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In Sandy-Struck NJ Town, Verizon Goes All Wireless, No Copper

Posted by timothy on from the copper-is-for-suckers dept.

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."

38 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Re:waste of money by Deathlizard · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fiber would be nice and cheaper than full copper runs.

    --
    In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
  2. Emergency Situations? by cynop · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Emergency Situations? by djmurdoch · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That won't be much of a problem. In a disaster, there'll probably be a power failure, and nobody's phone will work at all. Oops, maybe that's not a feature, is it?

    2. Re:Emergency Situations? by rikkards · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Let's see:
      Ice storm of 98: Cell coverage was spotty. POTS worked fine.
      Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine
      Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine
      See a pattern?
      At least with the wired power has never been an issue since it gets it from the switch. Before the blackout we had got rid of our wired phone and had only cordless. At that point I was thinking of getting rid of our wired connection. That changed my mind.

    3. Re:Emergency Situations? by Trepidity · · Score: 2

      That's still possible in the U.S., but most people have "upgraded" to fancier phones that require mains electricity to function. A vanilla corded phone will run solely on POTS line power, but line power will only support a draw of up to 20 mA or so at ~12 V terminal voltage, or about 250 mW power.

      The biggest category of phones that can't function on line power is cordless phones, which are also the most common. Some households do keep one corded phone around to use in case of power outages; I know my parents do. I would be curious what percentage of households with POTS service have a line-powerable phone.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    4. Re:Emergency Situations? by gl4ss · · Score: 2

      ..just skimming the article blur, I think they HAD a disaster which is why their phone lines are broken in the first place.

      sometimes wireless is better.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    5. Re:Emergency Situations? by hawguy · · Score: 2

      Let's see:
      Ice storm of 98: Cell coverage was spotty. POTS worked fine.
      Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine
      Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine
      See a pattern?
      At least with the wired power has never been an issue since it gets it from the switch. Before the blackout we had got rid of our wired phone and had only cordless. At that point I was thinking of getting rid of our wired connection. That changed my mind.

      When I was in an earthquake in Hawaii followed by an island-wide power outage, POTS was useless - took 20 - 30 minutes with the phone off hook just to get a dial-tone, and calling anyone (local or long distance) resulted in an "all circuits are busy" recording. Both AT&T and Verizon wireless cell sites were working for at least 6 hours hours after the power went off, I still couldn't get a voice call through, but I was able to get (slow) internet access, and send SMS messages to check on family/friends (SMS within the same carrier worked fine, sending across carriers had a 10 minute - 1 hour delay).

      I did continue to have good DSL internet, until the UPS that was powering my DSL modem ran out of power 30 minutes after the power went out.

      POTS doesn't guarantee service in a disaster, and as people continue to abandon POTS and telcos reduce the capacity of the system, it won't get any better.

    6. Re:Emergency Situations? by Solandri · · Score: 4, Informative

      Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine

      POTS works during power failures because the phone line itself carries enough power to operate a low-tech phone. Outside of hotels, I haven't seen one of these in over a decade. Every home phone I've seen is cordless and needs AC power. If you've got a battery backup, you can move it from the computer over to the landline phone to use it. But battery backups in homes are almost as rare as low-tech corded phones.

      Cell phones will work for about an hour at least, until the batteries in the towers give out. That should cover 99.99% of blackouts. My cell phone has always worked during a blackout. In the one extended blackout I went through (3 days because fallen trees took out all the power and phone lines), if I went outside to a high spot my cell phone could pick up a distant powered tower, and I could make calls (note that only CDMA can do this; GSM has a range limit of about 20 miles due to being sensitive to lag caused by the speed of light).

      Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine

      In the old days, POTS would become useless immediately after a large earthquake. The shaking would knock all the vertically mounted pay phone handsets off the hook. Same for some home phones (the kind with a separate base and handset). These phones would tie up a POTS line even though nobody was calling. If you tried to make a call then, you'd get a fast busy signal (all circuits busy). You had to wait a few minutes for the phone company to time all those lines out and forcibly disconnect them. By which time everyone else was trying to call and it could take an hour before you could finally get a dial tone. TV news would constantly broadcast to resist the urge to call relatives to tell them you're ok and please stay off the phones, so emergency services and those calling 911 could get through first.

      So it's not that POTS stands up better in earthquakes. It's that much fewer people use it nowadays, while the infrastructure that still remains was originally designed to handle a much larger volume of calls. As that equipment starts to break down and isn't replaced because the call volume isn't needed, POTS service will become as (un)reliable as cell phone service after these types of widescale disasters.

  3. Reliability... by Dancindan84 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Reliability... by puto · · Score: 2

      Part of living in a rural area. I live in Ocala, Florida, not exactly a huge city, but we do have LTE and I get blazing fast reliable internet.

      I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up. I can stream and torrent reliably.

      --
      The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
  4. voice quality by blogagog · · Score: 2

    Does that mean every phone call from Mantolocking will sound like it's coming from a cell phone? Blech.

  5. Power failures? by Theaetetus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Power failures? by intermelt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      This would probably be more reliable than POTS. Every household would have a backup battery. Even the POTS interfaces from the cable company come with a battery installed. Remember when cell phones were just phones and the battery lasted for days? Now imagine a bigger battery.

      Also in a disaster they could easily setup mobile towers to replace towers that have been damaged or to add additional capacity. You can't just run new POTS lines in an emergency. The old system could have been down for weeks if your lines went down. Now maybe only hours or days if it even goes down. There is a lot more redundancy now too since you are not relying on a single copper connection to your house. In theory you would have the ability to connect to multiple towers, so it one fails the other will be a backup.

      So it is not at all more vulnerable to disasters.

    2. Re:Power failures? by robot256 · · Score: 2

      This is not necessarily true anymore. Several times our neighbors' phones went out with the power, but our FIOS phone and cell phones still worked (and continued to work when I plugged our terminal into a bigger UPS). I chalk it up to a bad/insufficient UPS on the copper-to-fiber switches somewhere upstream. We don't get copper back to the switch board anymore.

      Also, what Verizon didn't say was how many customers in the town were actually subscribed to copper landlines before the storm. It's possibly most of them had cut the cord already.

    3. Re:Power failures? by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, an underappreciated aspect of the "copper" network, at least in the U.S., is that it's increasingly only a legacy last-mile network: there's copper under the streets of your subdivision, but once it gets out of the subdivision it's no longer on copper anymore.

      If you still have a modem lying around and something to dial up to, you can get a rough idea of how far your copper goes by seeing if you can actually get 56.6 kbps downstream. The official phone standard only supports a band of frequencies (300-3000 Hz) sufficient to squeeze in about 30-35 kbps of data transfer. The 56kbps standard exploits the larger physical capacity of copper lines to push more data in the downstream direction, by replacing the usual DAC on the phone-company end with a codec that directly switches line voltages, with the effect of using more of the copper's bandwidth... as long as it doesn't go through another filter at any point in the process, in which case you won't be able to get better than 33.6.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    4. Re:Power failures? by jittles · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      This would probably be more reliable than POTS. Every household would have a backup battery. Even the POTS interfaces from the cable company come with a battery installed. Remember when cell phones were just phones and the battery lasted for days? Now imagine a bigger battery.

      Also in a disaster they could easily setup mobile towers to replace towers that have been damaged or to add additional capacity. You can't just run new POTS lines in an emergency. The old system could have been down for weeks if your lines went down. Now maybe only hours or days if it even goes down. There is a lot more redundancy now too since you are not relying on a single copper connection to your house. In theory you would have the ability to connect to multiple towers, so it one fails the other will be a backup.

      So it is not at all more vulnerable to disasters.

      I had one of these cellular home phones when I lived in a South American country. After the president of said country was temporarily ousted by the military, I carried around said phone for days in the event that the US Embassy needed to get a hold of me. The battery did indeed last for days. In fact it had to, power went out on a regular basis and no one would have phone service without a battery. It was quite handy, I will say. Thankfully they never had to get a hold of me.

    5. Re:Power failures? by nine-times · · Score: 2

      It also reminds me of the discussion of the cell phone network going out after the bombing in Boston. A lot of people were taking the attitude, "Well it's fine for the cell phone network to go out in an emergency. It's not serious infrastructure. You shouldn't be relying on cell phones." As thought the cell phones were toys for teenagers to post Facebook posts, while landlines were for "real" stuff.

  6. I agree with the decision to not roll copper. by robbak · · Score: 2

    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
  7. Same thing in Fire Island. Just one problem... by doglikegroove · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. Single digit GB/mo cap by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:waste of money by AlphaWolf_HK · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper. That is, using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic, and using lasers instead of LED. Not even just talking about the materials, actually properly terminating fiber lines requires a bit of skill and some tools that aren't cheap, unlike say voice grade copper that requires a simple punch tool.

    In addition, running fiber not only requires the fiber itself, but you also have to have repeaters, which means you need copper power lines running parallel with the fiber lines. Sure you could depend on the power grid, but then you have to forgo the classic emergency benefit where the phone lines worked even during a blackout. This is precisely the reason why all long distance fiber lines do invariably come with copper, in fact many of which need a lot of copper (far more than voice grade lines) since one of the sheathing layers is made out of copper to make it more resilient against damage while still being somewhat flexible.

    DSL itself is rather low tech, and is probably right now about as good as its going to get, likewise IMO it's not even worth bothering to rebuild it. You can only do so much with voice grade copper since it can only carry a very limited number of channels, unlike say cable which is shielded far better and is easily capable of 5.1Gbit/s if you use all available channels up to 1Ghz. (In most of the existing infrastructure you can go up to 3Ghz, it's just a matter of having better transmitters and receivers to take advantage of it. Dump the analog channels and you'll get even more out of it.)

    --
    Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
  10. Re:Terrible move by robot256 · · Score: 2

    Does Comcast need to rebuild all their infrastructure too? There may not be any landline game in town for some time.

    The engineers at Verizon aren't complete idiots, you know. I'm sure they've calculated the cost of adding some cells to handle the demand and found it cheaper than running new copper. And if the business drones are worth the suits on their backs they'll be worried about Comcast poaching customers, so they wouldn't balk at *some* investment to recover from a disaster with some of their reputation intact.

  11. Dubyaphone by tepples · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Re:waste of money by AlphaWolf_HK · · Score: 2

    It's one thing to run a trunk line to the towers, and a whole other thing (due to flooding) to dig up and replace the smaller lines to each individual house.

    I think they're far more likely to do a better job with modern wireless than POTS anyways. Newer modulation techniques allow for far more bandwidth and signal reliability, especially given that since you aren't dealing with a tiny cell phone with limited battery you could get away with using a higher power transmitter at the customer end, coupled with a UPS for emergency use.

    You have to keep in mind as well that POTS also has a finite number of possible links at once, dare I say probably even more limited than wireless. In a POTS connection, you are literally establishing a dedicated circuit from point A to point B by use of a series of automated switchboards. There are only going to be so many circuits that can be active at any one time in any particular area. 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.

    --
    Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
  13. Insurance windfall result in skyrocketing earnings by Aaron+B+Lingwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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]
  14. Power cut? by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  15. Then Abolish Monopoly Privileges by littlewink · · Score: 2

    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.

  16. I find the lack of reliable last miles disturbing by DigitalSorceress · · Score: 2

    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
  17. Re:waste of money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But who says yhou put in voice grade copper?
    I think Verizon shpuld be required to replace the downed copper. That's what the maintenence fees the customers have been paying forever were to cover.

  18. Re:PSC Failure? by Lehk228 · · Score: 2

    because despite what talk radio may assert, the function of regulating agencies is not to supress improved modern technology. the only time i ever lost any coverage on my cell due to a storm was when a lightning bolt popped the cell tower near my home. blizzards, high wind, and floods all make mincemeat out of copper threads hanging from sticks anyways and buried copper is more durable but takes forever to fix when it does get wrecked.

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  19. I wonder about latency.... by flayzernax · · Score: 2

    It must be entertaining to play quake. Then again if Verizon used really good AP's maybe its not much different.

  20. Re:waste of money by rogueippacket · · Score: 2

    You should look into PON as a consumer access technology. No fusion splicing on customer premise, passive splitters, and enough range to cover entire communities with power only provided by the Central Office. All of your points are absolutely true of traditional fiber services, but PON is rising in popularity because it sidesteps all of them while remaining cheaper than copper while still delivering services up to 1 Gbps.
    Additionally, VDSL2 with Bonding (and eventually Vectoring) turns traditional cable plant into a very expensive waste of money - cable loops are longer and a shared medium, while copper loops terminate directly from the customer premise to a cabinet or Central Office. This allows the ISP to deliver service with true data rates using existing copper up to and beyond 150 Mbps. Ultimately though, DSL and Cable will be replaced by PON.

  21. Use it, or lose it by stox · · Score: 2

    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. "
  22. Re:Here's a hint, Verizon by Average · · Score: 2

    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.

    The advanced Asian countries have faster and cheaper mostly-fiber networks than the Europeans, deal with more natural disasters than they do, and once you get more than a kilometer out of central-business-district Seoul/Tokyo/Osaka, the air is thick with wires everywhichaway.

    'That's what they do in Europe' isn't necessarily perfection, either.

  23. Re:waste of money by Khyber · · Score: 3, Informative

    " and using lasers instead of LED"

    Boy do I have some news for you. Pretty much every Laser in use today that isn't a gas laser is based right off an LED.

    Source: I make LED and solid-state laser equipment.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  24. Re:waste of money by Rising+Ape · · Score: 2

    Mechanical circuit switching is long dead, and electronic circuit switching is no more limited in capacity than packet switching. The reason long distance was more expensive was that in the old days it really was very expensive to install a lot of long distance capacity, and this was true for data as well as voice. Fibre changed all that, so if they're still charging a fortune it's solely because they can. Some phone companies here in the UK offer unlimited international calls (to come countries) in their bundles, but there's now a (regulator enforced) competitive market. The old monopoly telco, BT, would never have done anything like that.

  25. Re:waste of money by Khyber · · Score: 4, Informative

    "And LED is only capable of transmitting a single channel,"

    Umm, we've got multi-path LED-laser arrays, multi-wavelength, that are so tiny you could couple one to a 2mm fiber.

    And because they're not in a wavelength that will actually hurt the plastic transmission medium, no yellowing over time, as long as the fiber is underground and properly protected.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  26. Re:waste of money by Crypto+Gnome · · Score: 2

    100Mbps is plenty for a home user.

    You, sir, are mentally deficient.

    VDSL technologies do NOT provide a 100Mbps service.

    They provide an UP TO 100Mbps service.

    As the bandwidth capacity of the service is dependent on copper-length and quality the provider MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO GUARANTEES REGARDING SERVICE QUALITY.

    However, with a fibre service, they DO provide guarantees, because fibre in the last mile is a truly digital service, either it works or it doesn't.

    And when it works, it works at the full service specification, none of that WEASEL WORDING like "up to" which means they can charge you for 100Mbps service but if all you can get is 2Mbps YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RECOURSE.

    This is ONE of the MAJOR problems with ALL copper-in-the-last-mile services, it's all about THE PROVIDER legally being able to provide a FUCKING AWFUL SERVICE and still charge you premium service pricing.

    AAAAND don't get me started on the MASSIVELY HUGE difference in upload speed between copper vs fibre in the last mile.

    --
    Visit CryptoGnome in his home.