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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!
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.
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
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.
So are POTS. Especially for long distance.
The big argument against dropping POTS is that cellular is simply not available everywhere you need a phone. In basements. In rural areas. Yes, you can bypass those limitations but I'm not seeing any legislation that forces the Really Big Corporations to do that.
Guarantee that everyone who needs a phone line can get reception, work on your redundancy and backup, nail the corporate weasels down tight and no problemo.
Otherwise, leave the damned wires alone.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
This isn't about dropping POTS in favor of wireless. It is about using VOIP instead of POTS, wiring still required.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
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.
Let the 'free market' take care of pots demand? Without government subsidies, the copper wouldn't have been strung out to your middle-of-nowhere canyon house in the first place, and certainly wouldn't be maintained over the long term. Your terrible cell service is an example of the 'free market' handling it. I'm not arguing with your conclusion, just questioning whether it really gets what you're after.
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.
No, not At&T chairman, nor even a former At&T chairman. Instead is the former President and CEO of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) and former President and CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA). Head of both the cable and cell phone industry lobbying groups! What's not to love?
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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.
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.
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.
I live in a suburban area just south of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Following the Great Ice Storm of 1998 (Vermont and northern New York were also affected), my home was without electrical power for 8 and a half days. No lights, no water (electrical pump in well), and no heat (oil-fired furnace in those days). But the copper-wire twisted-pair telephone worked fine almost all of the time. There were several outages of a few hours at a time but otherwise we could call friends and relatives, and 9-1-1 if we had needed to. It was very reassuring despite our other challenges. Today I have a small back-up generator, wood stove, and cell phone, but I doubt I will ever give up my twisted-pair telephone.
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.
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
My POTS is much more reliable than the electric power - can't remember the last time, if ever, that it was down.
Would you notice? I notice the one-a-year or less that there's an interruption in my electrical supply, as some digital clocks need resetting. It doesn't matter if I'm in/awake or not, and a 1-second interruption is enough.
If I used the POTS phone for all calls while I'm at home, I'm only going to notice it's not working if I try and make a call, which is a small fraction of the week.
Example (since I have a BT line): http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/12209/~/do-faults-ever-occur-on-the-bt-network%3F "BT currently clears 89% of business faults within five hours. We are committed to continuous improvement. Published network reliability statistics suggests on average only one fault in seven years."
So they are more reliable, but probably not more than 10 times more reliable.
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.
Incorrect. Once upon a time, yes, all phone lines led back to a "central office" which, of course, had stand-by generators. Not so these days and the points where digital backhauls are broken out to the pairs of copper that provide POTS to customer premise are often far from the CO. No generators live in those huts. Only batteries.
Last year when a major snowstorm that knocked out power for over a week (12 days to be exact), cell service was out after a day, but landlines stayed on the entire time.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
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>
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.
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.
They have been dismantling it by attrition and entropy for decades now. This just puts an official stake in its heart. Analog also seems to scare large companies these days...
Do i agree this should be done? No, but its reality.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hurricane Sandy destroyed the POTS network in much of the area that it hit. In fact it hasn't yet been fully rebuilt.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
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?
I was out of power for 12 days after Sandy. I had POTS telephone service for much of that. I did not have cable. And my neighbors' FIOS didn't work either.
POTS is a great resource in disasters. I predict it will be removed. Then someone will come up with an idea for a reliable backup service that will cost 100 times the cost of keeping POTS, and we will give that money to some corporation(s).
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.
I agree. However, I could agree to dismantling of POTS if they FIRST also lessen regulations on a swath of HAM for use by the public, and also legalize packet radio over CB, Family band, and other public use frequencies. We have the technology to radio for help in times of emergency -- Indeed HAM operators are sometimes on the scene in disasters before paramedics arrive. They already play a role in Earthquakes and other times when infrastructure is threatened. Lower the barrier for the common man to have greater ability to communicate first then I'll reconsider my stance on our keeping wired POTS going.
We have the technology for radios to negotiate to noise free channels automatically -- hell, my cheap wifi router does this. The cellular system exists, but we need a similar mesh network for the common people. The EM spectrum belongs to We the People, give us back some damn air waves instead of charging us for all of them. It's the information age, yet outdated packet radio laws remain repressive to progress. Problem is that the government can't just throw a kill switch on public powered wireless devices -- Like they can on the Internet (and probably telephone too).
It would be foolish to ignore that the government has an Internet Kill Switch, vast spying infrastructures, and a pro-censorship anti-discourse agenda whereby government agents actually plan to expose porn habits to silence dissent, while considering migrating any communication medium to IP based services. Furthermore -- The price of bits does not reflect the cost to distribute them. Cellular plans make a mockery of POTS long distance fees, and though it's never been cheeper to move bits the prices aren't going down nearly as fast as in foreign markets with actual competition. We need less regulation of the public sector and more regulation of the private sector's price fixed oligopoly before I'd ever advocate for tossing POTS out. Additionally: Unwarranted metadata collection is too powerful a tool already -- If Snoden can infiltrate PRISM, so can spies from enemy states.
Beware: When those in power advocate change, the changes suggested never give those they have power over more freedom.
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
The main problem with availability of service is not the signal range - it's power.
As in power to RUN the communication machine.
With mobile phones or other solutions requiring external power supply to run, in case of an actual emergency you have a serial power outage issue.
Both the network AND the communication device have to have working power supply - so you get twice the chance of failure compared to POTS which supplies the power to the communication device through the network.
Plus, it is a separate source of power going into the disaster area in case of emergency.
You can't really run your big screen TV or boil water on it, but you can sure as hell connect a radio or a charger for your GPS/radio/flashlight/WiFi-enabled smartphone to it and at least get the needed information in and maybe get some of it out.
During the war (here in Bosnia) we had electricity on for only couple of hours each day.
So people would routinely connect radios to the phone lines to listen to the news - despite warnings to stop doing that.
You simply can't do that with a mobile or VoIP (unless it runs on the power supplied by the POTS).
At best, making every cell-tower and every mobile phone solar powered would provide such functionality.
Up to the point where cell-towers are far more vulnerable to disruptions from everything that flies, falls, blows, burns or radiates.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
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.
Exactly. When Hurricane Ike came through here (Houston TX) and knocked out most fo the power grid, I had a POTS line at the time. Before then, the POTS lines ran all the way back to the local CO that had the infrastructure to keep everything powered almost indefinately. Not now. As soon as the batteries ran down that powered the local equipment in the little hut or equipment cabinet at the front of the subdivision, the phones and internet quit working. Same thing for the cell towers. Even though most had some generator backup, their downstream links ran through the same equipment, so they became isolated too. You could text between cell phones on the local network, but that was it and even that was spotty. This also meant no 911 service the entire time. So the lesson for me was that you better be armed in such situations. Power was off for 16 days. Ran everything in the house on a small generator except for the dryer and central AC. No cell service, internet, or POTS lines the entire time. Underground centralized service downtown where I worked fared much better and we made a few trips to use the internet on my company laptop and send out updated emails and such.
In Baltimore city in parts it was still alive in 2013. Wires from the house all the way to the CO 5 blocks away, all unswitched until it gets into that building. Phone service still locally active even without power. My parents gave up their landline this year and have had problems with VOIP ever since.
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
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
Spoken like someone without much imagination.
When the power goes out, the odds of needing to make a 911 call go way up.
Yep. Same experience here. No power for 7 days (we live in luxury compared to your 12 ... sorry). The landline was on the entire time.
We also experience frequent power outages (non-storm related) here in the lovely northeast US, and the typical routine is this:
1. Find flashlight.
2. Find the electric bill with the customer service number on it.
3. Go to the POTS/landline phone in the house.
4. Report power outage.
5. Marvel at how every other damned thing in the house doesn't work, but the "old" landline survives just about anything.
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.