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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?
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...
I think we should probably be keeping that POTS system around, maintained and such. You just never know. We might need it for something!
In the real world, ISPs rely on laying cables, and allowing any schmuck to lay cables throughout your neighborhood is a recipe for disaster. Realizing this, a competent (ie, non-Randroid) local government would require the companies that lay cables to sell usage of their cables at a fair price to competitors to promote healthy competition. Unfortunately, Randroids rule the day, and the companies that are allowed to lay cables cannot be burdened with regulations because ARGLE BARGLE FREE MARKET, and so we are in the situation that we are in.
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.
In real capitalism, you make sure there is no competition left before you screw over your customers. Being good capitalists does mean using any means to destroy your competition and government is a good tool, fairly cheap and well armed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
Yeah, people who pay for the cables, the installation, the maintenance, and the repair should be forced to allow the competition on their infrastructure even though it might interfere with their operation. I mean, we need to control who can lay cables and only allow our biggest political contributors and/or the highest bidder to lay infrastructure. Because Randroids HARG ARGLE BLARGLE...
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?
The alternative is that they can negotiate with each individual property owner whose property the cables run through individually. Good luck with that.
In real capitalism, where the government doesn't prevent the development of monopolies, there is no competition to go to when you get fucked over.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
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.
I REAL capitalism, when you screw over your customers, they leave you and go to the competition.
Which is selling you exactly the same shit sandwich as the company you left.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
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?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
You've got your capitalisms reversed. Fake capitalism, aka "fantasy capitalism" is when you screw over your customers, they leave you and go to the competition. This scenario of a just world largely only exists in the imagination of libertarians. Real capitalism with unregulated markets inevitably leads to monopolies as more and more wealth gets concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people as competitors eventually get bought out.
Don't like a particular company, start your own! This is the popular libertarian/corporatist mantra. Of course, its virtually impossible to start your own telephone company, ISP, or cellular service provider. But that won't stop the libertarian from making that claim, nor will the near impossibility of such justify the government imposing any type of regulations whatsoever on such companies.
I hear bagpipes! You are using the same no true Scotsman fallacy that the communists employ when every real life attempt at implementing it fails to produce a utopia. The communists will claim that true communism can only exist when the government ceases to exist. Funny how you libertarians are making the exact same argument with capitalism, blaming the very existence of a government for its failures.
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
Over here in The Netherlands that's a quite common scenario and it works fine but it does require there are no legal obstacles in the way and net neutrality is a must.
Like some towns were fed up waiting for a company to lay cable so they financed a non-profit to do so.
At some point in time they'll probably sell their cable company and the money goes back to the city.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
There are big problems with the switch. The old analog phone lines were powered by the -48 Volt signal DC voltage from the phone company switching stations, which had very reliable backup power and facilities to cut off phones that were accidentally left off hook and kept draining current from the batteries or secondary generators. All this has evaporated in the modern cable modem/FIOS/internaet/land line era. Each house needs its own local battery or other power supply to keep the phones active, and each buried switch needs its own power, and many cut-rate DSL or phone companies are skimping on the quality and size of these backup power systems. The result is much more fragile, and phone service is much less reliable than the old analog system. That old analog system was _amazing_ in its ability to survive natural disasters and still provide _some_ phone service, even if only to a few homes in a neighborhood.
Yes, 'free market' is abused quite often. Let's look at the term.
'Free', as in the freedom to buy a thing, or not buy a thing; the freedom to pick and choose among various styles and vendors of that thing...
There's no freedom here; I have to have internet access to my house, on just about the same level as I need power and water. Going without it is not an option. And as far as the kind of internet access I need, there's really just one of those too; and it's called 'Fast Enough'.
'Market', as in more than one store to buy something at. There's no market here; I have to buy that internet access from whatever cable comes to by house, regardless of what they call themselves this week. I will give you that where FIOS has overlapped cable, you have a market of 2. (I won't count DSL) And yes, we see temporary price wars, but I'm not fooled into thinking that it's a healthy 'market', or that it's good for me in any way in the long run.
There is no free market, and to try to fake one, pisses me off as a conservative. It's a utility already, and access to it needs to be 'owned', in the physical sense, by the government, or the people. Cities should probably administer it at a municipal level; Co-Ops are great for more rural areas. Maybe county, or even state. Whatever works best for for your locality as a voter, with as much right to internet access, as the right to have power and running water to your house.
The only hesitation that I have, is that it's early, and standardizing on something like fiber optic might be like Edison jumping on DC too early. Plus, the existing infrastructures would have to be bought out; the government can preeminent domain take something to a point, but the takee has to be paid. The moment such a law passed, but long before unprepared municipalities would be ready; investment money would flee the space instantly, resulting in chaos. The opponents would use that to their advantage, and would probably win.
Still, I can't wait for ISPs to be taken over by the people, and the term replaced with lowercase 'isp', an anachronism referring to a particular type of hookup to the internet.
Correct. They should. At the fair price.
And in perfect world a non-profit, probably government-financed organisation would build those and then lease them to private companies. That way no one has the stranglehold on competition and private business can actually flourish instead of being strangled by private monopolies with power to bully everyone, including law makers into doing what they want to be done.
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.
The fundamental problem is that POTS sucks by any definition, but it rarely fails suddenly and catastrophically in areas where the phone lines are mostly underground (I don't know about the rest of the US, but in Florida, there are a LOT of places where the phone lines are buried, even though the power lines aren't). Most of what you describe is progressive deterioration over relatively long periods of time. Wireless networks, in contrast, tend to lose power suddenly, and stay down for at least the remainder of whatever catastrophe caused the failure in the first place.
Twenty years ago, it was almost UNHEARD of in Florida to actually lose phone service during anything short of an Andrew-like hurricane... and even in Andrew, few people actually lost phone service. When they did, it was almost always due to catastrophic destruction of their own home's demarc box. Two years ago, half of Dade & Broward county lost Comcast & U-verse for half the day during a GODDAMN TROPICAL STORM (Isaac) that didn't even hit us directly. In fact, it seems like the most disruptive storms are, in fact, "slow & sloppy" tropical storms that have enough gusts to knock out commercial power early in the storm, then leave the area in limbo for another day and a half as the storm slowly passes through the area.
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.
Having multiple redundant links is a good thing. Tell you what, we'll do it your way, but only after three competing companies have each laid their own cable provided that all three of them are running fiber optics from end to end.
Right now we're doing it your way, and the cable company gets to say "Oh gee look, I'm already here, guess nobody else can build now so I get to dictate terms to the market. Thank you mr politician, here's your bribe money."
You do realize though that modern city developments use conduit right? No more trenching, we just run cables inside of an existing pipe that can fit a lot more wires than what a single company would be interested in deploying anyways.
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