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FCC Wants To Trial Shift From Analog Phone Networks To Digital
An anonymous reader sends word that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has given the go-ahead for telecommunications companies to start experimenting with an IP-based telephone protocol. From the article:
"The experiments approved by the FCC would not test the new technology - it is already being used - and would not determine law and policy regulating it, FCC staff said. The trials would seek to establish, among other things, how consumers welcome the change and how new technology performs in emergency situations, including in remote locations. 'What we're doing here is a big deal. This is an important moment,' FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said. 'We today invite service providers to propose voluntary experiments for all-IP networks.' The move in part grants the application by AT&T to conduct IP transition tests as companies that offer landline phone services seek to ultimately replace their old copper wires with newer technology like fiber or wireless."
Aren't a lot of people already using digital phone service?
(at home we have phone service via Charter cable)
My POTS line works great, works in power outages, and sounds way better than any other phone service I've had the misfortune of being exposed to. Of course the FCC wants to screw it up.
I'm not at all saying that the FCC is pushing towards surveillance with this, but I question whether or not this makes it easier, more difficult, or the same. I'm under the impression that it would become easier to spy on the content of calls (the so called "metadata" wouldn't see any change, of course).
More delays that make conversations frustrating! Woohoo!
Brave Sir Robin ran away. ("No!") Bravely ran away away. ("I didn't!")
AT&T and Verizon are pushing this. Why? Digital services aren't currently unregulated. Digital services are non-unionized. Digital services don't currently require universal service. Digital services are not required to be repaired in a timely basis. Unless the FCC declares digital services to be common carriers instead of information providers, we are going to get screwed and hard!
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Of course! Anybody not using POTS is already VOIP. Of course, even POTS customers are VOIP if they call beyond their local exchange, probably.
On the plus side, if done right (HA!!) POTS would still be POTS but from the neighborhood Uverse/FIOS/etc box rather than from the central office - think many neighborhood exchanges rather than one or 2 per town. Or maybe each neighborhood on a phone co. PBX. The concept goes downhill from there ...
And if that works they can get rid of some central offices which are often on valuable real estate near the middle of town.
Really, because my POTS line goes down every couple of months, sometimes mis-routes calls, only supports in-band DTMF signaling, and often has lower quality audio than my VoIP line.
It's almost like the underlying signaling technology is not the sole determining factor in quality of service, and there are a number of ways to meet (or fail to meet) desired service goals. But I know that's a silly idea -- we know from history that older == more robust, just like older cars start better in cold weather and older flashlights need fewer batteries.
It works this well because it is /mandated/ that the resources required to /make it reliable/ are /spent/ to make it so.
If wireless networks were provisioned with the battery backup/generators necessary and the redundancy of overlapping coverage to account for faults in towers (or some random drunk plowing in to one) then they too would be this 'reliable' (though the software in the stack would be in question; having multiple brands/models of phones would help).
My POTS line works great, works in power outages, and sounds way better than any other phone service I've had the misfortune of being exposed to. Of course the FCC wants to screw it up.
I was home for the holidays over Christmas and the power went out at my parents place during an ice storm. The battery backup for the IP phone started beeping. They asked what it was for and I had to explain to them that they had signed up for VoIP service and that it needed power to the internet router to keep the phones working. The battery lasted about 8 hours.
So, while VoIP works quite well, POTS has the advantage of pretty much always having a dial tone, even when the power is out.
If they do decide to get rid of analog lines and go to VoIP, then they are going to have to figure out how to keep it powered. Of course, POE has been around for a long while. I'm guessing, though, that the phone companies can't just hook up the VoIP phones to the analog battery banks due to differences in power requirements.
Are things different now?
No, VOIP still sucks. Cellular sucks. Cellular plus VOIP really sucks. Lags as high as 1 second.
Telephony has gone from "You can hear a pin drop" to "Can you hear me now?".
Analogue telephone networks were phased out starting in the 1980s when digital transmission lines became affordable.
The only part where you still can get an "analogue line" is the last mile. However even there the first thing that gets done is a conversion to digital.
What the FCC is talking about is turning traditional digital TDM networks to VoIP networks. This has nothing to do with analogue or digital. With the proper adapters you can connect your dial phone to both, and your phone company can still charge you extra for touch dialling.
They never said *when* you would hear the pin drop.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
They DAMN well better make digital service providers common carriers and subject them to all the same regulations as PSTN.
Otherwise, we are truly fucked.
Old geezer confession... When things got really rough back in the day I used to take a break and sit in the dark switching closet and listen to the electromechanical relays go clickey-clack. Here a call, there a call, imagining the vast global web of conversations. Some would spark and the blue-green lights were a beautiful visual In the darkness, the transformer a barely audible bass hum.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
POTS is simple and much more resilient than VOIP so, let's get rid of it. VOIP is a MESS, way to go FCC!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
It works this well because it is /mandated/ that the resources required to /make it reliable/ are /spent/ to make it so.
The commission report states their standard of reliability...They are holding the new technology to a lower standard of reliability.
24 hours of backup power after a power outage
During winter storms and other similar events; I have experienced 3 to 5 day outages on occasion: POTS lines never went down, so emergency calls could still be made, even when there was no cell service...
though, that the phone companies can't just hook up the VoIP phones to the analog battery banks due to differences in power requirements.
During an extended outage; I can power the bloody VoIP devices myself, via a local generator. MY concern is, that even if I power up the VoIP phone, and all my on-premises equipment, the network link will be dead, because the phone company's nearest repeater's battery has died --- I.E. the remote unit somewhere in their infrastructure that lights up a fiber, and converts it to Ethernet over copper, before feeding it into my building.
I am content if the FCC just requires them to provide continuous power up to the consumer household; with a minimum of 72 hours of onsite backup power for any network elements such as remote pedestals -- to be replenished prior to exhaustion, and a hookup for the homeowner to provide a battery and additional sources of emergency power at their location ---- such as a solar panel and charge controller to help charge the battery, when power is down for an extended period.
This is great if a transformer blows. For many people their pstn wire is on the same poles as their power and if the lines are down, the lines are down.
That is possible, but usually what happens is the electricity gets switched off due to a fault / short-circuit, or transformer blowing... like you said.
One fault in the electrical system, and the circuit breakers gets thrown on a very large number of people.
Your telephone line is a private circuit. Chances are, if someone's phone line got a short circuit -- the other circuits are intact -- it's not everybody elses.
Also... often the telephone cabling may be completely underground; all the way from the served location to the central office. Whereas, the electrical transmission need be overhead.
The distribution networks look entirely different, so there is a fair chance your phone line might not be near your power line much of the way.
Remember party lines? We got one once, by accident. Very entertaining (!). (1960's)
Phone calls to my grandparents, even in the 60's: Call their neighbors, who had an actual phone, ask them to go get grandma, call back in 1/2 an hour (This was KY, neighbors weren't that close, physically). The neighbors and my grandparents were friendly, all right - 3 pairs of their kids married each other (one of them being my mother)
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
I've experienced two different kinds of call mis-routing on POTS. The first is where my phone rings, but there are actually two other parties connected to the call, and no one can hear me. This is almost certainly a signaling failure at the electrical level, which doesn't have an equivalent failure mode under VoIP. (VoIP *has* failure modes related to electrical misconnection, but they don't cause the same error). To the best of my knowledge, no fire was related to this failure (certainly nothing at my end caught fire).
The other failure mode is almost certainly related to the in-band command signaling I was complaining about and you were defending, wherein the number I dial is not the endpoint to which I am connected. I don't mean "I misdialed" or even "the computer at the remote end of my call failed to decode my in-call DTMF signaling" I mean "my auto-dialer sent DTMF and I got connected to a different number than the one represented by the tones I played on the line".
And the failure of DTMF in-call is also in issue with POTS, whether you believe it or not. I agree, it's not something POTS was designed to deal with, but it is something that is actually used in the real world that POTS does not handle cleanly and has no capability to improve its reliability. If you want to convince end users around the world that they should not require the use of DTMF signaling because it's unreliable over POTS be my guest, but arguing that it's not useful just because POTS wasn't designed for it is like arguing that electricity is not useful just because steam locomotives were not designed for it.
Modems and fax work fine over VoIP if you set their speed (bandwidth) lower than the bandwidth setting of the voip. If you set the voip channel to 48Kbps and set the fax to 56Kps that doesn't work well - you're trying to 56K of data through a 48K channel.
Instead, set the VoIP to 64 and the fax to 34. 34K through a 64K channel works fine.
The cell tower your phone talks to will last 24 hours at best. After that, it doesn't matter if your cellphone is charged. I have seen a few multi-day power outages but the phone has always worked.
Copper has been on the skids for a while, but I wonder if the MBA whiz kids have started doing the math on the long-term salvage value of copper.
At some point, I can see them just start deciding they're just not in the analog business enough to start demo-ing all that copper they have for its metal value.
I've got a cable company provided VoIP service in an area prone to power outages. I also have my POTS service as well that I refuse to discontinue, much top the chagrin of the cable provider AND the POTS provider.
I have extensive UPS and the ability to run some devices without power for as much as a couple of days. But, it's utterly pointless with the cable provider because, apparently, the intermediate nodes every mile or so between me and the CO/headend are battery backed. But, their batteries die after a couple of hours. So, no matter what I do, the VoIP service(and the internet service) die after two hours.
Now, let's not kid ourselves, the POTS CO also uses a battery bank too. But, that battery bank can run the CO for half a day, after that, a generator cranks up and runs the POP for five days, minimum, before needing to be refueled. The POTS essentially never goes down.
POTS provides 99.999% (five nines) reliability (that's 5.26 minutes of down time per annum) whereas, despite outlandish claims that are bald faced lies, the cable provider's VoIP service is more akin to 99.9% (three nines) reliability (that's 525 minutes, 8.75 HOURS, downtime per annum). I suffer numerous VoIP outages for short and long period every year. If it wasn't for my ability to make international calls for a tiny fraction of the price, I would abandon VoIP completely.
Oh, and don't get me started on unreliable call qu-a---l-it---y... quality, DTMF detection, number spoofing with no ability to trace...
But, here's the KICKER. I sell, install, and maintain VoIP PBX networks. Behind all their SIP trunks, they all have POTS backups, ever at the ready. How's that for irony?
There's really nothing to it.
I worked for two carriers that have been doing it (POTS over SIP using the straight Internet).
Apart from TDD (which we never had to deal with), it just works as long as the customer is using the carrier's ip network (mainly if the customer needs to do FAX or data calls), voice works using third party networks well too.
This is the typical case of slowing down the process, just migrate it already.
At the same time, there are millions of phone lines running over triple play boxes (typically HFC fiber-coax networks from CATV providers) for at least a decade, the only difference is in that case you're 100% stuck with using the provider's network, but it's IP as well (typically MGCP).
This looks like a case of pretending it isn't done already...
Just deploy SIP over a dedicated VLAN plus endpoint isolation, so you can't even ping the ATAs from the internet, nor between on another.
A company that charges you $10 for a single call and you still haven't switched to Vonage at $25 / month, or Vitelity (cents per hour) or any of the other companies that treat you as a customer rather than a victim?!
My business has used Vonage for years and we're very happy with it. Only when we first got it we had it set to high bandwidth, which our modem wouldn't carry without stuttering. Since we set it to medium or low bandwidth ten years ago we've had no trouble. If you've used something like Magic Jack $10 / year?) and you thought that all VoIP was like that I can understand. It's not, though. If you're willing to pay a few dollars per month there are several very good VoIP providers who will provide you with good service.
Just what we need, to let the emergency services (POTS-line based) have to rely on Cisco and its army of CCNIdiots for communications.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin