Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
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.
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.
This is not how it works. I've called 911 on a cell recently, and on a land line around 10 years ago.
When I called on the land line, the operator asked, "Are you MY NAME?", which means she had my information INSTANTLY.
When I called on a "smart" phone, I had to tell the operator where I was, so she could forward me to the right jurisdiction, and there was a little hold time.
To me, this is a big difference, because the time I called 911 on the land line, there were two men trying to break my door down, and being put on hold would not have improved my confidence.
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.
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.