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The Dismantling of POTS: Bold Move Or Grave Error?
New submitter TheRealHocusLocus writes "The FCC is drafting rules to formalize the process of transition of 'last-mile' subscriber circuits to digital IP-based data streams. The move is lauded by AT&T Chairman Tom Wheeler who claims that significant resources are spent to maintain 'legacy' POTS service, though some 100 million still use it. POTS, or 'Plain Old Telephone Service,' is the analog standard that allows the use of simple unpowered phone devices on the wire, with the phone company supplying ring and talk voltage. I cannot fault progress, in fact I'm part of the problem: I gave up my dial tone a couple years ago because I needed cell and could not afford to keep both. But what concerns me is, are we poised to dismantle systems that are capable of standing alone to keep communities and regions 'in-touch' with each other, in favor of systems that rely on centralized (and distant) points of failure? Despite its analog limitations POTS switches have enforced the use of hard-coded local exchanges and equipment that will faithfully complete local calls even if its network connections are down. But do these IP phones deliver the same promise? For that matter, is any single local cell tower isolated from its parent network of use to anyone at all? I have had a difficult time finding answers to this question, and would love savvy Slashdot folks to weigh in: In a disaster that isolates the community from outside or partitions the country's connectivity — aside from local Plain Old Telephone Service, how many IP and cell phones would continue to function?"
SH*T or get off the POTS.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
At least in my region, POTS isn't that useful in the event of severe weather/tragedy. The batteries they place in the boxes to handle calls in the event of a power outage last only a few hours.
Or at least the only circuit-switched part. The connections from the central office to the rest of the network, and the core of the telephone system itself, has been packet-switched for a while now. Or so I thought. Am I mistaken?
Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Because POTS will work in some of the worst environmental conditions possible. It survived the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been through hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even meteor strikes and kept working. Yes, some parts of the system failed, but for those parts that were still connected as long as a local power source (often just a battery bank) supplied power the system kept working.
It was on the back of the POTS system that the internet was born, and has always been a backup to every computer network system... even if it wasn't perfect at least *something* would get through in terms of data.
Cellular phone networks are hugely over subscribed. In a large scale emergency like a hurricane when everybody is calling, they become useless.
To dismantle a network that works so well, can keep work in a case of a disaster, power failure and civil unrest, and has proved itself so resilient over time. I guess it is a matter of money, and listen be able to listen to conversations in a central point, however from the point of a backup of service, and redundancy of operations this decision is a disaster.
When the "point" to the carrier is about charging per call, which requires their monitoring of usage, it's hard for them to do that without a datacenter logging the call activity, and permitting, say, a "long distance" call to go through. Yet it is not cost effective to install such a datacenter in each local region, is it? So if a disaster strikes, and the local telco can't determine if I payed my bill or not this month, why should it let me make a call? -- Not saying this is good, but I suspect this is how it goes down. If it does let me make a call in such a situation, then would someone who doesn't subscribe to telephone service suddenly get a dialtone on their line when the disaster strikes? I highly doubt it.
1. If a hurricane/tornado/earthquake/what-have-you destroys your POTS infrastructure, it can take weeks or months to rebuild it. You can restore cell service in matter of hours with a mobile cell site.
2. The same applies to your house. What good is a fixed, "simple" phone if your house isn't there any more?
3. One of the biggest issues when a disaster strikes is locating people. POTS doesn't do anything to help with this.
POTS was great but it's had it's time and we need to stop supporting it and move on newer technologies.
Probably both.
It's hard to keep analog transmission lines when you can transmit thousands of times the same information using a digital channel that costs the same (or even less).
But communication is not *just* about cheapness, it's about reliability. Analog lines are far more resilient than digital lines, and a wise one should take this in consideration on the long term.
A cheap telephone line that I can't use when I really need is a useless telephone line.
by the way, are you americans happy with your broadband internet connection? What do you think it will happen with your telephone services when it will be serviced using the same technology by the same players your Internet connection is served now?
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
In some cases a cell tower is easier to replace. A simple truck with a generator and an extension tower can get cell phones up and running for a small area.
Compare that to trying to redo several miles of phone and electrical cabling.
Of course the generator and extension tower still need to get to the disaster area. Then again if you can't get a generator and extension tower into the area, how likely are to get a fleet truck needed to restring the phone and electrical cables?
Especially with the governments overarching reach. Wonder how long communications would last when the gov't presses that internet kill switch (which they claim they don't have - yeah, perhaps a bit tinfoil hat wearing, but after all, we were all assured there were no illegal phone monitoring/data harvesting either). Guess we should all go back to shortwave radio - unfortunately it has become a lost art now a days.
Don't forget the new FCC guy was a lobbyist for the industry. If POTS has to be removed and phone companies are "forced," to comply with new installations and the billions that will cost, they will want Federal subsidies. Do I hear the phone companies shouting "Bingo."
Nah, that's all to cynical. :O
The call quality on both cell phones and IP phones is worse than those on traditional phone lines. IP phones echo and stutter. Cell phones give no aural feedback in the earpiece of the person speaking, which is why everyone is always yelling over their cell phone, and cut out when no one is speaking, which sounds like a dropped call. I think anyone who enjoyed two, three, or more decades in the last century, making phone calls over POTS lines, would agree that we have taken a step back in call quality. Every phone call is like an overseas call from the 1970's. Pulling up the POTS lines would be a mistake.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
We'd be replacing one highly centralized system with a different one. Hardly a problem in itself.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Remember that the wire used to deliver POTS service also delivers DSL. No wire, no DSL.
Rather than thinking of only traditional landline phones, we should make sure we reach everyone during a disaster. Huge number of people don't have a landline or an antenna. Others may be trapped under ruble or an a rooftop with nothing except a cell phone. An emergency fleet of high altitude balloons to carry cell signals would do more in a disaster than POTS.
Tom Wheeler is FCC chairman, not AT&T chairman as posted in the summary.
Making it so does put the emphasis on the user to provide some of the infrastructure that the telcos usually provide, thus saving them money, i.e costing you money, so that the revenues can be driven even higher. The real issue though is supporting emergency phone calls reliably when lives are on the line and whether the backbone technology for the telcos is suitable for the last mile to Joe Caller.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
This is a terrible idea.
Sure, it's possible to get by with all IP or wireless. But, you open up many more possibilities when you also have the analog infrastructure, which is ALREADY IN PLACE!
But digital makes it so much easier for the snoops at the FBI and NSA to record and store our data.
Well, why doesn't Verizon include it in a bundle?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Our township is on the end of a long telephone line which not infrequently goes down. As does much of the power The local mobile mast will cease functionig immediatey - even though it still provides a signal and connects phones. The local exchange continues for several days. On one occasion like this we set up a wire-sneaker-mobile relay where someone on the edge of our area was able to get a mobile signal at the far end of the yard and had a working local phone connection in the house. The local doctor would call them on the landline from their practice, they would run down to the end of the yard and phone from there by mobile to ambulance control. We tested it, but fortunately never needed to use it in earnest.
Of cells would work as POTS would be useful should a line go down.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
As long as we keep the semaphore towers. Also, I heard there's a Mountie in Canada that is apparently still on the POTS and it's causing all kinds of problems. He can't use the phone if he's wearing his uniform or something like that.
rewriting history since 2109
Isn't as plain or old as you make it out to be. I'm about 2 miles from my CO but my phone line terminates in a climate controlled cabinet about 1,000ft from my house. That's the end of the line for my pair where the line is powered, digitized and bridged to fiber for the haul back to the CO.
Even without that the addition of DSL about 2 decades ago added a lot of complexity to the system with DSLAMs and other digital equipment. Much of that digital stuff was spliced in between the switch and CPE on the CO or line side, but it was still there.
The COs I've been in also don't use the card coded switches you seem to be talking to; they use gigantic digital affairs that are all basically computers and handle not only the line pair for voice, but DST, T and D trunks, interoffice signaling and such.
The reason this stuff is all so resilient is the power supply. Nothing in the CO runs on wall voltage; it's all -48vDC and runs from a battery bank the size of a small house. The batteries are constantly charged from mains at the rate of their depletion by the equipment. In case of power failure where they batteries are being drawn down a generator auto-starts and switches from mains to local power to re-charge the batteries. Note that in this setup the load equipment is never switched from one power source to another (a major single-point of failure).
That said... Im not against reforming or eliminate the last vestiges of POTS.Less that 1/3 of the population HAS it and I'd bet even less than that actually use it. By that I mean that I think less than 1/10th of the US population has a telephone in their house that will work solely from CO power on the line pair without a wall wart.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
And learn to charge your batteries without the power grid. I think that's what you're looking for here-- POTS won't last long during a catastrophe.
We live in a remote area. There are two cell towers (AT&T and Verizon) in the county seat. They cover some, but not all of the local area. At our house, AT&T cell is blocked by a mountain. We get a little knife edge refraction signal, but you can't count on it. As far as using it for 911 calls, the idea is just silly.
If they get rid of the POTS, they pretty much get rid of phone service. Internet comes in by an rf link. We're pretty much the last house in the canyon we live in to get rf link internet or cell service. Everybody else uses smoke signals, satellite internet, or POTS.
Why doesn't the FCC do something useful, like bug the White House phones, and let the free market take care of the POTS demand?
To directly answer the OP's question, a cell tower that has lost connectivity to the back end gear (e.g. PDSN and HA for data), the tower will be effectively worthless.
The cells do not work as a p2p network; tunnels are built to the backend gear for everything, including the home location register the telcos use to know which carrier services your phone.
Consumers, Silicon Valley, and the phone companies all agree on something for a change. POTS' shelf life expired about fifteen years ago.
The technology is ready to retire. The impediment is regulatory -- without FCC oversight, delivery of last-mile infrastructure becomes thoroughly anticompetitive, a process which has repeated itself over and over again this past half century. POTS and twisted pair has been the last vestige of deregulation in the sector, to the detriment of the public and MUCH to the detriment of inventors and small business.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
there are two lines of thought.
sensible and socially responsible:
why disable an existing and working system that has advantages over the new system? at the very least, make outgoing calls free for emergency purposes.
shortsighted asshole capitalist:
it costs money to maintain, so just unplug it as soon as contractually possible. when they somehow manage to call your support staff, tell them that they will need to upgrade to your cable internet + VOIP service and transfer them to sales. if they are rural and thus too far out to actually make a profit from installing new cabling, tell them they cant get it and politely hang up. be sure to use your hired company that keeps track of online forums and rating sites to blast anyone that is upset.
which do you think your telecom is going to fall under?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
In the old days POTS was the entire way...now POTS is just the last 0.25-5 miles
If you lose the ability to route network IP traffic you lose the current access to the last 0.25-5 miles of POTS and you also lose the IP phones...so the POTS does not really reduce any failure points (any more). The POTS are ran on the same wires as the IP to the house so that does not reduce any single points of failure. There is really no advantage to it any more since it long since quit being a redundant path.
Technologies come and go. I didn't see folks up in arms when the roaming knife sharpeners and milk delivery men went out of business. Those going away destroyed jobs. Moving from POTS to digital IP-based communications is a good thing. The digital service can be restored a lot faster, and there are excellent cell phone tower replacements.
The only thing really lost is local 911 services. Those things were a disaster waiting to happen, anyway, as the cost of the analog infrastructure was killing localities as they tried to grow. Something better needs to be implemented and sooner is always better than later.
The one advantage POTS has is that it does take a court order for them to tap the line. But, I am guessing that laws will be changing soon and some of our privacy and security concerns will get addressed. Again, sooner is always better than later.
They are not proposing replacement with cell service, but with wired IP. IP based telephony is LESS centralized than analog pots, and is easier to setup redundancy, and has better audio quality (when g.722 or g.729 codecs are used).... The main drawbacks are there is no longer a central battery for all stations, and phone sets need more complex electronics....
AC: Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Good question, although I Sens an odd bit of d3r1s1ve m0ckery from yous.
Because it was built that way. Your local bell telephone exchange was designed to stand alone and not just provide electricity to operate telephones. From that single building It completes calls between its own subscribers and those in other directly-connected exchanges, even if long haul circuits are down.
But in the digital subscriber age we are starting to see roll-outs of nationwide services that only appear to be local. They demonstrate sudden, surprising, even shocking failure. Router restarts, failures to push software updates, failure to connect to centralized RADIUS servers, failure to complete DSL login and even failure of DNS lookup within the telco's own Internet can cause confusion and backlogs that disrupt IP phone service.
I grant that no mob with torches has ever marched up to the Phone Company and demanded that they pull the plug to prove that the service they provide is resilient to inter-network failure.
In fact, these vulnerabilities extend to the use of local; electrical power. I have known a few people who buy in to these IP-phones supplied by the local cable company who are shocked to discover that it stops functioning soon after their electricity goes out. And it's not just a house thing, a MERE few hours into an ice storm many pole-mounted cable company amplifiers that rely on city power depleted their (may I say, 'dipshit'?) battery packs and whole neighborhoods lost their phones regardless of whether they had emergency power.
Meanwhile the POTS providers who had sunk a larger investment into provisioning their remote buildings, carried enough batteries to keep going for a couple of days.
What we have here is a general attention to infrastructure and disaster preparedness in the interest of rolling out things that work almost as well, most of the time.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
POTS supplies its own power. So now insead one one connection worki g you need two connections. VoIP data and some ki d of power, and they have to both be working at the same time.
BTW the cheapest VoIP provider if you are just trying to hold onto a number is callcentric at $3.95/mo incl 911 and pay per minute.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
"But what concerns me is, are we poised to dismantle systems that are capable of standing alone to keep communities and regions 'in-touch' with each other"
I dont know where you live or what magic technology you use, but Telephones have never been stand alone, except in a small number of direct wired locations such as internal coms or maybe some major military back ups. You pick up a phone to dial or connect, and Point B needs to handle your connection to Point c.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
While the above is true, there are times that the cell phone network doesn't work and the wired does in the same disasters.
There is another difference - POTS have protection under law that VOIP/Cell does not. If the POTS fails, one can file with the FCC about the failure. The FCC doesn't care in the same ways about VOIP.
(over Thanksgiving an associate was trying to figure out to structure a lawsuit over the unwillingness of the Internet providers to accept the same level of common carrier status/responsibility for the Internet service as they had accepted for POTS. If anyone has ideas, feel free to post.)
As someone who builds and installs large phone systems for a living, I cringe whenever a customer tells me "Yeah we've got a T1, coming in over Time Warner."
A traditional copper PRI from Verizon is the ideal service I like most of my customers to have, I never get anywhere near the same level complaints of call quality issues or service outages for a traditional PRI that I get for any PRI coming in over the internet. Well, except after hurricane Sandy, after that storm we had a number of customers switch over to an IP based PRI or a pure SIP solution. It made sense since it took Verizon months to fix their wiring, but a lot of these customers that switched wanted to immediately switch back as soon as Verizon was available again since the quality was so god awful.
I have no problem with Verizon using fiber and IP based telephony in the back end since I they're not going to be able to maintain their legacy equipment forever. But, don't send everything down the same pipe and just install a $200 Adtran on-site and expect it to be anywhere near as reliable. Especially since a lot of the support engineers for these carriers have no idea how to do anything with an IAD. I've had support engineers tell me I need to send a SIP redirect to forward calls out with the proper caller ID, well sure I'd love to except I'm being handed a PRI and the SIP side of things is all them.
Anyway, for customers that have rock solid internet and a separate dedicated pipe for a SIP trunk, I have no problem going native SIP all the way to our equipment. My problem is when someone out in the boonies thinks they'll save a ton of money switching to VoIP service from their cable provider. Instead it just means dozens of billable hours trying to explain to this customer that while their internet service is excellent for checking Facebook, good voice quality requires a solid internet connection with little to no packet loss and very low latency and nothing we can do to their PBX will change that. Although as one coworker pointed out, as the number of people who grew up using cell phones all their life increases, the less complaints we will receive. People who are used to POTS lines are going to be used to picking up a phone and having excellent call quality, people who grew up with cell phones are much more accustomed to jitter, echo, and poor call quality so I'm sure they'll be fine in a pure IP telephony world.
This. The telcos need to get rid of their A-to-D switching banks, a technology which is about 50 years old. Let's let them. Grandma is going to have to upgrade to DSL.
The apocalypse just got a whole lot sexier.. oh yeah!
I am immediately suspicious. The fact that the chairman "lauded" this proposal makes me think it is a terrible idea before I read any further.
We have this impression of the reliability and stability of the POTS network partially because it is ubiquitous and invisible. Yet, as someone who has spent most of my adult life working in and around copper twisted pair, I can tell you POTS isn't as "reliable" as you think.
You have the impression that POTS is reliable because there's a small army of men and women maintaining it. AT&T is claiming that it is costing them a fortune to maintain the copper twisted pair infrastructure to the standards dictated by the FCC for a rapidly dwindling number of customers. People are leaving copper-pair services by the thousands every day: some are going wireless, some are going to pure-play VoIP providers, and even the "cable company" (or the telephone company's own fiber).
Copper wire only lasts 20-30 years hanging from the side of a pole, on average, before it will likely need to be replaced. Especially in urban areas, where cable replacement isn't cheap, most of the landline phone companies are staring down the barrel of 50-60 year old copper infrastructure that may have as many as 75% of the pairs condemned.
Let me put it this way. No IT department for a business in a 100-year-old building facing a phone rewire job would replace all that 50-year-old 25-pair with.. more Category 2. The minimum they'd pull is Cat5e or "6", and even more likely they'd pull a significant amount of fiber, if not to the desk at least to a departmental wiring closet. That's the same decision the phone companies want to make.
From a strictly technical/engineering perspective, it's 100% the right choice. Copper loop is functionally obsolete in almost every way.
But can't cross state lines.
If you think your current POTS line is circuit-switched, or will work if your local exchange is disconnected from the network, think again.
A bigger concern is that while POTS isn't as robust as, say, cellular or VoIP against some sorts of damage it *will* work during a prolonged power outage (as long as the generator at the local exchange stays fuelled). VoIP won't, at all, unless there's power at the subscribers home. Cellular even if you can keep your cellphone battery topped off somehow, I wouldn't bet on power to the cell towers being as robust as to a local POTS exchange.
along with the wirecenters/etc should be transferred to local cities and townships, to use for emergency communications. (Eg 911).
Every line should automatically have a number, every line should able to dial 911. Cost of maintenance should be covered by a SMALL tax, similar in amount to the "e911" charge already in use, per home.
In fact, this is what should have been done with payphones, too. But its too late for that I guess.
A POTS home requires a phone that needs no on-premises equipment requiring a source of power. Also, POTS is required by law to provide 911 service even if the homeowner isn't paying for any phone service.
Even though I have VOIP (comcast), I have a corded (no batteries needed) POTS phone in case there is an emergency, I can disconnect my VOIP line from the house, and plug in the 20yr old $10 'walmart special' into the wall and call 911.
Sure, a cell is a backup for VOIP, but they both require power to work.
btw, I've never seen a commercial for POTS where they say "Can you hear me now? Good." POTS just works.
My POTS is much more reliable than the electric power - can't remember the last time, if ever, that it was down. It even continued working when a large tree fell on the line. However, if the power is out, the only phone that works with it is my rotary phone. That thing is even more indestructible than POTS and will survive any natural disaster.
However, I'm still waiting for the Picturephone, http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/70picture.html
Some years ago I was listening to a radio program where they mentioned some company in Australia(?) planning to dismantle the urban POTS and replace it with something newer. But the reasoning wasn't just for upgrading: It was because they couldn't get the parts anymore.
Some of the manufacturers had stopped making the relays and whatnot that the POTS used, so the options were to convert to a new set of POTS hardware (an expensive Red Queen's race), get a huge order of compatible components custom-made (ditto), or upgrade-and-cannibalize the urban network to get them enough parts to maintain the rural POTS for another couple of decades and hope the entire system could be upgraded before they emptied their supply.
Don't remove POTS. Some key reasons:
In case of incident (Natural / man made). Here in Seattle (area), several years ago we had a large wind storm that took out most of the power in the entire region. Many areas didn't have power for over a week. Cell phone - towers died after about three days. That's right: The TOWERS failed. Also, you couldn't get gasoline; no power at the pumps (Read local generators - at homes - started giving out).
In some areas of Seattle, people have their choice of which ISP they like (DSL, Cable, fiber optic, wireless) which is all fine and good for a VOIP carrier. Ask any of the phone companies what will happen when the power goes out? You can't call... 911, the power company, anyone for any emergency service, much less a call such as "I'm alive and okay", or "need food, shelter" (in case of some emergency).
I have family in north eastern WA. Where they are at, there is not viable alternative to dial-up. No VOIP, and spotty cell phone availability.
Cell phones... great sound unless you are in a dead area (there are a lot more of these than the phone company's are willing to admit); or as noted the power is out for an extended time.
Just because it (POTS) isn't as profitable as cell - or as well regulated, doesn't men it should be dismantled.
The phones usually still work. Bell was right when he refused to use Edison's power systems.
I see no problem with allowing telcos to replace analog POTS with new fiber lines as long as they provide basic telephone service under the same prices as previously, and they at no charge provide a POTS to fiber node at the customer premises for all existing customers with landline service, and are still required to lease lines as under the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Verizon i know already installs a fiber to POTS node at the customer premises on FIOS, as do cable companies, so the customer can keep on using their POTS phones and wiring. The concerns you have could be addressed if the telcos were simply required to operate a local exchange for the fiber digital network within say 20 miles of the subscriber, not really something that is too difficult. I cant imagine why they would want to do otherwise, as operating a local exchange saves network capacity.
I have POTS from my cable company through a digital coax to POTS adapter so I can keep my home phones, fax, etc, and be able to have family conversations due to being able to hook up many telephones to the same line. I actually think people should have landline if they can for E911 services.
To ask telcos to operate both a POTS system and a fiber system would be unreasonable and absurd.
This isn't about dropping POTS in favor of wireless. It is about using VOIP instead of POTS, wiring still required.
This isn't about dropping POTS in favor of wireless. It is about using any technology that isn't specifically named in federal law as subject to pricing, quality and access regulatory controls.
People hundreds and thousands of miles from the coast couldn't use their cellphones for weeks after Katrina because they had New Orleans phone numbers.
There's a lot of stuff happening underground, right?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Other than that the 'POTS' system stays as it currently is. :)
I know, reading and comprehension is so fucking hard isn't it?
Other than: the price controls that apply to POTS will no longer apply, the uptime requirements that apply to POTS will no longer apply, the universal service requirements that apply to POTS will no longer apply, etc.
That's what the telcos said in Massachusetts http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Working-Hard-to-Gut-Massachusetts-Consumer-Protections-126180, and in New York http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/NY-PSC-Takes-Closer-Look-at-Verizons-Killing-of-Copper-124315 and everywhere else when they've asked for "waivers" to do trial changeovers away from POTS.
Apparently reading IS fraking hard.
they want to have IP over 3g/4g/LTE with low caps and fees as high as $60 for 10GB with $10 per GB overage
In an emergency, no one really cares about long distance. You need to call the local sheriff's office, the ambulance, or the fire station. Those are primary, above all else. Secondarily, you need to be able to call local people - relatives or not - who can assist each other immediately. No matter WHO lives six hundred miles away, calling him/her will have no bearing on your emergency situation, because he/she cannot help you in an emergency.
Calling your mother-in-law to inform her that your spouse has been injured or killed is very damned important, of course, but it doesn't quite rank up there with immediate disaster response.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Over what wiring, DSL? Those copper phone lines are going to be scrapped and DSL will be gone too. No, Fiber will not replace them because it isn't profitable enough. Verizon considers FIOS to be a mistake. This is all about AT&T and Verizon completely abandoning wireline and replacing it with wireless. Unlike wireline POTS, wireless is completely regulated and comes with zero quality of service guarantees. There are zero requirements that a cell phone site stay up during a power outage. The government tried to require that each cell site have 8 hours worth of backup power available, but the wireless industry fought it and won. There are zero guarantees about the signal strength being adequate in the entirety of the wireline markets being abandoned. When it is all said and done there are going to be many homes with zero telecommunications at all. Don't count on the FCC to provide consumer protections either. The FCC chairman is a former cable company lobbyist. Might as well ask a former CEO of BP to oversee offshore oil drilling safety and disaster mitigation.
Wireless is also more lucrative because they can charge many times more for data. Why provide 100s of gigabytes on a wireline when at the same price you can offer single digits worth of gigabytes and charge up the wazoo with overages. This reform is more about the Verizon and AT&T raping and pillaging of the consumer via overpriced wireless data in areas without cable internet and allowing cable companies to become the monopoly for all wireline based communications than it is about promoting technical innovation. Replacing wireline with wireless is much like the power company deciding that providing wired electricity is too expensive and selling batteries to their customers is a suitable replacement.
AT&T has fiber to the node in most areas but they don't really want to even keep doing that or fiber to the home. They want to lock you in to high cost LTE.
If only comcast TV did not suck and if WOW cable had more channels and stuff like CSNCHI + HD then I can drop ATT DSL + directv.
And I will contradict some more. A lot depends on the infrastructure service providers' support reliability, and the extent/nature of an outage. During a severe ice storm in the Raleigh-Durham NC area over 10 years ago, our Verizon POTS line was down longer (5 days) than the Time Warner Cable service and electric power 3-4 days). Our cell phones were working within hours (and now it easy to recharge them from car cigarette lighter sockets, lap tops, and various backup batteries designed for that).
However, most other times with power outages (usually localized from storm-driven trees knocking out the nearest overhead lines - to our house is underground for the last 50 yards or so), the POTS line would continue functioning, although we had to have a wired phone to call in the problem (and Duke Energy has an automated system that can record the outage based on the phone number you are calling from - no idea how that would work with a cell phone or VOIP call-in).
YMMV
Many thanks to the ACs who addressed my question on the autonomy of isolated cell towers, to wit:
AC: A cell tower requires more infrastructure to actually complete a call than what is on the tower itself. The brains are located more centrally, like in the nearest CO. If a CO is taken out, it's bad for the area... and the local cell towers. If a CO is NOT taken down, it has all the infrastructure required in order to complete calls for its local area, which is what the OP stated -- even if that CO is segregated from every other one. COs are also more hardened than a tower can be and have more batteries and likely has a local generator. In the northeast blackout (2003), keeping cell towers powered required moving generators around to each tower in order to keep them running for a few more hours.
AC: I would add that the systems running voice, data, and SMS are crazy complicated and can fail in many, many more ways than POTS. I managed the auth systems and data core for a cell service, and it seemed like a damn miracle the thing worked at all.
So we have a cell Central Office layer that is regional and connectivity to it would be necessary for individual towers to complete calls. Let me extend the Q to ask: is there some standard practice that confines geographic placement of COs to a certain radius? How many of these (as opposed to mere towers) would we find on a map, if such a map was available? I presume that if a CO was isolated no one could roam-in because the necessary central inter-carrier auth could not be completed, but what of existing subscribers? Would a CO facility, even if it was restarted from power down, retain enough subscriber data to bring its 'native' users in the local area to the point where that can complete calls to each other?
Sorry about the Wheeler (FCC Chairman) booboo in the summary. Brain fart.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Never fear, it has been archived and recorded, waiting, bidding its time till the phone lines become digital. Now that technique would not work any more. So that hazing practice can be revived.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If they're spending so much maintiaining POTS, the price will come down and at no cost to them.
Another government handout.
And guess what: prices won't drop.
Funny that.
I'm fine with getting rid of what's left of circuit switched audio phones, but that's not all POTS provides. To replace POTS we also need:
Switching independence at the network node: Cell towers, and other significant points of connection, need to be able to operate independently of any centralized systems. If the rest of the world outside my local cell tower's range ceases to exist, and I want to call my neighbor, it should work.
Dense routing options: Cell towers, and other significant points of connection, need to be able to talk to each other via many routes (multiple fiber lines, point-to-point wireless, satellite, etc). A single cut fiber should never put many customers offline.
Power redundancy at the network node: Cell towers, and other significant points of connection, need to have power from multiple grids, their own generation systems, or multi-day back-ups.
Power redundancy at the endpoint: Wired internet connections need to come with Power over Ethernet (or equivalent) connections with enough juice to run their modem (or equivalent) and a low-power wifi-router.
Survivability at the network node: Severe weather? Flooding? Earthquake? Fire? Cell towers, and other significant points of connection, need to be reasonably resistant to local disasters.
POTS had standards and regulations in place for these kinds of things, while for cell phone cable and wired internet that's much less true.
While I understand the telcos and ISPs wish to avoid complex and burdensome regulations, I as a customer still want some assurance of my connectivity in adverse circumstances.
Thus, I propose a Federal Backhoe of Investigation. In return for allowing the discontinuation of POTS, the government should receive the right to dig random holes on any property owned or controlled by the affected telcos, and fine them heavily if this causes any customer outages. It would be to telcos what chaos monkey is to Netflix.
He didn't say that communication is stupid; it clearly is not.
What is stupid, however, are telephones. They are an ineffective, archaic, 19th-century fossil that has no place in the modern world.
Voice-only communication is by far the worst type of communication. It is prone to misinformation and misunderstanding creeping into conversations, and this is even between two people who have known each other for years, and natively speak the same dialect of the same language. It gets much worse when there are people who speak different dialects of the same language, or worse, people who aren't native speakers of the language being used. Any native English speaker who has called a support line and been directed to an Indian call center knows what I mean. "James" may speak something resembling English, but over the phone it's damn near impossible to understand.
Voice-only communication also generally doesn't leave any sort of a useful record of the discussion for the participants of the call (although third-parties may be intercepting and recording voice communication, but this is usually does clandestinely and without providing such records to the call's participants). This helps contribute to the miscommunication problem mentioned earlier.
And then there's the fact that voice-only communication often gives a very misleading glimpse into the person's emotions. It's nowhere near the amount of information gleamed when talking face-to-face, or even making a video call. This is yet another source of misunderstanding that makes voice-only communication nearly useless. It's usually better to have the basically no emotional information conveyed by textual forms of communication.
Then there's the inconvenience that telephones bring. "Phone tag" is something we've all experienced, and it's a stupid waste of time. Then there are the hours upon hours that can be spent when calling the support line of a commercial entity, for example. Even when the phone call does go through, it's usually very disruptive to whoever is receiving it, as well as anyone around them.
It's not 1876 any longer. These days, we have so many alternatives that voice-only communication should be the very, very last resort in all situations. For business transactions of any sort, websites or email are better. For keeping in touch with friends and family, it's obvious that email, social media and family gatherings are better. For quickly getting in touch with somebody, send an SMS.
Make a phone call only in extreme, life-threatening emergencies only, where other forms of communication are not suitable. Other than that, voice-only telephone communication is by far the worst commonly used method available today, and should be completely avoided.
It's not about whether you've got analog signals on copper or IP telephony, it's all about the mindset and organization behind the service. Copper POTS has a "keep the lights on at all costs" mindset behind it: people willing to go out in a horrible storm and splice wires in a bucket truck. IP telephony tends (particularly in the last mile) to be more "cable TV entertainment" oriented. Oh, your network connection is down? Have you reinstalled Windows? Rebooted? Still doesn't work? We'll credit you for a day on your bill.
I have no doubt that given sufficient legal mandate, IP telephony would be as reliable (if not moreso) as POTS. It would also have equivalent voice quality (we have IP phones at work and they are indistinguishable from POTS phones or from the ISDN phones that preceded them). Cellular services have trained people to have acceptance for truly horrible quality, both in terms of dropped calls,but also in terms of encoding. it's all about the bits. 8kbps for cellphones vs 56-64 kbps for ISDN/POTS/IP telephony makes a HUGE difference in quality. Likewise, I have FiOS at home (battery backed up to provide POTS emulation to conventional wired phones), which I assume is carried by some sort of digital scheme to the CO (whether IP based or some ATM based scheme, I do not know, nor care..)
The problem I see is a trend to "let the market decide", and the "market" tends to go for short term price reduction: People would rather pay less for crummy service, than more for good quality service. And eventually, the good service will cease to exist in most places because it will be "uneconomical".
I consider our society three days from falling apart at any given time. That's completely dependent on having electricity. Having telecommunications dependent on electricity is part of that. The few battery backups for cell towers are dead by that time. That means that everything is exponentially worse.
I'd only back this if whatever system was going to used was backed by a week's worth of battery power or adequate solar power.
They are going to go digital over the same copper? Or they are going to charge lots more for new conductors. Or they are going to force everyone to get on a cell tower or a cableTV cable. Or are they planning on fiber out to the last mile and copper the last mile.
My guess is the solution will cost the customer a lot more and the phone company a lot less to maintain. And you will probably have to sign a new contract that will surrender all your rights.
And I guess the phone company gets to pocket all that money they collected for rural communications outreach.
AT&T is now deploying fiber to the business like you wouldn't believe. A HUGE amount of cash is going into the project. Pretty much anywhere they have existing fiber, they're putting this stuff in.
Yeah, not much consolation for the rest of us but, there it is. ( In case you're wondering what they're spending money on these days )
My guess is Google lit a fire under their ass when they made the announcement of deploying fiber to whomever showed enough interest in it. AT&T has never been a pro-active company, so maybe Google provided the push that was needed to get the ball rolling.
As for pots going away ?
AT&T is pushing hard for it because the costs to maintain the aging infrastructure to support it is high. Somehow, however, I doubt the costs ( for the customer ) will stay the same. If anything, they'll go up. Consider what your home line costs vs the average cell phone plan you have.
Personally, I would rather have the analog service vs the wireless or voip anyway. It's more reliable, it's cheaper for the end user, it's regulated / protected by the FCC.
I might go for the voip replacement as long as the same conditions apply, but only if.
It's not just customers either, AT&T is pushing to rid itself of all copper based anything in the near future. Including all inter-company circuits that ride copper facilities. The sheer volume of that makes it a tall hurdle to clear. But they're certainly going to try.
What the phone companies can and can't do with POTS is highly regulated. They have been on a crusade to do away with the regulations for a long time. This is a simpler way to get rid of the regulations.
Every one on Slashdot is saying the same thing.
Pots is good because it is more reliable(which I question sometimes)
Wouldn't cell towers that can mesh network with each other be a better service and faster to get up and running? With regulations every tower must have 36 hours of local run time at full load?
The real reason cell towers fail is that they were cheaply built. Expanding their roles to handle more of the switching duties would only be a good thing.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
but don't take away the service requirements. But we couldn't do that because of Socalisms...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Cell towers have too many power requirements and not enough capacity. Many of them are inter-linked by microwave dishes. Depending on the nature of the situation, the alignment of those microwave point to point links may be lost, isolating the cell tower.
Cell sites are just too resource intensive to maintain under emergency status. I would guess that probably 3 percent of the power to run a cell site would maintain connectivity on a few thousand land line phones.
It's probably best to think in some other terms than radius.
For one example, Tennessee has rather continuous types of bedrock in the middle and western parts of the state, leading right up to the New Madrid faultline in Missouri. If that lets go again, as it did historically, the west and middle parts of the state may see a widespread major earthquake, severe enough to do building damage hundreds of miles from the epicenter, even in Nashville and possibly even Crossville. But in the eastern part of the state, as the plateau region turns to foothills and valleys, there's a narrow zone where any potential damage from a westward quake will fall off extremely swiftly, and east of that, there is likely to be little or no serious damage even if a new New Madrid quake is as strong as the one that caused the Fukashima disaster in Japan. This sounds, to me, like it might be preferential to locate COs on or towards the eastern side of the zone wherever possible.
Planners should do similar analysis for such events as nuclear war, where radius would matter, but it would be the weapon burst radius around their target points. Elevation based analysis could be useful for floods and tsunamis. There's even regions where the primary concern in locating a CO might be forest fires, or the reliability history of local power generation.
Who is John Cabal?
You're scaring all the old people!
Have gnu, will travel.
Where I live, the underground water and sewer lines have far more problems than the overhead cables. In the last 18 months, our water has been off for repairs three times, our cable has had no problems. That suggests to me that underground is not necessarily more reliable than overhead.
"significant resources are spent to maintain 'legacy' POTS service" and when we kill POTS we can fire everyone and then keep our rates as high as they are and steal more money. An obvious win-win. For the telcos. Lose-lose-lose-lose-lose for us.
Also, the zoning board of my old town is so full of nimbys that they'd rather fall off the comms grid than erect a cell tower where it might be *gasp* VISIBLE! (ie. the only place a point-to-point signal is reliable.) Pretty sure they're not alone.
Fukt on many levels.
VOIP can be set to different bandwidth. A high bandwidth setting has clearer sound but is more likely to drop out. A modem or fax will work over a VOIP line that is set to about twice the bandwidth of the modem. So for example a 64K voip channel will support a modem of up to about 32K.
What a great return on investment: from the cost of the copper wire when it was originally installed to its price now on the scrap market.
the one thing that I always get worried about in topics like this: if we're getting rid of POTS, are we replacing it with something that has the same features? Or are we throwing away those feature because we don't know they are there? In just about every case of someone wanting to replace old with new, we loose features in the bargain. This will be no different.
The other point to keep in mind: the telephone companies are supporting this. That should wake you up: it means it benefits them and takes away from us. Always a good meter to measure this kind of stuff against: entrenched business loves it. be afraid...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
There is nothing in either link that says anything about replacing POTS with wireless. They are only suggesting replacing analog transmission with digital. Cell phones and television have already done this and it wasn't a disaster. It wouldn't make the system less robust. The physical infrastructure would be the same only the protocol would change. I can see how it would save the phone companies a lot of resources to standardize on IP.
How long ago were those lines put in? How often are they inspected? You'd kind of expect an unmaintained 100-year-old sewer line to fail.
I bet sewer lines would be better maintained if they were strung over people's heads.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Have we learned nothing from Battlestar Galactica?
We should have never allowed them to pull down the fire beacons.
That was good for a chuckle, thanks.
This is always a tough debate. We've (well, the US) spent the past 60 years dismantling infrastructure in our cities and urban corridors that we're now rebuilding at tremendous cost. "Superior" technology replaced trains and street cars and half a century later we're busy trying to get that infrastructure back b/c cars are hugely inefficient at transporting large numbers of people,. Well, at least how they're used these days...maybe we shouldn't actively trash the POTS system...
Where I live, the underground water and sewer lines have far more problems than the overhead cables. In the last 18 months, our water has been off for repairs three times, our cable has had no problems. That suggests to me that underground is not necessarily more reliable than overhead.
On the flip side, Hurricane Charley came directly over where I was living at the time, and we never lost telephone service, power, gas, or water, all of which were delivered underground. Certainly it's not problem-free, but in my experience it's been a lot more reliable.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I have set of telecoms manuals from the late 40's and 48 hours was the mandatory time a CO (exchange) was designed of work off batteries (in case the generator sets failed) - it even details exactly how you build your battery room
Eh. POTS may be slightly less vulnerable to system failure than cellular, but not much. And you're depending on physical wire which is more susceptible to damage. If you're really concerned about emergency communication capability, radio is the only way to go. No centralized ANYTHING, no infrastructure of any kind, and (with a bit of forethought) can work indefinitely, entirely off the grid. Go get your ham radio license.
I have a girlfriend whose name doesn't end in
There's more involved than just connectivity. Take power, for instance. Without it, connectivity doesn't matter because the phones won't work. Digital systems have battery back-up, but batteries have a finite capacity and when it runs out your phones are dead. It doesn't matter if the phone system central office is fully functional on generator power if the VOIP box that'd connect you to it has run out of battery power. Standard POTS, OTOH, is powered from the central office. I keep an old 70s-vintage Radio Shack handset around for emergencies, it's primitive but it's also completely passive and gets all the power it needs from the phone line itself. I plug that in and I can get phone service on a POTS line as long as the CO has power, regardless of whether my local area has power or not.
We've seen this in weather-related disasters lately, where it may take days or weeks to get power restored to large areas because of damage to the transmission network. I've experienced it personally with local power failures, where cel towers only lasted a few hours before running their batteries out rendering a charged cel phone useless. The problem isn't theoretical.
Digital systems may be more efficient. One of the inevitable downsides, though, is a lack of robustness. Efficiency means removing redundancy, removing excess capacity, removing those parts of the system that aren't actively being used so you aren't spending money and effort maintaining things that're just sitting gathering dust. But when something goes wrong, that redundancy and "excess" capacity isn't available to pick up the load. It's amusing because current "cloud" and virtualization technology is all driven by a recognition that we do in fact need excess capacity and redundant equipment, and the inevitable conflict of that ugly reality with Business's desire not to pay for any of that until we actually need it. But the phone network isn't AWS. Amazon can bet that not everyone will have a demand spike at the same time and that with enough customers they'll be able to keep that "idle" capacity occupied with something revenue-producing until it's needed (eg. by offering cheaper prices to customers who'll accept being bumped if someone else needs the space). You can't do that with the local phone system, though.
Who says an exchange that is isolated will still route local calls?
Water and sewer lines are mostly made of iron and steel. They carry water, generally contaminated with things like flouride, and human waste. Corrosive stuff, for iron. In many places, those water and sewer lines are a hundred years old. Lots of corrosion.
Power and communication lines don't have much water flowing through them, nor contaminants. You can actually expect high quality copper with good insulation to last for a hundred years, especially if laid within covered concrete trenches. The last time I checked, electrons weren't known to corrode copper.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I work for a phone company. This move is about deregulation, nothing more. Phone companies biggest competitors are cable companies, that's obvious. But what's not so obvious is the huge regulatory hurdles phone companies have to overcome while cable companies are almost completely unregulated. The FCC is almost entirely in AT&Ts pocket.... hell, most of the people working for the FCC probably used to work for AT&T. This will pass just like everything else AT&T wants, they basically write their own regulation now.
What will happen? What are AT&T's goals?
Phone service is more profitable in areas of high population density. For years AT&T has been abandoning rural exchanges, selling them, and focusing on big cities. They are exponentially more profitable than rural areas. The problem however is these exchanges usually cover areas that are both highly profitable and areas that actually lose money. So the phone company, by law, has to shift the burden across the entire exchange. So the city peoples prices go up, so the rural people can have phone service. The cable companies however just refuse to serve rural people. This is exactly what AT&T wants. Imagine the footprint of your local cable company, that is the exact same footprint AT&T wants for their phone service. Outside that? Get a cellphone.
The article seems to want to argue the primary reason to hold onto POTs is its relighability. During a disaster it stays working... well no, it doesn't. Basically it works like this, there is a primary switch and it can reach out a certain distance before call quality goes down. So then they have remotes that basically act as repeaters. Both the switch and the remotes have rooms full of car batteries. I'm not kidding they really are car batteries. They are all hooked up to a giant charger and if the power goes out the batteries continue to power the switch or remote for, at most, 36hrs. Often far less. If there is a power outage in the area, the batteries provide power long enough for the techs to drive a generator to the site. If there's a major power outage (think hurricane) the techs end up driving in circles from remote to remote with the 2 or 3 generators they have on had charging up each remote as much as they can before moving on to the next. At most this can last a few days. There are only so many techs, and so many generators. The techs get tired, the generators take hours to charge the remote up so they never get it above 25% before they have to move on to the next failing remote. etc... etc...
POTs networks have very high alarm rates (I worked in the NOC for a while) Equipment is constantly failing. Mice, car accidents, etc... POTs networks are not redundant, have no fail-safes. If any part of the wiring leading back to the CO gets damaged, you lose your service. Once we switch people to IP service, all those problems go away. The network auto-corrects. We can have a degraded cable (bad pairs) and the equipment works around it. Rather than having to send a tech out every time a single pair is damaged, you now only have to send them when a certain percentage of the pairs in a binder are failing.
So IP service IS better. But AT&T doesn't want to switch people to IP service because it's better... they want to be able to force people to take it weather they want it or not. They want to then treat the service as a data service (completely unregulated) and not be subjected to annoying PSC complaints about their services. The real solution here would be to make data just as regulated as phone service and then let AT&T provide whichever they want... but that's not going to happen.
If AT&T is required by law to provide the same level of service with the same legal obligations then I think this is a good idea. I doubt they will want to do this. By same level of service I mean support fax, e911, same analog handoff to the customer, service during a power outage, and same voice quality. By same legal requirements I mean the services are regulated by the PUC/PSC, same resale requirements, same reliability requirements. They won't offer this. Verizon tried something similar in some areas after Sandy, but they made the mistake of admitting fax would not work and 911 service might not work. The NY AG said that was not acceptable. If AT&T does not think it can make money on POTS service, then AT&T should be required to divest itself from the "last mile" infrastructure. Remember AT&T said they needed the spectrum from T-Mobile or it would be unable to offer 4G service. They lied.
See also: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/verizon-would-end-century-of-regulation-by-killing-wireline-phone-says-ny-ag/
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
When my town finally upgraded its water/sewer, they found that they were still using the wooden lines that my 104-year-old grandfather watched them put in when he was seven. Apparently, water swells the wood to keep it from leaking. It worked as long as it was undisturbed in the ground, but was mostly destroyed in removal.
FiOS may be a mistake from Verizon's short-term bottom line, but that big pipe is a boon to those of us who have it. And that's the big problem with the FCC, AT&T et al who want to pull the plug on POTS. All they are thinking about is short-term bottom line. The real solution is to tell Big Telecom that after they run fiber to the home, and keep it running for 5 years, then they can apply to pull the plug on POTS.
A really good sign that something is a REALLY BAD Idea is when High End Corporate Types(profiteering gluttons), support it.
POTS is old yes... It is expensive to maintain... it is reliable ... it is relatively easy to fix ... it doesn't depend on highly problematic equipment.
This being said the number 1 reason that we should not move to pure VoIP is that VoIP is not required to be repaired in 3 days by the government. Baring a state of emergency being declared the telephone companies are penalized for every phone line that is not repaired within 3 days( they like to interpret it as 3 business days) but on VoIP lines there is no such requirement and there have been areas where VoIP service has not been restored for WEEKS because of the cost of around the clock work.
I know most people will respond talking about cell phones. But these are even worse as in MOST places cell reception is STILL spotty at best and will always be problematic due the fact that the signal degrades differently depending what is between you and they nearest tower. Couple that with the fact that the network has to be functioning for the towers to pass information around there are many more points of failure and the more complex something is the harder it is to keep it running in a state of emergency.
Big data does not want to get rid of the POTS lines because they are expensive to maintain. A POTS line is a telecommunication service and they are open to competition. Cable internet and AT&T Uverse are data services and are closed to competition. I have a phone line from my local telco with a DSL line from someone else. I have a choice of a few DSL providers; that is competition. My DSL comes with a couple of things I'm rather fond of that I can only get with DSL. If POTS goes away then my DSL goes away and I have to choice between AT&T and my local cable internet. That isn't very much competition. I would very much like to keep my DSL.
Cool, who pays for the upgrades to the towers?
A T & T Charirman Wheeler made the same comment about resources going to support POTS. But why does HE care? They're not HIS resources. This is why other companies have been buying up the POTS infrastructure. For example, our POTS lines used to be maintained by Verizon, but a number of years ago, Verizon sold out to Frontier. Verizon is no longer responsible. That rather puts the fork to the argument about resources being drained away on POTS. There are a lot of folks that don't trust/like cellular phones. They will always be on POTS. Why not serve them?
Since land lines don't move around, the Police know exactly where to send help.
That s even more true of cell phones if you register with Smart911, you can include information like the people and animals that live at your house, and medications taken. All very useful for 911 to know when sending out a team to help.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
OK, whoi thinks the wireless networks are really wireless? Cell infrastructure requires physical backhaul and COs and such. If your basic POTS infrastructure is destroyed, your cell infrastructure isn't likely to be doing so hot, with the added prospect of saturation. Be nice to POTS.
There is a pattern to this. In the Ft. Lauderdale area pay phones were pretty much exterminated with very few surviving. The reasoning was that hookers and dope dealers were making way too much use of pay phones and in order to clear up crime pay phones were taken down. Sometimes it was neighbors marching and bashing down phone booths with sledge hammers.
The catch is that people can easily get stranded late at night as there are no pay phones, some still do not carry cell phones and cell phones have a habit of failing to function with low batteries and other causes. I am certain that a few lives are being lost because of this. Maybe the type of emergency phones on a pole like are on turnpikes might be a very good idea but we must find some way for people to always be able to call for help and have no price or super low price communications.
Cell networks are wonderfully resilient to "brain damage" eg a earthquake or tornado can take out one 10 mile area of coverage without disrupting the entire network. However the weakest point of the cell network is the HLR.
HLR, or home location registrar is where the billing takes place in a cell network. When you get your physical bill, this is processed from the calls you made stored in the HLR, so for the sake of the OP's question the HLR = CO. The HLR stores all calls and data billing. When you roam, the roaming HLR contacts your HLR and verifies that your phone is registered for service, and active, it does not care about plans or data allotments.
So the short answer is, a cell network will continue to function in perpetuity provided it's powered. The only thing centrally controlled is activation and physically sending you a bill. If your bill cycle is the 24th of the month, sometime on the 22nd of the month the "mothership" eg AT&T in Texas contacts the HLR, downloads the calls and data numbers made, and then calculates it against your plan. Realtime data usage you get on your phone basically does this.
I speak of this because I worked for AT&T Wireless at some point in time, what I describe above is based on the 2G system which is also identical to Verizon and Sprint's CDMA system since both were compatible with AMPS which was decommissioned years ago. The GSM system is slightly more complicated, but not so different in that it works otherwise in a similar same way. The tools CSR's query the HLR, which reps simply refer to as "checking the tower" they can see all the voice calls and SMS messages sent (and even send SMS messages from the HLR to anyone.) Keep in mind that the authentication is horribly overcomplicated in that a CSR may have like 20 passwords to access the various tools and systems, this is usually why reps do not want to troubleshoot something "with the network" because the network itself is not a simple "oh there is a problem with the network" but more like "there is a problem with that specific tower, HLR, HLR database, roaming database, sms or data connectivity" Basically CSR's can only troubleshoot "the problem with the user's phone" and not "a problem inside the network" because that can take hours, there are dedicated technicians that don't speak to customers that handle that.
So going back the OP's question. When there is a signal problem a tech is dispatched to the street corner of the reported problem, they make a call/sms/data query and if it works, they close the ticket as "no problem" and there needs to be quite a few reports before a tech will be dispatched because the vast majority of cell users reporting problems, are problems they created themselves, like trying to call from inside cement bunkers (basements, garages, convention centers.) If a HLR is disabled, everyone on that HLR is affected and everyone roaming on that HLR is affected, nothing else. When cell carriers share sites, they share the physical structures, not the power, or cables. So it's entirely possible to have a AT&T phone and Verizon phone lose wireless access at the same time because the power is out at one cell site's HLR, but if they were registered on a roaming HLR somewhere else their calls may get something like a fast-busy signal or a recording that the phone needs to be activated. Your phone contains a roaming database profile that say's it's allowed to use certain tower ID's. So a HLR for AT&T and a HLR for T-Mobile within a mile of each other will both be seen by your AT&T sim card in the phone, but your phone will not attempt or use the T-mobile HLR under any circumstances automatically.
So to answer the question I'm replying to. Yes the HLR contains the subscriber data and is basically independent of the carrier itself. It's possible to manually register phones on a HLR, or deactivate them independant of the central billing system, and this is often the reason why people ask about "calls" they don't remember making. They may have been (as part of tro
Bad as it is, the POTS still works. The nice thing about it, is during a storm that takes down the mains, if you still have an old style black dial phone connected, or you have a cordless with a battery back up, you can still use the phone. Some alarm systems still rely on the old telephone red & green wires. A lot of fax and dial up modems still use that, and pretty much any senior citizen still probably has a POTS line. It took me 2 years to talk my parents (80 & 79) into canceling their old pots line. My dad would say what about a power outage, but after I told him, you have what kind of pots phone? He responded a cordless....ok, and what powers the base station on the cordless? Then he got it and canceled it. The old copper pots lines, are why you see in a lot of areas, large tanks of liquid nitrogen strapped to the poles in an attempt to dry out the moisture in the lines. It's way cheaper than replacing a trunk line with hundreds of pairs of wires.
To add, because it's been years...
The CSR's tool for basic troubleshooting (not the billing system) will say exactly what HLR and site the IMSI is registered on. So a HLR will be something like some ID number like NYCBRKLN-004, the NYCBRKLN is the HLR or "CO" in terms of POTS. the -004 part is the cell site.
It's important to state that a HLR will only have local subscribers. The roaming HLR will have all the visiting IMSI's, even if these are two miles apart. So a NYCBRKLN may serve all of Brooklyn or it might only serve the customers in the 718 area code (LNP exception...)
When you factor in LNP (Local number portability) you can only port your number to other carriers who are on the same local exchange. So if your phone number was 7181234567, and you want to port to another carrier, that other carrier will port your number, overwriting a number they own in the HLR serving the same NPA-NXX, so you may be calling 7181234567 but it's actually 7181124599 in the HLR.
This is why you can't port your NYC number if you live in LA, because there are no HLR's serving that NPA-NXX. When you use your NYC number in LA, it's using the roaming HLR of whatever carrier you're connected to. If (going back to the previous question) the home HLR is disabled then only you will have connectivity problems, but nobody else around you will. If you want to port your number, you need to be on a carrier and cell site that serves that area. Now, there are work arounds, like simply having the carrier use another NYC home HLR other than one serving LA, but you will be billed as though you are in NYC still, including NYC taxes.
So again back to the original topic and follow up questions, If they remove POTS, nothing will happen. Wireless carriers have been exclusively using their own data networks since around 2005 to terminate calls. When you make a Cell phone to POTS or POTS to cell phone call, this call is initiated at the switch (MSC) may physically be at the HLR, or it may be at a CO.
A lot of this information is more or less correct at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_switching_subsystem
I keep my old POTS because I have a 3 meg DSL with a couple static IPs priced at $40
All non POTS solutions to replace the "old" DSL is double or triple the price or more.
Offer me a similar price structure under the new "delivery" setup and I'm in, otherwise F-Off telco's, i'm keepin it.
I like the customer UPS system issued by FiOS. It beeps incessantly. Just having them mail you a replacement battery is a lot of money.
Worse than the false belief that some people harbor about emergency communications availability, is the result of this incessant beeping: I have (as a consultant) come upon situations where smoke detector batteries went dead unnoticed because people had become so accustomed to the beeping they could not stop.
How about a POTS replacement that helps cause emergencies, bet ya hadn't thought about that one ;)...
With the addition of server-based switches at each local point of termination (the same place your copper lines go), and perhaps feeding voltage back to customer prem we could have a solution that is nearly as sturdy.
The only place we put in POTS lines are dual fire alarm panel lines required by local code. They cannot be part of a PBX. N. TX.
Cylons
The failure mode of television used to be some snow and a little static. That was all. You could still watch Laugh In no problem. Now, everything freezes, the audio cuts out, and the picture starts turning into screenshots of giant pixellated squares.
My telephone just works. It works when the power is out. The sound quality is excellent, as opposed to the sound quality I have heard on every one of the few occasions that I have used a friend's cell phone. They sound like shit. Please, FCC, keep away from POTS. You will fuck it up badly, because it's all you know how to do.
Please +mod P/GP and THANKS for the delightfully readable go-round on a complex topic. The NSS Wiki Page links to so many tangent issues and general-telecom defs it's hard to get a grip. If only when you follow Wikipedia links a voice would whisper, "You're getting warmer!" "Getting colder."
So I am gathering that should some hypothetical community or city region wish to impose upon cell providers a base requirement that their services as provided are locally autonomous, allowing native subscribers to talk -- the requirement is there must be a mobile switching center (MSC) driving the towers capable of maintaining enough end-to-end connections the area would need, and if the Home Location Register (HLR) is out of area -- at least a quiescent HLR platform with a (selective) mirror database mirror that could go live and be manually loaded as necessary.
Bear in mind the basic 'emergency' capability I'm trying to define involves only homed cells dialing each others' local assigned numbers, no number translation or PTSN interface.
I am diving into this cell issue because I think most folks off the street honestly believe that local cell towers doth a working communications system make. At least within the area where others' MSISDN are similar to theirs. And drawing from the expectations of the Bell era... why wouldn't it?
Clouding the issue is when people treat the mere repairability of a system under optimum conditions as some sort of 'solution' to disaster preparedness, as if it is only measured in time. In a disaster get everything everywhere working again for everybody exactly as it was. Problem solved!
But what if the parts required to get something working again -- at least locally -- turns out to be impossible because there never were enough parts to for a complete system in the first place?
It is my hope that a framework for defining and asserting autonomous operation can be devised so it becomes a matter of standard practice just as for Bell System Practice guidelines. A series of steps towards autonomy that can be reduced to cost/benefit.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
In response to: http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/11/20/fcc-announces-plans-to-upgrade-century-old-phone-system/?intcmp=obnetwork http://www.fcc.gov/blog/ip-transition-starting-now It's all conjecture on my part, but I'll take a stab. Deploying a next-generation telecom infrastructure is an interesting challenge - but one that is underway as we speak. Verizon chose Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) (FiOS). AT&T chose fiber to the node (FTTN) (U-verse) and is rolling out VDSL. CenturyLink (Qwest) has also picked FTTN and is rolling out VDSL as well. These rollouts are slow moving - but will continue to use copper for the foreseeable future - FTTP is the long term future still I think - but we keep being able cram more and more data over a pair - and with pair bonding that number keeps rising. For now at least, most voice will still be served over fairly long loops from the CO - AT&T is rolling out VoIP over U-verse - Verizon is doing the same over FiOS, CenturyLink has not yet marketed VoIP to residences - but I suspect it will come in a while (when more of their footprint is covered). Fiber to the Node has the advantage of having fiber near the customer when the cost of repairing the legacy copper exceeds the cost of putting fiber in to each house. Largely, based on my research - the new VoIP circuits are often being served off TDM offices that have upgraded been to packet switching. Both Lucent and Genband offer a way to upgrade their TDM switches to a packet based core (Lucent 7ESS or 7 R/E and Genband C15 Session Controller). In short - the article was full of hyperbole - If you look at the underlying blog post - it doesn't mention the removal of copper, copper will play a big part in last mile service delivery for likely another 20-30 years - in the end is about replacing the TDM based network core with packet switching - a process that has been going on for almost 20 years at this point. With proper engineering a packet based system is every bit as (if not more) reliable as TDM based one. That said, it raises some real questions - what of universal service? How about the CLEC market - will they be granted access to the new networks which are replacing the old? Only time will tell.
"Technology is too complex today."
It has been my experience in the middle of Alberta, Cell service is very unreliable (both TELUS and Rogers) and VOIP is just plain junk with echo delay, failure to connect and requiring far too much on-site equipment and power (no power, no VOIP, No power - Cell Towers and batteries die in a short as 1 day, not to mention circuit overload).
My parents are still on a Pots line in the city and refuse to go digital, partially because of the extra cost (and they are on fixed income) and because going digital does not provide them any usable advantage. I know you can say, but they can use Caller ID, etc. but they find it frustrating to use and especially all the digital messaging - press 1 to talk to a real operator.
I personally would love to go back to Analog, but Telus absolutely refuses, but you need Analog for Fax so why not for voice (and ADSL doesn't require Digital - works just fine on POTS).
Do not disable POTS as the new technology is simply unreliable, especially when the SHTF (Sh*te Hits The Fan).
The NSA has been tapping *all* communication at the SS7 network layer. They don't give a damn if the ends are POTS lines, cell phones, ISDN, or whatever.
I don't know about you, but I have extra batteries, genrators, and hell, a *car* I can charge my cell phone with.
As you say, it must be me, but I find it much easier to send an email.
I can send or receive messages at a convenient time, can give more thought to the form and detail, can edit mistakes, can easily include necessary attachments and will always have an exact record.
I don't have a landline and rarely carry a mobile. My recorded message gives my email address and asks people to use it.
Are you still using an old AMPS anlog brick? I haven't had a cell phone cut transmission when it detects silence since the late 80s. At the time many telecos did the same trick with long distance POTS lines too.
A common solution to this is to tell people just to text instead of making calls, that helps reduce the load on the cellular infrastructure.
And 80 cents to the phone company, 40 to send and 40 to receive, when people pay for plenty of minutes but no texts. And people struggling with figuring out how to text on a flip phone. And the POTS lines still tied up by relay calls made by the carrier when someone on a cell phone texts someone on POTS.
I think less than 1/10th of the US population has a telephone in their house that will work solely from CO power on the line pair without a wall wart.
Then I should be glad I'm among this 10 percent smart enough to keep a wired phone to report a blackout.
We have POTS service in our house and phones that don't need power other than the CO loop current.
Our neighborhood was hit in March 2006 by an F2 tornado. Our house survived rather well, but the infrastructure didn't.... other than the phone lines which are buried clear back to the CO. I was on the phone in the basement while the storm was passing overhead, checking on our kids who live nearby, but out of the direct path of the two tornadoes that hit our community that day. We had no electricity for a week and no cable for 10 days. They were mostly above ground.
My wife and I both have cell phones, but they did not work because the cell tower nearest us went down, too.
We survived fairly comfortably with a 5.5 KW generator and gas heat. We had access to the Internet via a dialup connection, which we don't have now.
I'm a firm POTS believer.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
How is it exactly that the Chairman of AT&T can't afford both a cell and a land line?
I worked on 3G/4G networks auth and policy enforcement software. It is hideously complicated. I'm surprised that anytime you make a call it goes through without any disasters.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I noted at one point that BC Tel Mobility (now Telus) had two COs located on different fault planes and hardened up with bunker-like security and power systems. They do think of earthquakes.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
FiOS may be a mistake from Verizon's short-term bottom line
It's not. By Verizon's own stats, they saved 100m in 2013 alone, by switching over 500,000 users to FIOS. Not only that, those users are now purchasing more services because FIOS allows more and better service, so revenue has increased. Cost went down, revenue went up, what's not to like?
I don't know about you, but I have extra batteries, genrators, and hell, a *car* I can charge my cell phone with.
Cars were so useful in New Orleans...
http://pendletonpanther.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/new-orl.jpg
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
If things get bad enough for infrastructure such as digital phone and data to go offline then we've got greater problems that POTS couldn't handle anyway. If maintaining POTS is slowing adoption of faster internet infrastructure then it should go. It was fun and I have fond memories of modem connection sounds but... the 1K chunks of files coming over were excruciating to endure.
Fiber Optic right to the home firewall/router is what I'd like to see.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
So what happens when the power goes out?
My 87 year old aunt has life alert which needs a POTS connection. My mother is caring for her and switched my aunt to Fios when it came to the neighborhood 2 years ago. After hurricane sandy my aunt lost power for two weeks (house wasn't flooded, downed trees took the power out). My mother stayed with her and they found that the phones were dead after only 8 hours. Thats it, the shitty backup battery lasts 8 hours. My mother and aunt were completely ignorant that the new system needs power to function and make calls. Verizon never stated that there was a need for power and that the system was useless in a prolonged blackout. So what use would life alert be or even making a simple phone call during a prolonged blackout?
So unless they can figure out a better backup system or more efficient electronics to last for a week or two then what is the point of moving to VOIP? Oh I get it, to save the phone companies more money.
Preparation for invasion.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by Clinton, muddied the waters by simultaneously allowing cable companies to sell local phone service in competition against the Baby Bells, and allowing the Baby Bells to branch out into long distance phone, as well as Internet and TV service. Local phone had previously been a sacred cow exclusively reserved for the legacy RBOC's (Regional Bell Operating Companies, Verizon and AT&T). The legacy POTS could not effectively compete with the voice/video/data "Triple Play" the cable operators have been offering since the late 90's. At this point, the RBOC's are having to build out totally new fiber networks (which naturally also provide phone service via VoIP). Additionally maintaining POTS represents a redundancy that is unjustifiable, business-wise, especially when RBOC's and Cable operators directly compete across all services, and thus service only a fraction of (as opposed to all of) the homes passed.
The market conditions that gave rise to POTS no longer exist, and such a network will likely never be built in the US, as it will be impossible to close the business case in the modern business and regulatory climate. The American POTS network was built out when Bell Telephone was a nationwide monopoly that serviced virtually every potential customer. Ma Bell further subsidized this local (and rural) service by charging astronomical rates for long distance calls, as well as equipment rentals. The landmark US vs. AT&T anti-trust case put an end to that, leading to the divestiture of Bell into AT&T and the various Regional Bell Operating Companies. Ma Bell didn't even pay for most of the rural telephone network, which was built out from the 1930's to 1950's via the Rural Electrification Administration (now known as the Rural Utility Service) which was part of FDR's New Deal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System_divestiture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._AT&T
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
" I presume that if a CO was isolated no one could roam-in because the necessary central inter-carrier auth could not be completed, but what of existing subscribers? Would a CO facility, even if it was restarted from power down, retain enough subscriber data to bring its 'native' users in the local area to the point where that can complete calls to each other?"
It really depends on how the system is configured, but short answer? No, the cell tower is merely an end-point for you into the network, from there, depending on the system in place, you are probably relying on a different server setup for call routing and signalling. If all of this remains powered, and the gateways are still able to route calls effectively, you could I guess still contact locally connected folks, provided there is POWER to all of the devices. A cell connection is, more than likely, going to enter the telco network in a media conversion, a module in a gateway is going to convert from the cell system into the IP datanetwork that makes up the telco, similar to the analog wired phones being call routed over the IP network.
As long as 2 devices are connected logically through a gateway, and the call routing table is intact, the devices should be able to communicate. Again though, you've got authentication servers that need to respond too
experienced all this after the earthquake in chile.
pots phones worked in the region, but not nationally or internationally in the first days. even my dsl router would work, if powered on my end. eventeully we were able to establish international communication again by voip.
cellphones were down for up to 2 weeks for one provider. there was no battery backup for the towers. when the systems came up, they were overwelmed by the millions of cuded calls and messages waiting and would crash again. there were insufficient real experts in the country to fix all the towers. everyone learned that sms was working, as the messages could be sent even if the cell network came online for just a few mins a day. voice calls were a no go for much of the worst hit areas for weeks.
lesson pots is still useful. sms should be given network priority in an emergency. don't trust cell as your only means of communication.
ironically, we discovered after the national ham radio club was up and running 5 mins after the quake as they had members in all the worst hit areas that were mobile. no one knew they were there or used them, while the whole country scrambled establish communication again.
So we have a cell Central Office layer that is regional and connectivity to it would be necessary for individual towers to complete calls. Let me extend the Q to ask: is there some standard practice that confines geographic placement of COs to a certain radius? How many of these (as opposed to mere towers) would we find on a map, if such a map was available? I presume that if a CO was isolated no one could roam-in because the necessary central inter-carrier auth could not be completed, but what of existing subscribers? Would a CO facility, even if it was restarted from power down, retain enough subscriber data to bring its 'native' users in the local area to the point where that can complete calls to each other?
Sorry about the Wheeler (FCC Chairman) booboo in the summary. Brain fart.
If you want a map of all the COs -- they are here : http://www.dslreports.com/coinfo They are not placed by geographic radius, but by number of subscribers. Back in the day, a central office might serve an exchange or two (an exchange is the three digits after the area code in a phone number, for example 517-355, where 355 was the exchange). Of course some COs were larger and served multiple exchanges, some getting as large as a dozen and some were smaller and only handled a single exchange. Each exchange could have just short of 10,000 subscribers (known as nodes, corresponding to the 4 digits after the exchange in the phone number).
COs, regardless of the brand (two of the most common in modern day were the 5ESS and the DMS100) knew ALL the info for their subscribers and how to route calls to tandem (directly connected) switches and upper class switches. These were known as Class 5 switches (they had directly connected subscribers) Similar to IP routing, if the phone number you were dialing was not a local subscriber then it would switch the call to the next higher class switch (Class 4), who knew how to route calls to every exchange in your LATA (your toll-free calling area). If it didn't know how to route it, it would toss it to the Class 3 switch and so forth. Billing is always done at your local CO using "CDR" records (and sent to your phone company for central billing). There are now exceptions to these roles with LNP (local number portability), but the same series of events generally occur. Remote COs know nothing of subscribers in other COs.
So, short answer, if a CO powered down completely, calls within that exchange would not get delivered. If your CO survived but was disconnected from the CLASS 4 switch, then it would be able to process calls locally and be able to send calls to the tandem switches, but you wouldn't be able to call others in your LATA and they wouldn't be able to call you.
Now cellular is a totally different game altogether. Cellular companies are subscribers of the phone network, not really a part of it. They run their own infrastructure and don't directly participate in SS7 for routing. A CO could disappear and the cellular network wouldn't necessarily be hurt (unless that was their point of termination with the phone network).
These were a lot more words than most people will care to read for a comment... I spent 8 years on the 5ESS DSIG crew installing new COs and working on the SS7 protocol.
If you want a map of all the [[wire-line]] COs -- they are here : http://www.dslreports.com/coinfo
[...] Now cellular is a totally different game altogether. Cellular companies are subscribers of the phone network, not really a part of it. They run their own infrastructure and don't directly participate in SS7 for routing.
Yup, the POTS Bell System was open with its information sharing (pride of accomplishment) and maps and stats are out there. But for cellular topics there sure are a bunch of Anonymous Cowards in this thread with insightful comments. No doubt because their openness and opinion does not necessarily reflect their employer's.
Now if some AC should happen to post a link to a pastebin hosted map showing CO/HLR CELLULAR facilities for each of the major providers, we'd all be able to get a handle on what state (sorry or satisfied) of disaster preparedness we have achieved, so it could be identified as a 'challenge to solve' and be addressed.
Oh I almost forgot. If you are concerned about the vulnerability of utilities maintained by private companies these days, you are potentially a terrorist threat. How bloomin' convenient for them.
I spent 8 years on the 5ESS DSIG crew installing new COs and working on the SS7 protocol.
Hats off to you! Network is where I most wanted to be years ago when I was at The Phone Company, but at the time I was so good at the Data Processing side (carrier settlement and toll billing) I was stuck there. Like a puppet on a chain.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Since you get to post anecdotal evidence as "proof"...
My electrical is underground (so is my cable). In the last 18 months or so, our power has gone out 3 times. Every time it was due to the above ground wiring before it got to our neighborhood where it went underground. It's about 2 blocks away, but above ground. As soon as they fixed that (mostly due to trees falling during a storm), my power came back on without any intervention in my neighborhood.
That suggests to me that above ground lines are not necessarily more reliable.
How is it that there is no responsibility placed on cell phone companies to keep cell phone directory information on the customers and publish this information publicly. It is quintessential for a cohesive accountability of these companies supplying this communication technology to the general public in an informed society.
It is absolutely unfathomable that these cell phones are devices used by terrorists to detonate bombs, killing thousands of bystanders throughout the world for decades and there is still no accountability of these companies selling this service technology to the public.
OK I need to read the original article but the classic current loop
and its ~56K bandwidth (remember your modem) I think is what
is being questioned.
DSL is hobbled because of POTS limitations... AT&T can drive a
lot more bits if the last leg of copper is not POTS limited.
I know that there is a push to eliminate P2P digital links but
if the regulators looks at phones that is that there is at
least in the local offices.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
In http://rmf.vc/CITransition I explain why we need fresh start rather than trying to bring the past forward.
the massive telephone land lines needs to be updated to fiber optic or better yet subspace cabling
redesign communications networks deployments
Because cell phone plans suck.
Agreed.
And this is ultimately why people stick with POTS.
I press a button, say "call " and then either click the number or say which one it is.
Doing so requires a smartphone, and in Slashdot's home country, the top carriers (Verizon, Sprint/Boost/Virgin, and AT&T) require all smartphones to be activated on a data plan. A lot of parents don't want to pay for a data plan for each of their single-digit-year-old children.
Call is ringing within 5 seconds.
And it's using up two minutes on your plan per minute that you're connected: one for the caller and one for the callee. A lot of families don't want to pay what carriers want to charge for unlimited calling because they don't make enough outgoing long-distance calls for it to actually be cheaper than POTS.
Why would you make so many calls to other rooms in the house. Stand up, walk around
Not everybody has that luxury.
Stop dropping your phones.
Good luck getting your single-digit-year-old children to do the same.
I started working for The Phone Company before divestiture, but after the first Electronic Switching Systems, though crossbar and step-by-step were still around for a long time (and may still be, in some rural areas.) Heard on the radio recently that only 30% of households have POTS lines these days; mobile phones and cable TV companies have displaced most of the rest. As far as "civil unrest" goes, your kitchen phone's only useful if you're at home, and you could just as well use your cell phone. Power failures don't bother my cell phone (widespread power system outages can, if the cell towers don't have adequate backup power, but these days that's only a problem if the power and roads are out long enough that refueling generators is a problem, or if somebody's stolen the generator.)
If you really need emergency backup communications, get a CB radio and a 2-meter ham set, and nobody's going to mind too much that you don't have a ham license if you're using it for legitimate emergencies.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
First of all, even that smartphone has a few hours of talk time, if you stop playing games and doing other battery-burning stuff, though they're not as reliable as old dumb phones were. If you can safely get out of the house, you can charge the phone in your car; if you can't safely get out, you should have called the emergency folks already.
Power for the cell towers is an issue, if the roads are down and the phone company can't refill the generators, but usually they're designed with enough slack to handle that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Telephone systems - analog, digital and VoIP pays my bills.
Copper POTS - yes, archaic, obsolete... but ya know what? When everything fails, the POTS stuff still works... and the sound quality is what we compare other systems to.
I understand that it's a very expensive network to keep up and running, and so long as there are viable alternatives I'm not opposed to allowing the copper system to be phased out... so long as the alternatives can equal voice quality and reliability. For many, POTS is literally a lifeline... the telcos and the FCC need to factor this in.
> The last time I checked, electrons weren't known to corrode copper.
Try hooking a battery to two wires , with the other ends in a glass of water. They'll corrode 1,000 times as fast as the same wires without the battery. The corrosion process ALSO requires oxygen, either air trapped between the copper stands when it was made or moisture which finds it's way in.
Nevertheless, I see your point.
Cost $15 dollars (1989). Reliable. Worked for years (still works if I could find it). Clear voice. Simple. Easy to use. Free local. Expensive long distance.
The first lie: “Our current infrastructure has served us well for almost a century but it no longer meets the needs of America?s consumers,” AT&T senior executive vice president Jim Cicconi said
Analog phones and analog dial tones perfectly serve everyone needing a voice call with another party, and they always will.
The second and 3rd lies: Cleland, a former White House telecom policy adviser, said that even if people wanted to keep the old system, “they are not making the switches anymore for this. And the engineers they need to keep it alive are retiring.”
The POTS system is fully mature, fully built. And there are fewer customers on POTS. So there is no need for new production switches, only parts to maintain the currently installed units. Which is why the industry stopped producing new units. But they haven't stopped producing parts. This argument is a red herring.
And when anyone says "nobody knows how to do it anymore, they're all retiring" you KNOW the entire argument is bullsh-t. This argument is literally the equivalent of saying "it's impossible to train new people to do this job". Ahem, if the job pays well, people will gladly learn to do it.
Make no mistake my fellow slashdot readers, the push by the telcos to switch the last mile of analog copper to digital has nothing to do with any of these 3 lies. It is all about profit motive. They have all been losing money as many customers have switched entirely to cell phones for voice, and cable TV for internet service. The city centric telcos want digital to the home phone so they can charge more for additional mandatory bundled services, generate more revenue by displaying ads on the new phones with big multi-line displays that people will be forced to buy, etc, etc. Want proof from the article itself?
'though the transition should not be harmed by “burdensome economic regulations,” such as mandates or price caps.'
This says the ILECs (Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers) should be allowed to charge whatever they want for the new digital phone service. Every person but one they interviewed for that article is a paid shill for the ILECs.
"Anna-Maria Kovacs, a visiting scholar at Georgetown?s Center for Business and Public Policy, stressed that phone companies “must be allowed to repurpose the capital that is currently deployed to support their obsolete circuit-switched networks” during the switch to guarantee a competitive edge."
Since when does a public policy scholar shill the position of a corporate entity? "MUST be allowed... to guarantee a competitive edge."? When she and her study are funded by these corporate interests, not by the taxpayers.
Switching the last mile of copper from analog to digital is a big loser for the consumer from both a reliability of infrastructure and monthly cost perspective. Digital only phone service over copper will be inherently less reliable and will cost significantly more than POTS. Switching to digital won't save the telcos any money. They're banking on charging customers more for it, for extra mandatory services nobody wants or needs.
Keep POTS around. It just works.
Your local CO can't route calls localy anymore. Back when they were first build all numbers were programed localy. Now all switched have had this removed and when any call is made the local switch uses a system called SS7 (Signaling System 7) and it askes a central national database that is shared by all phone companys. It askes how to route the call, SS7 sends the routing information back to the local switch with routing information.
POTS - Analog is a limitation, but reliable voice+ service during disasters is a national interest necessity (IMO). Analog should be replaced by digital exchanges that complete local calls even if national/global network connections are down (include NYC, Boston, LA, NOLA all communities.
The IP phones can deliver the same promise, but not for free or easy profit to US. Cell towers are vulnerable to physical disasters/attack; Hence, FEMA, DoD, TelCo need to collectively address community treat and public collaboration. Technologies like telecommunications HAPs (check Goggle’s planning) can be moved to diminished coverage areas, Military strategic/tactical cell-towers that can deployed to locations during community exigencies . This is a disaster relief and national defense requirement just like the Interstate highway system. Yes, emergency RF systems are great for 1st responders, but community and personal functions (medical, fire, food, construction ) and calm coordinated communications and efforts are essential to all US responses (not just political and emergency).
In a disaster that isolates the community from outside or partition in helping sustain their community and country requires connectivity. Analog/Digital is just a red-herring distracting US from our national interest to maintain communities and lives. So, the question is what are FEMA, DoD, TelCo doing to assure telephone+ services?
IMPO asking, how many IP and cell phones would continue to function, is dreadfully dangerous and denies the essential requirement to make them all function when and where needed for all US.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I was fascinated reading this thread. It was very informative. Much less noise and more signal than usual for slashdot. Many of the postings filled in small bits of information missing in my understanding of telecom and telecom history. Thanks Guys.
A lot of cell towers in our area have attached permanent generators. That being said, the wireless carriers who I am familiar with will actually backhaul to one single switch for a large regional area, an area much larger than what just a single CO would cover. The ILEC, Verizon has switches in each of the CO's for POTS, however Verizon Wireless does not have a switch in each CO in this area, I'm not sure about others but I'd imagine it is similar. A large wireless carrier for example has three switches for the entire state. What that means is if that central switch goes down, you cannot call people local to your area / CO.
Technology disrupted, inconvenient, until it becomes ubiquitous will have weak points. Horses take all varieties of fuel, and carriages are pretty easy to maintain. But they had their limits. Once folks got a taste of electric and petrol cars, well - we know how this story turned out. I would expect once the POTS lines are unplugged, some resources will go towards cellurlar. The remainder will be for pension obligations or pocket lining.