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."

Comments

Re:waste of money

[Deathlizard]

Fiber would be nice and cheaper than full copper runs.

Emergency Situations?

[cynop]

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.

Re:Emergency Situations?

[djmurdoch]

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?

Re:Emergency Situations?

[rikkards]

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.

Re:Emergency Situations?

[Solandri]

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.

Reliability...

[Dancindan84]

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.

Power failures?

[Theaetetus]

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.

Re:Power failures?

[intermelt]

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.

Re:Power failures?

[Trepidity]

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.

Re:Power failures?

[jittles]

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.

Single digit GB/mo cap

[tepples]

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.

Re:waste of money

[AlphaWolf_HK]

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.)

Insurance windfall result in skyrocketing earnings

[Aaron B Lingwood]

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.

Power cut?

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:waste of money

[Khyber]

" 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.

Re:waste of money

[Khyber]

"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.