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In Sandy-Struck NJ Town, Verizon Goes All Wireless, No Copper
An anonymous reader writes with a bit from the Asbury Park Press: "'Devastated and wiped out by superstorm Sandy, Verizon has no plans to rebuild its copper-line telephone network in Mantoloking. Instead, Verizon says Mantoloking is the first town in New Jersey, and one of the few areas in the country, to have a new service called Verizon Voice Link. Essentially, it connects your home's wired and cordless telephones to the Verizon Wireless network.' So no copper or fiber to a fairly densely populated area. Comcast will now be the only voice/data option with copper to the area."
Apparently landlines are a waste of money, that's why they force DSL susbscribers to pay for them even if all they want is DSL. It is nice to see that they are more flexible about landline use when it comes to saving their own money.
...nice and over-subscribed.
DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
They better design the network to be able to withstand the extra load that an emergency situation would create. Imagine the panic when a disaster happens and noone can reach anybody for help or to make sure they're ok.
Why would the PSC and FCC permit this?
As someone who lives in a rural area and is forced to use wireless internet (still have copper for my phone though), the reliability and speed still aren't anywhere near that of wired. Speed may not be an issue for just phone, but the inconsistent connection may well be.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Does that mean every phone call from Mantolocking will sound like it's coming from a cell phone? Blech.
Of course, one benefit of POTS was that, in a power failure, your landline phone would frequently still work because of the giant piles of batteries at the CO. So, you could still dial 911 if, say, your aged relative's breathing assist machine needed power, or if there was some other medical emergency in the midst of what ever caused the power failure. Kind of ironic that, as a result of a disaster, they'll be somewhat more vulnerable to disasters.
Rolling out new copper in this day and age would be madness. But the decision to rely on wireless as anything other than a short-term emergency measure is wrong. They should, of course, be rolling out new fiber as a matter of urgency.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
They're doing the same thing on Fire Island. From what I heard, they were planning to run FiOS before Sandy, so I imagine this is just a stop-gap.
Which would be fine, save for one problem: their coverage *sucks* out there. When the summer season hits in less than a month, we're screwed.
You can't offer everyone 100Mbit internet service over a 3G LTE network (LTE in the US is not 4G). Comcast will eat Verizon's lunch once the whole town is on the cellular net, with no doubt will be incapable fo handling the load. People will also not accept paying $500/month for 50GB when wireline services are essentially unlimited.
Either that will happen, or Comcast will see an opportunity to adopt a capped pricing model and cap their wireline service at 50GB like AT&T does with U-Verse and DSL, but I somehow doubt that will happen.
USA companies are just dumb.
USA lawmakers are just dumb.
I have no clue why you put up with that?
we do have LTE [...] I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up. I can stream and torrent reliably.
But for how long at a time? With the 5 GB per month transfer cap that was typical of LTE plans last time I checked, a 10 Mbps transfer would eat up the entire month's allowance in one hour.
No wireless network, particularly a bad wireless network, is substitute in all weathers for a wired network.
Clearly they're not even trying to compete there anymore. It's amazing. Given the opportunity to rebuild the network, they don't want to. Should have run fiber-optics underground, but no. They think it's not worth the money to invest in new infrastructure, so they won't: they'll leave it to rot and move people on to something that we all know won't work when it counts.
America, it really looks like your only hope is Google Fiber.
Why would the PSC and FCC permit this?
I guess on the same reasoning as the "Dubyaphone" program that began in 2008 and extended the Lifeline program of the Universal Service Fund to mobile phones.
Isn't it another proof that the US slowly sink to 3rd world status for most of their citizens? The only other countries with no copper infrastructures are in Africa (for both historic and economical reasons). But thinking that one of the biggest companies in the US doesn't have the means to install proper infrastructure is ludicrous and shameful.
Wireless will *not* have the same bandwidth as wired connections. And asking each home to have spare battery power in case of emergency is shifting the burden onto the individuals, but with much less efficiency.
Proof of disintegration of the american society.
Verizon has likely pocketed tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance to cover loss of business and to 'make good' its infrastructure. Verizon then neglects to make good and proceeds with building an inferior alternative at a fraction of the cost.
It would be interesting to see if the insurance company paid for the cost of this new infrastructure; provided funds to the value of the existing infrastructure; or provided funds for the replacement cost of the existing infrastructure. In the case of the latter two, has Verizon returned the unspent portion to the insurance company (and are they required to?) or simply added this windfall to their bottom line.
It also makes me wonder how much federal and state funding was used to build this network.
[Rent This Space]
This is one reason, by the way, that long distance POTS calls are more expensive than long distance wireless calls, and consequently why wireless carriers make no distinction between local and long distance: they use virtual circuits instead of switched circuits.
Is that how the 10-10 dial-around carriers of the late 1990s were able to offer such low rates?
Mantoloking, NJ is one of those Inlet towns that live on a thin strip of land. It's very expensive to run and maintain wires there. I think wireless is a much more effective way to deliver telecommunications. Keep the wires on the New Jersey mainland.
Emerging economies in Africa and India are going all wireless from the start. It costs way more to run and maintain wires, and they never had wires to begin with.
Living in a neighborhood with many other wifi users, I sure can notice my wireless signal degrade in quality when lots of other wifi traffic is also taking place... To switch all internet and telephone to cellular in a high-populated dense area I would imagine similar problems would occur. Most people use cellular for basic things, but when they are switching all traffic and phone, you have to think of how many people stream HDTV and other high-bandwidth traffic now all going cellular.
I sure would be interested to see a follow up article to this. How well it worked out mainly.
Wireless infrastructure still has battery backups there's nothing different there from a POTS. The only difference here is how to power the endpoint devices since the system won't power them directly. There's no reason why this couldn't be battery powered. This is actually how FTTH endpoints are usually setup, with a local battery backup at the home ensuring voice over the fibre line keeps running when your power doesn't.
There are off the shelf solutions for this problem which work quite well.
Regardless of whether it is fibre or wireless the one problem that seems to have been overlooked is what happens in a power cut? The only reason we still have a landline is because of its reliability in an emergency. If local phone companies cut the copper link - which provides external power to a non-cordless phone - I'll dump them and switch to a cheaper net-based alternative.
If they refuse to run copper or cable then the local government should terminate their monopoly privileges and either allow another supplier to lay the wires or open service to full free market competition.
The area that they are talking about is very much a seasonal residence. Most people I know in those areas don't have landline service anyway. They cut the cord on that years ago. It's not worth the investment if only 30% of the residences will take up the service anyway.
Seriously, wireless is great for when I'm out and about and all I have is my cell phone or when I'm making a quick, temporary connection with the laptop, but I would not feel comfortable living somewhere I couldn't have a physical last mile connection - fiber or cable is fine, (though I'd pay for BOTH to have redundant last mile connections)
I get that it's cheaper to go wireless, but there appears to be a great divide between Internet reliability and speed - those with last mile wired connections and those with only wireless options (satellite of local wireless carriers) and in our mad rush to make things more convenient, we're also making them slower and less reliable than they could be.
I suppose I could look at it another way - it would cost WAY MORE than the phone company could hope to make back to re-run copper, so from a business sense, I guess this works for them.
However, if I were Verizon, I'd be rolling out the fiber to premises, and give Comcast something to worry about... but instead, they're abandoning FIOS... go figure.
The Digital Sorceress
POTTS lines are heavily regulated as to rates and service levels, this is why the connection rates are cheap and anything more than lifeline service is heavily levied.
The phone company is obligated to provide 911 service and lifeline at regulated rates.
This presents a business model with limited revenue and high maintenance liability, because folks that rely on this model don't use the phone excessively and are very careful about long distance charges.
With wireless service the phone co is no longer legally obligated for 24/7/365 functional service and has dramatically reduced it's maintenance costs (as it can over subscribe it's service capabilities) and skirts the regulated fee structure. On top of that they can bring in more revenue by charging an unregulated monthly flat rate even if they give free LD.
It's all about the money....... Look at the wireless model, over subscribed, 2-3 times the monthly rates (plus overages), and now since everyone has to have a phone there are 3-5 (or more) accounts per household where there used to be only 1-2. PLUS they can cripple the phones and nickle and dime you for "features" enabled. KachING!
On the west coast Verizon sold off all of it's buried wire and fiber.....
Rick B.
It must be entertaining to play quake. Then again if Verizon used really good AP's maybe its not much different.
At 800 watts, or even less, I can cook food with it - I wonder what the effect of all that microwave EMF has on living tissue.. I wonder what kind of effect EMF has on electrical based systems - such as my brain. It's okay though telecommunications companies are all over that shit by funding the appropriate research and we all know that electromagnetism has absolutely no bearing on electrical systems - it can't even excite a molecular structure.
Now.. I'm off to have a wholly legitimate KFC with a diet Coke with a healthy does of approved E numbers.
I'm slowly beginning to realise Slashdot is full of normal people.
Mantoloking has barely a square kilometer of land with under 300 people. While certainly not rural, it's among the least-densely populated areas of the state! This place is more like a neighborhood than a whole town. The new service only has a few dozen subscribers so far, but it's hard to imagine that there are more than 100-200 potential customers (each household being a single customer). I can easily see the whole area served by a single cell tower.
dom
I think Verizon should forfeit their rights to the landline infrastructure and associated rights of way. These can, in turn, be rewarded to someone who can maintain and improve upon them.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Common practice for telcos is to self insure. Verizon is most likely paying for any reconstruction out of their pockets.
Too bad wireless service has such low data caps. Even with a 10GB cap which is over $100 USD a month you won't be doing much if any streaming video.
That copper to home did not mean copper from the plant to home.
In newer areas, the power failed after six hours. The phone company had fiber to a local box which had batteries and copper to the houses.
In my older area of town, the power stayed on to the phone (but we lacked electrical power for 3 weeks and only old dumb phones worked- anything with a power plug didn't).
I think the days of copper to home are going away. Hopefully we can get fiber to the home.
I would prefer to see one wide fiber pipe which all the telephone companies share and use and compete for your service on. I think a pure wireless approach won't work at times.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
For all the people talking about rolling out fiber or Google coming in, Mantoloking only had around 300 residents before the storm so it really is not worth the money for any company to try and roll out fiber.
Mantoloking is a Jersey Shore community situated on the Barnegat Peninsula, also known as Barnegat Bay Island, a long, narrow barrier island that separates Barnegat Bay from the Atlantic Ocean.
As of the 2000 Census, Mantoloking was the wealthiest community in the state of New Jersey with a per capita money income of $114,017 as of 1999, an increase of 29.8% from the $87,830 recorded in 1989. It was ranked as the 15th highest-income place in the United States.
Mantoloking, New Jersey
Population 300. As a summer resort, 5,000.
Anything you build here will be exposed and vulnerable, I am not sure that trenching cable solves that problem.
Most of what you build here will see little or no use eight to nine months out of the year --- and little or no return on your investment.
Anybody care to guess how many days it would take Verizon to change its mind about FiOS if Google showed up at the next Mantoloking city council meeting & offered to deploy Google Fiber there if the city paid the direct costs of laying the fiber itself? Oh, and offered to pay for the lawyers the city would need when Verizon and Comcast fought back the only way modern American corporations seem to be capable of competing -- by using the courts to block it, instead of trying to outdo them by offering better and faster service...
The big problem with Comcast is that it's unreliable, and makes no attempt at being otherwise. When a Comcast service area has a region-wide commercial power outage, Comcast goes down, and stays down, until commercial power is restored. Sometimes, it doesn't even take a regional outage. Last year, Tropical Storm Isaac took down Comcast for several hours across Dade & Broward counties. The failure's apparent cause? A power outage at a SINGLE LOCATION along their backhaul route. They talk about customers with backup power, but it only works if your house is literally the only one on the block without power. The moment the blackout extends to your neighborhood, or any point along the backhaul route between your house and their network center, your internet service is gone.
Ten years ago, a fragile market compromise existed between "the company that used to be the phone company", and "the company that used to be the cable company". The phone company had DSL. It wasn't as fast as cable, but it was built to run on carrier-grade infrastructure and enjoyed most of its same robust backup power and reliability. The cable company had DOCSIS. It was faster than DSL, but nowhere near as reliable. So, consumers kind of had a choice... slower service that rarely went down, or faster service that had daily interruptions & got knocked down for the count whenever ANYTHING significant happened to the local power grid. Then... our wonderful regulators decided to allow the phone company to neglect its infrastructure and allow it to degrade to the non-reliability of cable, and now we have lots of places where there really ISN'T anything that approaches the former reliability and robustness of landline phone service.
Wireless might be fast to bring back up after a storm, but buried copper with battery power at the central office didn't used to go down at all. There were people who came home to neighborhoods wiped away by Hurricane Andrew, and were greeted by phones making "off hook" noises from under the rubble. It was the lucky consequence of having mostly buried telecommunications infrastructure that was built to survive a 20-megaton nuclear bomb falling within 2 miles of downtown Miami, and another pair of bombs falling within a mile or two of Homestead Air Force Base. Today, U-verse isn't quite as bad as Comcast (AT&T still owns generators that were purchased years ago, though the state no longer requires them to maintain or use them), but the sad truth is that our nation's telecommunications infrastructure today is a pale, ghetto-fabulous shadow of what it used to be. Reliability and availability can no longer be taken for granted at any level unless you own your own fiber and have direct control over its endpoints so you can provide your own backup power. Even services like Frame Relay that were once protected by ironclad SLAs and stiff, automatic penalties with teeth, are now at risk of carriers just looking the other way and making a business decision to pay the fines and let the network go down because it's cheaper to take a hit for a few days now than to invest the capital into five-nines or better uptime.
I think people have failed to look at Mantoloking on a map. It's a piece of land consisting of 448 acres and population of less than 300 people.
Are you all nucking futz? There are tons of posts above this all calling for putting copper back in the ground. Why would you want to rebuild a POTS when you can actually support a modern day network capable of real data?
Think folks, what do you use in your home more often, land line voice or data?
What ratio of wireless devices (including cellphones and cordless phones) are used on a daily basis vs. that hard-wired telephone going to a land-line?
Just because copper is shiny doesn't mean we still need it to look at.
How about we stop building permanant housing along the coast.
I used to be
How much is Verizon charging for this service? This looks exactly like Verizon "Wireless at Home" service which is priced at $20 a month for unlimited calling anywhere in the US. It only says in the article that it will be cheaper than the previous wired phone service. Similar service can be bought from MNVO's for even less.
Ditto. I'd rather use dial-up with unlimited, oh wait. Thanks Verizon. :( Why don't they just deploy damn fiber?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
if it forced the power company to bury the lines.
When I took my laptop into the Verizon store and asked for wireless support for Ubuntu Linux, I was told that "Linux was not available on personal computers. It was only for big, expensive computers such as those in Universities and in Hollywood." One of the kids at the store had briefly worked at Pixar. I booted up my laptop to show them, and they were astounded, as if I'd brought a tiger or a cobra into the store. Sprint, by accident, supports Linux on broadband. Verizon is casual about the responsibilities of their position as a utility. Why shouldn't they be casual? This is the United States of America, where near-monopolies are encouraged, right? Their only duty is to provide profits for shareholders, and otherwise they've already paid for ... what was on sale when the government auctioned the airwaves. Ask Verizon about Apple, then, or Windows. Or ask for a phone. Or ask for directions elsewhere.