take voice digital. Unfortunately, US phone companies took it as an opportunity to switch from flat-rate local call pricing to per-minute pricing, so it never went anywhere.
The US did ISDN power wrong - Europe provides power over ISDN, but the US does not. So ISDN home equipment remains powered up as long as the central office has power. (There's a cute trick with ISDN power - normally, it's one DC polarity, and you can draw a fair amount of power, enough to run answering machines, wireless base stations, and ISDN phone displays. In emergencies, the central office reverses the DC polarity and lowers the current limit. You can still make calls, but the accessories power down.) Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark are about 1/3 voice ISDN.
Here are some modern ISDN phones. They have nice features, like a running display of call cost and SMS capability. ISDN and DSL can be run on the same wire pair, so using ISDN for voice and DSL for data works.
I still get analog TV, where I live in Northern Arizona. The digital conversion has not yet occurred here (except for one 1 channel). Some of the mountaintop repeaters, which serve rural areas and smaller cites, were exempt from the requirement to change to digital. Some of the mountaintop translators in parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and elsewhere are still analog.
I still get 4 analog channels and just one digital channel. I use a rabbit ears antenna mounted on top of my old mid-1990s 13-inch television, without a converter box. Cable is not available where I live. For several years, I kept hearing that analog TV would not exist beyond a certain date, but here it is almost 2010, and I am still watching analog TV. Oddly enough I think the translator station is probably having to convert a digital signal to analog to accomplish that.
Since I do not have cable, I use DSL over POTS lines from the telephone company for my Internet connection. Where I live the available speed is 1.5 Mb / 800 k for DSL, with hints that QWEST may possibly eventually upgrade to local equipment to 7 Mb capability someday.
Up until about 3 years ago 26.4k dial-up was all that I could get, even when using a 56k modem. The local telephone lines were not good enough for 28.8k or 56k.
Did AT&T ever provide a web page that allows you to monitor usage so that you could cut back if it looks like you are about to go over the limit?
If they haven't, then people need to start getting their local politicians to demand it.
Just look at how well the forced conversion to digital TV worked out. They said the reason for the forced conversion was to help bring better OTA TV coverage to rural areas. In my very rural area we had 5 network TV stations: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and PBS before the forced conversion. Now we have three, only one of which actually switched to digital. The crippled $20 off boxes don't pass through analog signals without degradation so I have to replug the antenna in order to switch channels.
Ah yes, another stellar example of the best government money can buy. Did it not suffice that the telecoms have kept the US in the technological telecommunications toilet compared to the rest of the developed world? Now they've destroyed OTA TV and are planing to destroy POTS and DSL. Yet whenever we try to fight the corporate destruction of our country, our efforts get thwarted by the simple ploy of crying "socialism!".
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It's because the average Slashdotter seems to think that "Voice Over Internet Protocol" means "phone calls over broadband Internet."
VoIP doesn't really require broadband and doesn't have to travel over the Internet. Most of my POTS calls are in fact VoIP calls as soon as they hit the local substation.
ATT whines about people leaving for alternative services as if it were inevitable. I don't think it was.
VoIP gave people alternatives to being gouged $25 or $30 a month for just *dialtone*, and people chose. I have a T-Mobile prepaid cell phone and I pay less than that *per year* for the 'dialtone' component.
I'd pay $100/year for a wired circuit and dialtone, but that kind of money just isn't enough for the likes of AT&T.
A.
(who has been off the PSTN for a long, long time)
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
...as long as it is a fair trade, rural versus heavy urban. I'll take no broadband while living in the log cabin because it doesn't exist out in the sticks as long as the big cities, those folks living in a more "sensible" heavily packed high rise apartment means they get no food, because it doesn't exist there and has to be trucked in, which we will cut out then.
Fair enough? You keep your 50 meg down high speed connection, we keep the food, seems totally fair to me, no reason to push one product or the other one way or the other when it doesn't exist there, just let folks live with what they have locally and be done with it. No need for commie subsidized and shared roads, nor commie subsidized and shared wires on poles then, everyone is happy, no urbanite pays for anything from or for the rural areas, no rural folks pay for anything from or for the urban areas. Even steven, complete split there. You got yours, we got ours, no one pays for the other guy's life in any manner.
err..good luck man, hope you like those tasty electrons....