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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!
Remember that the wire used to deliver POTS service also delivers DSL. No wire, no DSL.
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.
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>
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
Until fiber optic cable cable to the home is as common as copper it won't be a suitable replacement for POTS.
I *almost* agree. Saying we should keep POTS until it can be replaced with fiber, however, is like saying everyone should stick with driving Yugos until it becomes feasible for everyone to buy a Ferrari. Wireless technologies are a good interim solution until fiber can be deployed ubiquitously, especially in very low density areas.
And I *almost* agree with this. I have this one caveat: that a wireless interim solution actually be implemented before POTS is killed. If the data transmission corporations want to kill POTS they should be eager to cooperate in setting up an adequate replacement in terms of coverage, accessibility and reliability.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
[Parent's emphasis retained]
If the current POTS were highly centralized - you'd have a point. But it isn't, it's widely distributed. The ring-and-talk voltage for my analog POTS phone comes from a phone center just a few miles away. Folks at the south end of the county have their own center, as do the folks at the north end of the county, etc... etc... (If an accident or disaster severs our links to the outside world, our local system continues to operate just fine.) Will this be true of an IP based network?
And that's the real key as to whether or not an IP based system is sufficient replacement for the POTS - will it provide equivalent support (I.E. will it continue to work even if I lose power to my house as the current system does), and will it fail (at the system level) as gracefully? While I doubt the POTS is entirely bulletproof, short of damage that physically destroys the system (which are rare event indeed, even on the national scale) it's robust as hell. After all, they've had over a century to refine the design.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
And don't forget; The NSA can't track and tap the phones of us with POTS like they can you folks with cell phones. Therefore they must force all of us to have cell phones so we can be tracked and listened to. Warrants are only needed with POTS.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?