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WSJ: Prepare To Hang Up the Phone — Forever
retroworks writes: "Telecom giants AT&T and Verizon Communications are lobbying states, one by one, to hang up the plain, old telephone system, what the industry now calls POTS — the copper-wired landline phone system whose reliability and reach made the U.S. a communications powerhouse for more than 100 years. Is landline obsolete, and should be immune from grandparents-era social protection? The article continues, 'Last week, Michigan joined more than 30 other states that have passed or are considering laws that restrict state-government oversight and eliminate "carrier of last resort" mandates, effectively ending the universal-service guarantee that gives every U.S. resident access to local-exchange wireline telephone service, the POTS. (There are no federal regulations guaranteeing Internet access.) ... In Mantoloking, N.J., Verizon wants to replace the landline system, which Hurricane Sandy wiped out, with its wireless Voice Link. That would make it the first entire town to go landline-less, a move that isn't sitting well with all residents."
Seems like a fair trade.
As soon as they can guarantee reliable cell service to everyone, they can be allowed to cease providing land line service to everyone.
With carriers having overcharged over 300 billion who is then on the hook if there are no more landline companies? Of course telcom giants want people only on wireless, Verizon has been selling off their landline business for years.
I haven't kept up with the laws the last decade but the ILECs - incumbent local exchange carrier - were the equivalent of government mandated monopolies. Telco reform act of '96 forced the ILECs to share the publicly paid for infrastructure with startup phone companies. The Internet exploded with thousands of ISPs popping up. This was rolled back under Bush Jr when Powell's son was running the FCC. I wonder if this means other companies can move into these abandoned areas without the ILEC screaming like crazy?
Storms of electromagnetic radiation created ...
Municipality should simply take over the existing land line infrastructure.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Only a couple of conditions:
1. All government services must be accessible at no cost via a method which is guaranteed to be available to any person. IOW if landline phone service isn't required to be universal then all government offices must have in-person hours and be staffed at a level sufficient to get everyone who shows up on any given day served before the office closes, or all services must be available via mail (postage pre-paid). Online-only services are not allowed, since the government isn't guaranteeing that everyone will receive Internet access. Phone-only services are not allowed since the government isn't guaranteeing everyone will receive cel phone service. Online-only or phone-only would only be allowed if the government mandated that everyone would be able to receive either Internet access or cel-phone service regardless of location. Which the service providers won't go for, since their whole goal is to avoid being legally required to provide service in unprofitable areas.
2. Any person must be able to get basic (local calling and 911 service) phone service at any address, regardless of where that address is, upon request at no more than the previous cost of equivalent landline service. Whether it be via cel or VOIP, the service must be available. Note that this doesn't completely get around requirement #1, since the basic service isn't guaranteed to provide access to government numbers. To the extent that it does, it would satisfy #1.
we use daily. Why throw it away?
...these supercarriers need to be advised that any service they plan on replacing POTS with, will fall under common carrier regulation, and they will need to get approval from state regulatory boards for price modifications, service level changes, and the like. Under Common Carrier regulation, they will have to open up their service offerings to competitors at the same rates they charge their internal providers, i.e. their Internet Service capability will have to be available to companies like NetZero, at the same rates that they charge their own internal ISP organization.
They will also be obligated to build out their infrastructure to provide universal access to provide coverage to every customer they pull POTS services from. That's not to say that they can't make hybrid service available, where they provide some form of a wireless trunk to an equipment stack outside of town that provides local distribution in the same area that they already do this for with POTS. Essentially they will replace T1 trunk hardware at those remote vaults with a wireless T1 system, and presumably none of the customers would be the wiser.
Note, I don't expect that this is how things will play out, just how I think it should. I'm biased, as I am a customer who's worked in the telecom industry.
You never know...
Hope you all have backup power supplies in place for when the power goes for more time than your mobile battery lasts.
That used to be my argument for keeping a landline. But you know what? Even with old style phone service, people tend to not keep a corded phone around - they prefer wireless handsets. When the power fails, so do those phones. Even with a landline, the last few times we had a power failure I had to use my cell phone to call it in.
We finally dumped our landline last year. Well, actually, we still have the number - my wife won't let us get rid of it. But now we're only paying ten bucks a month to T-Mobile for it instead of the forty-plus we were giving Century Link every month for way too long.
#DeleteChrome
Mmm, yes, I while had cell phones that I mainly used when I still lived in the States; I also had a landline in my home. Two cordless phones in the house that used. However, I had a cheap corded phone that I just kept in a cabinet in case of an emergency. Like the 7 days we were without power due to an ice storm. Corded phone came out, I was able to keep in contact. Sure, I could charge my cell phone in the car, but I had to leave the car running to do that.
I think we should probably be keeping that POTS system around, maintained and such. You just never know. We might need it for something!
I REAL capitalism, when you screw over your customers, they leave you and go to the competition. In fake capoitalism (read government controlled), you're pretty much the only game in town and have a protected monopoly and can screw your customers with impunity.... Kinda like the current utilities system we have.
It's been called POTS for at least 20 years. Sheesh, kids these days
.
I will fight to keep POTS as long as you prevent all unlicensed use of select short-wave radio bands.
I'm in Silicon Valley, and cellular just doesn't work very well. At least not Sprint's CDMA network.
At home, I have to go to a window to get one or two bars, because the local community association doesn't want a cell tower nearby. I have a Sprint Airave box, which gives me a femtocell which mooches bandwidth from my IP connection. This gets me VoIP quality at cellular prices. If I lose Internet connectivity, I lose cellular connectivity. The Airave box is badly programmed; when it loses IP connectivity it still captures local handsets and insists it's the best path to the network. You have to disconnect its power to reach a cell tower instead.
At TechShop Menlo Park, which is adjacent to a major freeway, I have to get near a window to get coverage. I'm not sure why there's a coverage hole there.
For a long time, there was no Sprint coverage on the Stanford campus, because Stanford had an exclusive deal with AT&T.
I was in San Jose recently, near PayPal HQ, and couldn't get Sprint connectivity until I drove up to a closed Sprint store. They have a femtocell so their demos work, and just outside the store, there was good connectivity.
Even when it works, cellular voice quality sucks. Sprint finally seems to have fixed their delay problem, though. For a while I was getting delays as long as a second, with delayed echoes coming back, like some low-end VoIP system.
The land line works great. Voice quality is very good, because it's only about 150 feet of copper to the big underground AT&T vault (the size of a shipping container, air conditioned, and full of racks of gear) out at the street. But there are no cellular antennas at that location; it's all wires and fiber.
POT is a constitutionally protected privacy interest. The airwaves are not.
That's not a bad idea. I don't know if you meant truly universal, or "full coverage in the affected area". I think it would be fine to allow an experiment in a town that has had the POTS infrastructure already wiped out, if the town has at least two competing VoIP or wireless carriers with full coverage in the town.
If it works okay in the town that had already lost POTS due to the hurricane, the same policy could be tried elsewhere. The phone company could drop POTS service in the county only if that leaves at least two providers of phone service with full coverage in that county. (Either two wireless, two, VoIP, or both).
In theory, that would be good for everyone. According to the phone company that would be good for them because they wouldn't be forced to use antique methods for rebuilding the network in the town, then maintain it. Consumers would be guaranteed multiple choices and therefore competition. We wouldn't need the government (in cooperation with the phone company) setting rates at 28Â / minute like we had with fully regulated phone service in the 1970s and 1980s because the guaranteed competition would mean companies compete on price and service.
The problem is the people outside of town. It's easy to have a cell tower or 2 in the centre of town but to have multiple towers will mean eating into their profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The price of a land line as far as I know is capped so even remote locations will be able to afford one. Not only that, but I believe that almost every location should be able to get a land line at this price and telcos are mandated to provide that service.
If telcos want to go wireless, they are essentially talking about getting the "last mile" out of the equation. How they get (voice) data from and to the neighborhoods isn't mandated. This has already led to phone systems being out on the fritz when they are most needed, because phone companies decided to cheapskate on things like electrical power availability, line of sight and such. The telephone system has helped keep communications going for disaster areas throughout the last 100 years or so with varying amounts of success. Lets at least get them to do it properly if they are ever allowed to replace it so people can be certain it's affordable and it will work even in disaster circumstances when the reliability is required most.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
So first there's a privacy risk although POTS can be tapped with a satellite or radar system, so even if it's constitutionally protected they're still tapping it.
The real argument is: POTS is obsolete but fiber is it's successor. They should be requiring the phone companies to install fiber to all homes, providing 10Gbps+ Internet and access to network resources like VoIP and IPTV.
The problem with an all wireless solution is limited capacity and radiation exposure. We've already ramped up emissions by millions upon millions of times, and it's literally causing DNA and brain injuries, preventing curing of cancer, causing species decline and extinction, and other problems. The Schumann resonance which the earth produces and all life is dependent on is literally being over powered by microwaves and other EMF causing all these different phenomena, including conditions like anxiety and schizophrenia.
When you walk around you're walking in a field of EMF smog. The mind cannot turn off, and melatonin production is also dropping because the pineal gland which produces it is activated by EMF of all wavelengths and doesn't get the chance when being flooded with signals 24/7.
Watch this video for one guys story. Who is Elisa Lam? On YouTube. Also covers bioelectromagnetic weapons development and their use by our governments to attack people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In a prolonged emergency, your phone is not the weakest link. Hell, once of those "emergency chargers" (a plug and a pack of AA batteries, basically) can be put next to your fusebox quite easily.
The problem is the cells. If your mobile phone is powered up by the local cell is flooded / offline / out of power then you're fucked.
I don't think landlines have much life left, to be honest. They are fast being replaced by wireless technology and are getting obsolete. And yes, while I have made phone calls on landlines in powercuts, the same can be said for mobile phones when the landline has also gone off.
The problem you're wishing to solve - long-term powerless - is much more of a problem all around and not one that either technology solves.
But then, generally, after a few days in anything catastrophic, calling from your house is likely to be not as important as you think. You either won't be there any more (and will be relocated somehow), or there'll be some other way of keeping in contact made available to you.
If you're that paranoid, keep a pair of cheap walkie-talkies charged. Worst that happens, you give one to a potential rescuer or use them to call in help yourself.
I suspect in certain areas that would indeed be costly for the telco. They'd have to balance that cost against the cost of laying and maintaining copper if they had to cover the entire county. Would they rather keep providing copper to the whole county, or switch to providing fiber or wireless to the county? Either way, the entire county has service.
my celphone charges in my car, and runs for a week
A big thing is that they don't get to define 'coverage'. Too many areas they claim are covered have terrible and unreliable service. To be covered, it needs to have x signal strength INSIDE each and every home all the time. No dropped calls at all, and no drop outs.
In other words, it needs to be at least as good as properly maintained copper. That also means they will need to have several days of backup power at each cell tower.
And since it costs a lot less than POTS to install and maintain, we expect it to cost less than POTS service. Note that in many areas they will need a low cost voice only unlimited minutes for a flat fee rate.
That's not an argument against regulations, it's merely an argument against putting horse judges and drinking buddies instead of professionals in charge of drafting, revising and enforcing regulations.
Here in the UK, our governments certainly have had many failings but your attitude is completely alien to our way of life.
Over here, we understand that the best way to have real freedom and competition is to have more than one powerful competitor and the government actually works to make sure that happens.
In the town I live in, there are two major supermarkets within 5-10 minutes walking distance of each other and there's another major one on the outskirts of town. If one of them does something stupid, then I would just move my business to another one.
The same goes for other types of businesses.
In other words, you are free to make as much money as you want in the UK (and Europe); you just have to do it in a socially fair and acceptable way.
And BTW, while we are discussing American "freedoms", what's all this about about allowing people to ask for your receipts and inspect your bags when exiting a supermarket in the US even though you are not suspected of doing anything wrong ?
Do you have any idea of the massive uproar which would occur in the UK if a supermarket (like Tesco) was stupid enough to try that over here ?
Such a concept of guilty until proven innocent is totally alien to our way of life and it would result in a massive backlash against the supermarket in question as well as a mass migration to supermarkets who did not treat their customers as criminals.
For a country which has given the world so much, and rightly deserves to be recognised for such, it saddens me to see Americans talk about freedoms and then willingly subject themselves to things which would never be tolerated over here.
Most of the people I know keep at least one old corded phone around just in case it's needed.
Very strong signal do that, little one don't. Simple enough?
You'll need really long jumper cables to keep the tower up and running. They like to really skimp on the batteries (if they don't just fail completely).
Yes. Drop POTS. Drop it and make it Public Domain. See what happens when you give us a little infra to build on.
Real capitalism is where you start off with many competitors and slowly whittle them down as one dominates the others either driving them out of business, or merging them into the fold, until eventually you have one giant monopoly controlling most/all supply and using sheer weight of capital to crush any competitors that attempt to enter the market. You get this with or without government intervention (sorry anarcho-capitalists, but your blind belief in competition solving all problems is sheer lunacy). And once all competition is gone, there is no incentive to compete on price, so the customers get screwed in the end. This is especially prevalent in large, infrastructure heavy businesses where huge capital is required just to start doing business, let alone compete with the incumbents.
The only system that combats this natural evolution of capitalism is government anti-monopoly intervention (forcing large monopolistic entities to break up into smaller entities, and blocking mergers that will result in monopolies).
They want to be able to sell you wireless, internet, etc, etc. But if you look around, they're not going to let you out the door for anything less than $100 a month anymore.
I had a client trying to figure out why AT&T was charging her $400/month for 2 "business" POTS lines. They told her she could reduce her bill to $150 if she took 2 POTS lines and a DSL connection. She already had Comcast cable and a Comcast phone line. Adding 2 lines to the Comcast plan would have cost $70 (the first 3 lines are usually the most expensive). But damn if that AT&T person didn't try the hard sell!
Basically this is about shedding regulatory obligations and pumping the public for even MORE money. Make no mistake.
They're still not promising universal coverage, coverage in underserved areas, higher speeds, etc. They're basically just trying to force the customers into paying more without the government coming down on them like a ton of baked shit bricks.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Can you hear me now?
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That "inspection at the door" works both ways. On several occasions, Costco inspectors have noticed I forgot to pick up my Forever stamps, etc. Two of them are among the friendliest staff in the whole store, and if they catch someone taking stuff then that translates into them keeping MY prices down. Everything about Costco comes across as "a great and fair deal for all", and yet that is the only store I exit that checks my receipt.
I come here for the love
It's easy to say it's just the phone company pushing it but here in Norway there used to be 2.6 million land lines (PSTN/ISDN). In the last statistics (H1 2013) there's less than 600.000 and the trend has been >10% reduction each year, so probably less than 550.000 right now. Fiber and cable are growing, xDSL is dropping the moment people get alternatives. Practically everybody already have a cell phone and would never consider dropping it, so price wise you can be on the cell phone forever before you break even having a land line as well. In the cities with multiple choices of Internet providers and plenty cell phone towers it's all but dead, serving a few elderly and such that don't want or need anything else.
I'm one of those with no land line, I have fiber + cell phone and if the power goes the fiber line goes too. Long story short, if all the towers near me go down or I can't get charge for my cell phone for so long that it's actually a problem - if I forgot to charge mine and there's an emergency I'd bang the neighbors' doors - then we're in deeper shit than me not having a cell phone. I worry as much about not being able to call for an ambulance roughly as much as being struck by lightning twice in a row. If you live on a farm far out in a rural area with crap cell phone coverage and your land line is truly your life line to civilization it's different, but I don't think it's necessary everywhere. That said, who says a tree won't fall over and take down a telephone pole or a land slide wash out a ground cable?
If I wanted to be really safe, I'd rather not depend on any local infrastructure at all and use something like inReach which I could bring along and will work no matter where I am as long as I got clear sight to the sky. Imagine you take a nasty fall and break a leg, do you really want to crawl all the way back to your land line? What if you're stuck and can't get loose? Yes, it costs a bit ($300 + $12/mo cheapest plan) and is only useful for emergencies but consider it like fire insurance - be happy if you don't have to use it ever. Of course you need to have a decent replacement for day to day activities, but it kind of puts a cap on how much the "emergency service" of land lines are worth. Cell phone only service would suck, but there's no way I'd turn down fiber or cable to replace copper.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Which is one of the many reasons why capitalism is sub-optimal for society: various assumptions such as perfect competition, communication, zero transaction costs etc leading to the conclusion that it is the most efficient model are blatantly incorrect in the real world. Steve Keen has showed this cleary, and Stiglitz demonstrated it ages ago. Still, our dear politicians conveniently forget about these findings and others from a long time ago, such as those by Kropotkin, and continue on the same descending road to nowhere. When will we start discussing political economics seriously again ?
AT&T and Verizon have been abandoning rural phone for years now. They sell their rural territories and invest in metropolitan areas because there's less expense in metropolitan areas. The same equipment that serves 100 people in a rural area serves 10,000 in newyork. Yet it costs the same. These laws force AT&T to serve the rural customers they have.
If they do away with these laws then the only option rural customers will have (the majority of the country) is cellular if it's available... and in many areas it is not. Even if you can get cellular, how much will that cost? Will AT&T provide cellphones at a price poor farming families can afford? Or are we going to further penalize those that choose not to live in smog choked city centers?
I agree there must be some deregulation. The cable companies and satellite providers have a distinct and unfair advantage over those services that are under regulation (telcos) But those telcos are under those regulations for a reason and we can't lose sight of that. They've used their easements and regulatory position for decades for profit. I'm sorry they aren't working so hot for them now, but sometimes you've got to pay the piper.
As long as broadband access can be guaranteed at reasonable price, it's all good.
If they are allowed to proceed with this, because you have to have *a* service at any time.
They will blanket the areas with signals so saturated and strong, people within them will be literally cooking - in much less time than they are now.
We are talking about cancers within months not years.
Then again, one industry supports another, right?
Pharmas will love this deal, as well as the entire cancer treatment machine, because there will be a magnitude more patients than before. Win-Win, really.
Oh, I guess we are the only ones fucked in the deal..
If you're running fiber to the premises (as basically all decently fast and non-latent Internet access entails), then it's trivial to include POTS functionality in the endpoint terminal at the home of business. Carriers should be required to maintain the POTS network until they come up with a better, non-wireless solution to replace it. I think that, in general, the network will be maintained IN MOST areas for at least another 10-20 years. Too much legacy equipment that's dependent on it right now. Even in Verizon areas damaged by Sandy (Fire Island), Verizon is changing their mind about providing shitty wireless service only and will be providing FiOS service.
"we only wish to serve mankind"
When they require all Internet providers to have common carrier status and be regulated as such.
I also want all ISP's that have no direct competition to a customer to be forced to regulated pricing and bandwidth. IF you are a monopoly in an area you are not allowed to rape your customers like Comcast and Verizon gleefully do.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
think about the privacy?!
While the PSTN may be illegally tapped as routinely as I eat pizza, evidence gathered in such a way is not admissible in court. It is only a short matter of time before we likely see our other communications showing up in court without warrants to obtain. With the NSA's data harvesting being public knowledge and law enforcement agencies able to request it there will no longer be an expectation of privacy. Our governement has done a great job labeling all forms of dissent "terrorism" and will stop at nothing to prevent political reform.
Get rid of copper POTS and the regulation surrounding it. Enact new regulation requiring the same level of service along with low end data be provided over fiber to each home.
Just because copper as a medium is obsolete does not mean the necessity of communication service is obsolete.
Even though I'm in town I'm not sure I buy cell over POTS. I have this thing called a basement (actually, under the front porch, concrete coverage 90-95% on all 6 sides -- small wooden ceiling/floor at one end), and I live in the midwest, where hiding in it from tornadoes is a thing that we do. I also have a buried landline (won't get snapped by falling trees). As soon as the cell companies can get me signal in the bunker, then we can being the conversation about removal of the POTS line.
Barring that we can talk about other technologies that would substitute and fill a similar feature set. Buried FTTP would be an acceptable substitute. Sure, there's the power loss issue for signaling in a disaster event from my end (though that's a signal in and of itself), but I'm willing to take that burden and USPes aren't really that complex a technology nor that high a cost. For the sort of trouble expected here (tornado/wind damage), FTTP should be about as reliable as POTS.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
In some alternate reality, where gravity pushes things apart, power doesn't corrupt, most people are highly competent at their jobs, and water is dry your comment is relevant. In this universe, lawmakers are chosen by either by a popularity contest or by whoever has the most guns. Those in power stay there by the loyalty of their friends and they reward that loyalty. In this universe, people rise to the level of their incompetence. That's not a suggestion of how it SHOULD work, that's a law how things DO work, just like the law of gravity. Wishing otherwise doesn't change anything.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...
Yes, truly on their last leg. I believe a Verizon employee tried to wash my car windshield at light the other day. Or maybe he was going door to door selling FIOS because it is incredibly profitable for Verizon.
Yeah. Those poor saps might then have to connect remote towers with rural telephone lines paid for by decades of extra fees on everyone else. Perish the thought.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
That could hardly be more wrong, but I don't think it matters. Telco profits were good 15 years ago. Since then - not so much. NOBODY has made record profits in the last six years because the economy is in the shitter, if you haven't noticed. (Modulo than a few campaign contributors who get paid directly by the government for maybe building solar panels some day.)
I don't see how that matters at all, though. If Verizon and AT&T want the rules changed, it's reasonable to expect them to adjust so that the changes don't cause problems for consumers. They've always been required to provide complete coverage, historically via copper wires. If they want to provide complete coverage via fiber, wireless, or coax instead that's fine. Dropping coverage may not be okay. Their profit or loss really isn't relevant to the discussion.
You'd do well to remember such overstatement is often a tactic of those who use "small government" as code for "not enough oversight to catch me accepting bribes".
Politically partisan, ignorant and insulting I see. It may work the way you suggest where you live because the people you are cheering for appoint horse judges and drinking buddies to make it that way and then blame the effects of incompetence and nepotism on the very idea of a regulatory framework. Take a look at other places where political parties are not recently descended from gangsters and you'll see your "in this universe" as the worthless pile of shit excusing corruption that it is.
I am anti America. Exactly because of institutions like AT&T.
Next!
The telcos want to drop their old copper loop technology? Fine. But mandate that they offer a basic broadband+VoIP service in its place with the same universal service, common carrier requirements. If its the regulation they want to escape, sorry. That just shouldn't happen. If we let one entity escape the rule of law by fiddling with definitions, then we start down a slippery slope.
Have gnu, will travel.
you are making some assumptions about use of your car in protracted emergency. what if the shit hits the fan and you are miles from home with your car but can't drive anywhere. so you make a long trek home without your 2000 lbs. "charger".....
The copper plant is still usable. Taking the bridge taps off means you can sling data pretty fast and far over a copper twisted pair.
I say if they want to walk away let groups use it for their purposes. For example, it'd be a good backhaul for a little data project I want to do in my district.
When I say "Republicans" I mean the people who vote against Net Neutrality...
the same ones who deny Climate Change, try to make abortion illegal, always vote for tax breaks for the rich, start wars to increase personal profits
those people
just name a policy, any policy, and it is **always** Republicans who are voting to enrich Oligarchs and further enslave everyone else
seriously, if you're still confused, just **name a policy** and it is easy to discern which are Republicans
Thank you Dave Raggett
copper very much either works or it doesn't. It's reliable, but once it starts degrading it goes fast.
Cell service can often _barely_ work. This leaves you in the position of fighting tooth and nail with a phone company to get the service you've been promised. Unless you're wealthy you going to lose that fight.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The problem is the people outside of town. It's easy to have a cell tower or 2 in the centre of town but to have multiple towers will mean eating into their profits.
One other thing to note is that cell towers have limited range, dependent on a myriad of factors it can be as little as several hundred yards to 10 miles. Do you know how many towers would be needed to cover, say, rural Nevada or Utah? It's completely unfeasible from a cost stand point. If they tried, everyone's basic cell service would cost over $500/month, nationwide. Besides, they would still need the cables in the ground to get the signal from place to place because wireless interconnects would only be line-of-sight.
have you seen the inside of a pots box, its not just wires stapled to a chunk of plywood
"Coverage" is a joke.
I'm the guy who posted this story about a year and a half ago.
Based on the comments, I went with T-Mobile. I live INSIDE the City Limits of Los Angeles. T-Mobile's "coverage map" showed decent signal at my house. I COULD NOT get a single bar.
If carriers can't provide wireless coverage to people inside the city limits of the second largest city in the country, why should we trust them to do it for those people out in the sticks?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
And?
$500/month?
Bullshit.
If you know anything about how much profit they rake in you wouldn't say such retarded things.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Live in small communities near family and friends, work the land, talk to people in person, barter, use carrier pigeons, starve the NSA and all the voracious government agencies and the multi-nationals. But you might need a spaceship/habitat to get away.
We had a tornado in our neighborhood in 2006. Power was out for 7 days and cable was out for 10. Cell service ceased working reliably because the cell towers were out. POTS never hiccuped, even as the tornado was overhead. I still had access to dialup Internet so I could at least do email.
Both AT&T, my POTS provider and Comcast, our cable provider, keep bugging us to switch to VOIP. I keep saying "No" for reason of reliability. There's nothing quite like having a pair of copper wires back to a central office powered by a big battery. Yes, we do have phones that don't require line power to operate including one in the basement where we shelter in a severe weather situation.
Then there is my ham radio equipment which has battery backup.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Verizon's cellular replacement does not support fax, modem, postage machines, alarm systems etc. I would not want to be a small business in that area. Unlike the copper, Verizon is not required to lease capacity on their cellular replacement. A nice comparison table between POTS and Cellular is at http://teletruth.org/POTSvsvoicelink.pdf Also see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/verizons-wireless-voice-l_b_3451383.html
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
They use Edison Nickelâ"iron batteries. Easily a 50 year life but can work for a 100 years. Depends upon the load how long they run without power - but they are cheap as hell to maintain and you can't run them to death like lead acid; they take abuse and keep going.
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its ran off batteries ... really did i have to spell that out for you
My parents moved out to the countryside when they retired. They are a few miles from the nearest small town (population of a few hundred). The only way for them to access the internet is satellite, which is too high latency for VOIP. After a big storm, they lost cellular connectivity for several years (most likely a tower went down and was never replaced due to the small number of users) and pretty much relied on their copper (which was generally in terrible condition and had a ton of noise and crosstalk).
Is it an obsolete technology? Yes, but remember, obsolete technologies that work (IBM mainframe and dumb terminals, telegraph, et cetera) are a whole lot better than new technologies you cannot access.
So, do we really need copper telephone wires in New York or San Francisco? No, but companies should not be able to remove phone service unless they have government-regulated VOIP utilities or a net-neutral internet connection with bandwidth to support VOIP ready to replace it.
And because POTS lines have a mandated reliability, they provide adequate battery power for the mission and they actually maintain them. Because cellular has no such mandate, they don't provide adequate runtime or do appropriate maintenance. Occasionally a cell tower goes up in a big fireball due to poorly maintained batteries.
I realize you city dudes have a hard time with this idea but there are large swaths of the USA, and world, where there is no cell phone service. POTS is all we have and I had to lay a mile and a half of my own cable to get that. There is something called mountains that make radio, TV, cellular, WiFi and such not work so well.
In that case, they will need to include free data at at least 56Kbps with those unlimited minutes on the basic plans. They'll need to offer an allowance to replace FAX and modems with something that can use cellular data. Not sure what to do about the alarms that use a dry pair.
Suffice to say they're going to have to really step up their game with cellular if they want it to actually replace POTS.
ou live in a place where power doesn't corrupt? Where all the bureaucrats are competent and politicians are trustworthy? Where is that? I want to move there! At the very least, I'll buy my next car there and maybe get a credit card from there, because here you can't trust used-car sales people or credit card companies.
I joke, but seriously do you have a counter-example? Is there some place where cronyism isn't common? Somewhere in the United States even, since this discussion is about US policy?
You say I'm politically partisan. For which party, do you think? Are you under the impression that there's no cronyism in the Obama administration, or that there was none in Bush administration? Which party am I criticizing when I point out that US politics centers around loyalty, which results in cronyism?
Having the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that cronyism and corruption exists isn't condoning it, quite the opposite. IGNORING it is implicitly condoning it.
I didn't say that all regulation is bad. I said that we should be careful when proposing a list of new regulations, because that often goes wrong. You're absolutely right that people coming up with new laws INTEND for the effects to be good. The person who made it illegal to "affect emissions" didn't INTEND to make hybrid conversions illegal, but they did. Their intentions were good, but so what? Does that somehow magically undo the harm people cause, because the harm was caused by reckless neglect to think things through rather than malfeasance?
Telco profits were good 15 years ago. Since then - not so much
Try again.
Verizon made (net profit, after taxes, etc) over 11 BILLION in 2013. AT&T made over $18B.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
I think it's worse that we preach innocent until proven guilty while behaving just the opposite. As an American citizen, we are ripe for another revolution or civil war. The reset button desperately needs to be pressed as we are basically at society's blue screen of death.
I'm a leftist/libertarian
You're a troll...you're invited to the discussion when you want to talk about...***SPECIFIC POLICY***
we can look up who voted for what...you know that right?
name a policy & it's easy to test my theory about Republicans virtually always voting the wrong way on policy issues
until you do that this discussion is over
Thank you Dave Raggett
You are oversimplifying. What you describe happens where there are high barriers to entry. Not all barriers to entry are imposed by regulatioon. Many of them are natural.
OTOH, where there are high barriers to entry, either natural, or created by government regulation, then monopoly will be the final state, unless there are higher bariers to monopoly. Please note, any line of business where there are fewer than around 10 significant competitors is tending towards monopoly. If there are more than around 10, then it is plausible that new competition is entering faster than old competition is being eliminated. ... But "significant" is tricky to define. Even "competition" can be difficult to define in the face of secret agreements and patent pools, etc.
To put at it's most simple, neither the free market nor unfettered capitalism nor totalitarian control has ever existed in the historical record. We find many examples of societies tending in one direction or another. however. E.g., classical Greek civilization had an essentially unregulated marketplace. They were not notably successful economically, though they did do slightly better than did the Germans of the same time period (about which I know little), and extremely poorly compared to either the Egyptians or the Persians. OTOH, this may have been due to their tendency to invest heavily in their military...and to get into lots of fights with their natural enemies, the Greeks. (Athens and Sparta eventually wore each other into insolvency.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
it took until the last 5 years for states to require power backup systems on Cell towers... you know generators or something so they didn't go dead when the power went out in a storm. Those kinds of things were REQUIRED for POTS.
That's a 5% return on their $200 billion investment.
Historically, savings bonds have often been better than that. Instead of the risks with running a huge business, they could have just bought bonds. Around 1999-2000 profits were twice that. So it's "record profits" only if by "record" you mean "lower than average" and "less than half of what it used to be".
Every ounce of copper infrastructure was paid for with YOUR tax dollars via tax breaks. That is what gace the Bell system a monopoly; that's why they got broken up - and that's why corrupt legislators paid off by the Bell subsidiaries reformed ATT. The telcos have been charging excise taxes for years that are supposed to guarantee fiber infrastructure. They haven't - not nearly as they promised they would do. I say nationalize telecommunications infrastructure, or force out the incumbents. As for POTS: why give it up? It's there; like trolley lines in cities used to be there until we tore them up (and now we regret having done that). Leave the infrastructure in place. The ONLY thing the telcos care about is their profit; they care about nothing else. If they want to eliminate a service, it is for their current senior management's benefit only. Remember that.
correct. Neither are Wireless companies or Cable companies.... the concept of "net neutrality" hinged on that idea that POTS was essentially a "right" to all homes and businesses. The new technologies have no such requirement, in fact the courts keep pushing them back. Imagine that companies want to kill off the only "open" service?
ps, 2013 was the best year of the last ten. In 2012, their profit was less than 3% of their capitalization. In other words, of you invested $1,000, after a year you made $30. Woohoo, huge profits!
And when your house is on fire, make smoke signals. There's your 911.
I'll accept removal of my land line when the seas freeze over!
1. Cell phones don't work in our house (aluminum siding == Faraday Cage).
2. We would have to pay by the minute for every call we get, including spam calls.
3. Cell phones need a good battery to work - low battery == unable to call 911 for emergencies.
I can count on one hand the number of times in my life (66 years) when I couldn't make a phone call with a normal land line. I can count on at least 3 hands the number of times I couldn't make a call in the past week or two on my cell phone (thanks AT&T)...
So, if these boneheads at the providing phone comapnys do the following, I may change my position.
1. Guarantee universal cell access EVERYWHERE! (Right...)
2. Don't charge time for incoming calls, EVER.
3. Provide a backup emergency power supply (portable) so we can use our phones for emergency calls when the phone battery is dead.
4. Guarantee that #1 is available 24x365 with a SLA of 6+ sigma (99.9999+) percent of the time.
Until then, screw those money grubbing b'tards!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
I know you're trolling, but (hear me out on this one) this is actually true.
I don't know about anybody else, but I don't use POTS. I haven't used it in over 6 years. In fact, the house I most recently moved into was missing the POTS equipment at the demarc (the little plastic box is empty with a pair of obviously torn wires leading up to it.) I didn't care though because I don't ever plan on subscribing, and whatever copper thief made off with it can have it to feed his crack habit for another 5 minutes.
I fully imagine I'm not alone and that a lot of other people are in the same boat. That said, I think it is wholly unreasonable for the government to mandate that telecoms maintain an aging system that nobody save for a small subset of individuals even wants any more. Eventually that comes out of your bill somewhere if you happen to subscribe to another service that these companies offer, so effectively it is a tax on you for something you don't even care about and doesn't even affect you in any way. In fact one of the few people who might use it would be the crackhead who stole my POTS switch, but even he has cheaper options available through wireless, so not even he needs it.
Is it good for America to do away with obsolete systems that we don't use anymore? I'd say yes.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
How the hell am I supposed to find my cell phone lost in my house if I have no land line?
The wireless gateway would have to implement T.38 to support fax machines. Most alarms have already switched to wireless, so that shouldn't be a problem (dry pair isn't an option with many FTTH installs either).
Fuck no, telicoms can not be trusted to do anything other then what gives them more money. So no lets not go with that plan.
Get off your arse and vote instead of leaving it to those who treat politics as a game for the rich and you may get to live there without having to move.
I take it that's a no, you have no counter-example. You can't come up with a single time or place in history when government didn't have quite a few douchebags. 200 years ago Lord Acton said "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". It's always been true (see Caesar). Yet your solution to reduce corruption is to give them MORE power.
Sounds like comcast. We got a few business phone lines from comcast where I work, and none were usable for fax, alarm panels, modems or anything. We canceled because they couldn't even understand why there could even be a problem in theory. Voice works, so everything must work!
At my house, Verizon stopped providing POTS phone service ages ago. VoIP phone is all they offer now, and while better, it's still not very good.
I don't know, but it works for me.
Obviously not. Speak to me and not the strawman in your head.
Caesar was corrupt before he gained power and it's part of the way he was able to gain it.
I for one do not welcome our POTS replacing overlords. We had AT&T replace our old POTS connection with a box, for some reason (it's costing AT&T more money!). This box straight up sucks poop through a straw. I hate it. It's prone to crashing, and has to be powered. In our neighborhood, we have Detroit Terribly Engineered for power, and they can't maintain their connections worth anything. What made it so much better over the years was being able to get a corded phone off the shelf in the kitchen, plug it in, and get a dial tone which we then used to scream at DTE. It was a guaranteed bet that it was up, ready to react to your call at the drop of a hat. Does this box replace it? Not even close. It has several problems: 1. The signal strength is weak. Although it's an antiquated technology, I've still had to fire up a fax machine occasionally. The signal coming out of that dumb box is so weak we have to unplug the entire rest of the house in order to convince it that there is a phone connection. 2. It all hinges on the box. As I mentioned before, this box sucks. It's prone to crashing, which can't be resolved unless it gets power-cycled. I don't want to be in a situation where I can't call 911 because some box had a brain-fart. 3. It also needs power to run. This sucks too, because I had to go out and buy a UPS, since AT&T didn't give me one. This will last up to eight hours before finally giving in. With week-long power outages becoming more frequent, I don't want my access to services to hinge on how long the UPS can keep the box going. Sure, it's harder to maintain a web of copper. But the reliability is what made the landline the landline, so unless they have some magical solution which can give at least the exact same service as before, I want out.
whoeverthefuck is downmodding my comments on this thread should explain themselves b/c this comment and my original one in this thread are NOT TROLLING or FLAMEBAIT
I'm just not trolling...my comments have a point that can be falsified or debated...yes I use aggressive or colorful language but i'm not mindlessly arguing...
my points are coherent and consistent....this is bullshit!!!
Thank you Dave Raggett
I know the copper lines can be used for very high speed dsl; are they trying to get the lines abandoned and then purchase them on the cheap for services?
It's not that I'm old - even though I am - this can't happen until the quality of service for 3G/4G/WhateverG matches what Ma Bell & Co. deliver. I spend a good amount of my day on the phone speaking on webinars. It also happens that my home office has very poor service from AT&T. I've tried VoIP, tried cellular, both with lousy audio quality results and even a dropped call in the middle of a live webcast - that from VoIP. So, we have a POTS line - and when I'm on a webcast or confcall that's the only one I use. When the other things work maybe they can eliminate POTS. Not yet.
Too bad I have not mod points for this subthread, today.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It's my only good internet option, slow at 1.5Mb but unlimited. Satellite no, 3g no, dial-up hell no.
Just remember mouth piece.
1. The meltdown: Congress remove the funding for the Justice Department so they now have 1/3 the amount of people to pursue the financial crisis. ( call it Obama all you want but he did not defund the people who would build the legal cases to prosecute).
2. due process free detention / execution: Stated enemy combatant, traitor or terrorist can be engaged by lethal means. Yep if you are a traitor move to a foreign location to be trained by known terrorist, for the purpose of attacking America or American people the US can attack you. Even if you have now moved back to the US to perform those traitor or terrorist actions.
I would assume you would prefer that we remove the federal sentencing of "up to death" for traitors?
Go hate to go hate. When all of "your" team votes for the laws agrees with the de funding then complains that the laws are used as worded and and no one has been prosecuted. Well that is an issue you created so stop bitching.
I am not saying Obama has done great things but damn people. Make the mess then bitch at someone else. Rinse and repeat.
love the taste, hate the texture
I work in telco and what this is abut is making all telephony VoIP/SIP not getting rid of the land line altogether. You will still be able to get a normal phone, with a chord and all. It will just work over a different set of circuits is all. Which is entirely black box to the vast majority of.. everyone.
I can't even get DSL over copper. I'm not that far in the boonies, but go figure. Once Comcast signed it's wireless spectrum transfer deal with Verizon. All expansion ceased.
You're an idiot...
Sure, I am for this, with a 100% guarantee of coverage. What does that mean? It means at my house I get poor wireless reception. So I have to use a microcell piggybacked on my Comcast broadband internet connection. And I'm within a few hundred feet of one of the main routes in the area.
As such, if this is going to be passed, then the telecoms need to put up a crapload more cell towers. Furtheremore, we all know what will happen.
The telecoms will grease our selected officials to vote for their cause. They'll be freed from the need to run copper. While at the same time get to keep ALL the fees for expansion, which of course they'll never do...just pocketing the funds.
That tax is NOT going to go away. It'll just be converted to even more profit for the telcos.
What our government SHOULD be doing, is laying conduit....then anyone can run cables through said conduits.
Government subsidies?
We the customers?
Truth is, Comcast has been !@#$% us over for years. And really should be split into two companies. One which offers television services and one that offers internet.
Actually, in combat, semi-automatics are usually more effective than fully automatics. Though the most effective is likely the 3-round burst mode.
Evolution is the same, isn't it? Survival of the fittest. Eventually only one species should remain on earth. And no, symbiosis is a merely a transitional stage to accomplishment.
So eventually we'll either have humans that can photosynthesize and dwell in air and water....or cockroaches. One of the two.
We have a system in which controlling parties manipulate who is their candidate (by the time Pennsylvania got to vote in the primaries in 2008 and 2012. Both candidates had already been selected - we NEVER go to vote), while simultaneously passing legislation that prevents outside parties from being able to access the ballot.
So no....that's not really government by the people. Furthermore, you can try to speak to your selected officials. Even if 90% oppose something, they'll still pass it based on who is giving them money.
Heck, I'm not even all that rural. Just on the very outskirts, about 10 houses down from one of the main routes in the region. I can't even get DSL.
So I am locked into Comcast or no broadband.
Should have it's TV and internet business split into two companies. (And probably a third to own the wires.)
And overnight I went from not being able to stream 3D content from Netflix over my Comcast 50mbps service, to it streaming just fine. So it was nothing to do with hardware, just greedy politics.
Was a registered Democrat who ran for both governor and state senator a number of times. Almost won too.
If I'm paying $70 for internet, I should be able to access what I please.
In a commodity industry, during an economy in which the average consumer is hard pressed to get a 1%-2% return on an investment.
So yes, that's pretty good. And also remember that there are a LOT more profits there that are hidden, and distributed under tax law.
If I earn $10 billion, but pay my executives $1 billion in salary, which I deduct as a business expense... the solution to companies paying taxes was to minimize net revenue and pay much of the wealth to the elites.
They really made $2,000, they just hid most of that other $1,000 in tax loopholes.
Agree with pretty much all of the above. Also, Comcast and Verizon should NOT be able to sell each other's services on their websites. Conflict of interest!!!
Realize it was planned a few years prior....so let's be honest, let's blame Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr, Obama....and anyone else with a D||R
Until we get smart and change it to DNR (DO NOT RE-ELECT), we're gonna be screwed.
The problem with competing is how hard it is to lay all the connecting cable. You're either digging up roads and laying conduit (expensive, disruptive, traffic nightmare) or plopping down telephone poles (expensive, disruptive, traffic nightmare but somewhat cheaper than the last suggestion).
What we need is a robot that can burrow a 12" in conduit tunnel, while 3D printing it's own pipe, the result would be a technology who's non-disruptive nature would make it an extremely disruptive technology. Suddenly, all I need to lay fiber is a conduit droneand a man above the surface direction it's path while another refills it's 3D printer toner cartridge.
So you're claiming that last year Verizon paid it's top executives a billion dollars?
That is in addition to the billion that they paid to the alien federation, correct?
In real capitalism, you make sure there is no competition left before you screw over your customers.
And how, exactly, do you do that?
Space launch probably has the highest barriers-to-entry of any industry. But by building a family of space launch vehicles from scratch, and making them reliable and profitable, all while greatly undercutting his competition, Elon Musk has proven that it's possible to overcome even those barriers. We can conclude that your jab at "real capitalism" is unfounded.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.