VoIP And Cell Phones Eroding Traditional Telecoms

Lullabye_Muse writes "Yahoo! reports that telecoms in Europe and U.S. are losing in response to people switching their home phones for cellphones and dial up to cable modems. More info on specific VoIP discussed in latter part of article. The trend seems to becoming widespread, I guess 10 years and all the old wires are gonna start to be taken down."

College freshmen

[MDFedderly]

I'm about to move into college, and I for one don't plan on using the landline telephone. I know my cellphone gets good coverage all over the campus. Perhaps many other people are doing the same? As far as I know, the pricing is comparable, but the cell phone is much more portable. Maybe people moving into college are starting to realize this, and the same with first time house (and apartment) buyers.

Makes sense to me

[Cylix]

Currently, I don't have a traditional wired phone at the house. There isn't much of a need since everyone at the house has a cell pone.

For me, my job requires a mobile phone and they pay the bill. I'm not even home often enough to worry about having a land line.

I would have gotten one anyway, just for the security, but the phone company wants $80~ (US) to simply turn the bastard on.

Now, if the telecom industry was to try to lure me back, it would simply be with affordability.

I'm not even going to start on all the things I hate about the telecom service, but whats with charging not to have long distance? Someone tell me the logic in this one.

Watching it happen...

[codesurfer]

I work for Canada's largest telecom, and this is something that we've been watching for the last few years. VOIP is being launched for business customers all over the country, and even consumer trials are being held at the moment. I'm not sure that landlines will completely disappear, but the impact to the old style telco is pretty evident. Ah, move with the times, I always say!

Re:A land-line...?

[BoldAC]

I still have a land line... it's just through the cable instead of POTS.

We've been using roadrunner's digital phone service since day 1. $30ish for anywhere, anytime, no LD. Call waiting, etc.

We've had no problems with service until the last week. The cable/VoIP modem start cycling and trying to readjust over and over.

The guy came out and changed the modems. He said that it is very, very common.

So if you start losing VoIP service and your modem starts cycling... be quick to report it so they can change out your device.

I can blast huge torrents over suprnova and talk on the phone at the same time without any problems. I've been very impressed with the bandwidth... In fact, my impression is that my bandwidth greatly improved when they switched me over to VoIP. I imagine they uncap the bandwidth when you get digital phone service so insure both services work well together.

AC

Also in India

[leonara]

With the introduction of the relatively inexpensive CDMA service in India by Reliance, the number of households that have only cellphones is on the rise. This is true especially for young people setting up new homes. What makes this service even more attractive is that it makes nationwide calling very affordable when compared to the regular landline service.

I dunno

[Judg3]

I've had Vonage now for about 3 weeks and have mixed feelings on it. I've already had a few outages, and while all the features are nice (Such as the network availability forwarding, where it forwards calls to my cell phone if the voice terminal isn't online), my cable inet service seemed a whole lot more reliable before I got it.
Then again, it may be just the way my network is setup - seems like once or twice the problem has been with my firewall (Smoothwall) just 'locking up' during a 10+ minute long call.

All in all, if I can iron out these minor problems, I think it will be a lot nicer then a traditional landline, and the price is right. I'm just not at the phase where I trust it whole-heartedly, so I'm glad I have my cell as backup

Re:A land-line...?

[roche]

"I still keep my land-line operational, though... I'm beginning to wonder why"

I will never get rid of mine until they develop a system where 911 can determine my location instantly in a emergency.

Also, what are you going to do when the power goes out? My landline still works with no power.

Re:A land-line...?

[tarogue]

That's because you're using wireless. The key idea behind "land-line" is the "line". I have cordless phones for the mobility, but I will always keep a wired phone as insurance.

finally the internet delays a trend

[nbert]

I'm quite sure that internet access is the main reason we still have so many home phones after all.

Cable isn't that widespread in Europe, satelite links are quite expensive and they require a telephone line for upload. Access via power lines never really took off. There is nothing which beats 2 copper wires running to your house in terms of speed, reliability and price.

Wireless LANs bringing internet access to entire blocks reduces the amount of home phones, since only one POTS is needed to get it online, but (at least over here) we won't see telcos going down the drain before ISPs are offering (cheaper than telco) area-wide wireless access for their services.

I don't need a home phone at all, but my favorite monopolistic telco offers me DSL for a reasonable price. They also charge me for a mandatory phone connection using the same line, but it's still much cheaper than their closest competitor.

Re:Never

[flithm]

I just canceled my local service and signed up for Primus' TalkBroadband Service [primus.ca]. It's considerably cheaper than the regular land line, and the quality is pretty close.

I too was initially worried about emergency services and so forth, however all this stuff functions as normal with a regular land line. I can call 911, or 411 or whatever just like anybody else can. In the event of a power-outage you can have your service forward to a cell-phone, voice-mail, or even another regular land phone. So I'm really not that worried about it. In the event that the power goes out and the cell phone is dead, and I accidentally cut off my leg, thus disabling me from crawling to my neighbors house to use their land phone to call 911, I suppose I'll just have to suffer :o).

Seriously though, here's my experience so far:

The Good

Cheap.

Works with regular phones, and it actually works pretty good.

Says #$&@ you to the local @*&!@ telco monopoly.

The Bad

Can't use your regular house phone jacks (although if you need a phone in every room you can get one of those multi-set cordless base phones).

The service isn't perfect. (A couple of times someone has called, and before I could pick it up, the system hung up on them). But let's be realistic, this is pretty new technology.

All in all, I'm happy I decided to try out the VoIP phone. It saves me $10-15 / month, and lets me call way more long distance to boot. And I'm a no frills user. No calling features, no call display, I don't really call long distance. For someone who has a big calling feature pack and calls long distance, I could see a VoIP phone saving them a TON of cash.

Re:A land-line...?

[gcaseye6677]

Is it just me or do virtually ALL newer cordless phones suck? The best one I've ever had was a 900 MHz phone I bought about 7 years ago for $30. Except for needing a new battery a couple of times, it has never had any problems and still sounds great. I couldn't say the same for any newer models that cost a lot more.

Re:Same wires!

[freebase]

Actually a real T1 uses 2 pair, one for transmit, and one for receive. A T1 delivered by HDSL uses a single pair up to the smart jack, but it's still two pair (1,2,4,5 on the RJ45/RJ48).

And if you're actually in a CO, trying to trace a circuit between DSX panels, there's a fifth wire, the locator wire, wired in as part of the cross connect. It provides a neat function - when you insert a looping plug in the dsx, lights on both DSX panels come on to tell you where the circuit is.

TimeWarner owns me now.

[methano]

We just switched over to VOIP with Time Warner, who also sends us cable TV and Road Runner. They get a big check from us every month. It seems to work about the same except that all those features on the phone (Caller ID etc.) now work. Oddly enough, my old local company sent me a letter yesterday offering about the same deal. Why didn't they send me the offer while I was still a customer?
It reminded me of something that happened a few years ago at work.
We used to subscribe to a Derwent patent publication that listed new patents in the pharmaceutical industry. It costs about $30K a year. I called and asked if they could give us a little break on the price. "No Way," they said. So we cancelled the subscription. A few weeks later, they call up and said that there was a mistake and they could give it to us for only $800/yr. I said "No Way." Pricing in this information busness is funny stuff.

Re:Watching it happen...

[deputydink]

True. Shaw and Rogers, the two incumbent Cable providers are already in trials to provide a 90 dollar Cable, Voip, Internet and ondemand video service that you can control from your computer, allowing you a Tivo-like PVR ability.

Canadians can expect to have this convergance within 3 months, here's the
press release [www.shaw.ca] and heres an overview [tmcnet.com]

The technology was provided by Siemens with its SURPASS line of switches, and is really amazing. You'll be able to provision multiple lines, virutual PBX's and high bandwidths with their business offerings as well.

Re:A land-line...?

[ZorinLynx]

Don't be so sure. A lot of telcos have moved to using Remote Terminals (RT's) in neighborhoods. Basically, everyone's voice pairs terminate in the RT, and then there's a few pairs of fiber from the RT to the central office.

The idea is to save money; you have to run MUCH LESS copper, since EACH SUBSCRIBER PAIR doesn't have to go to the CO; it also enables DSL services for individuals who would otherwise be too far from the CO.

The problem: Unlike the CO, RT's don't have a backup generator. They only have batteries. So if there's a long-lasting power failure at the RT, you only get a few hours of battery backup before the RT runs out of juice, and all the local voice pairs coming out of it go dead. Sure, there's still light on the fiber coming from the CO, but what good does that do you?

Now, in a crisis, telcos actually have portable generators on trailers that they can haul out to RT's serving critical facilities, like hospitals. But unless your residence shares an RT with a hospital, don't count on getting more than few hours of continued service after the lights go out.

There's generally thousands of these RT's in areas where they're used; they don't have enough generators for all of them.

-Z

Nah.

[dj245]

I guess 10 years and all the old wires are gonna start to be taken down."

I still need da phone line for my DSL. Cable is way too unreliable in my area. The folks that run it use dodgy amplifiers apparently. Phone line infrastructure was terribly expensive to put up and maintain, and it has lots of other uses (DSL etc). They will never tear it down voluntarily.

Never-Money pipes.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't think the landline will go away completely, but there's not much reason to use unshielded twisted pairs that have been installed outdoors decades ago when we now have better technologies available."

They're already paid for.

Re:Two disagreements

[base3]

Cells are useless in large metropolitan emergencies (which, oddly enough, often accompany severe weather), because the network doesn't have the reserve capacity the PSTN does. While the cell networks oversubscribe to the max, the PSTN is provisioned to handle Mother's Day.

Re:A land-line...?

[tomreagan]

well, they are right, there is no such thing as a 911-only phone. if you want a phone number, you need to pay for service.

however, any phone in the united states is required to permit 911 dialing at all times under all circumstances. if you truly only want the phone to work to dial 911, disconnect servce and leave the phones plugged in. in an emergency, pick it up and dial 911 - the call must go through or the phone company is in a lot of trouble.

you won't have a number, but you'll have what you want.

Re:A land-line...?

[homer_ca]

You're lucky to be paying that little. When I had a landline from Verizon it was $17.25 + $10 in taxes and fees. So try $336 a year. This was for unmetered local calls since I had dialup at the time.

There's always alternatives for emergencies. Any unactivated cellphone can still dial 911. And there's always payphones if it's close enough.

T*Mobile did the same to me!

[Atomic Fro]

I had been using T*mobile for two years. This past year I started using text messaging and the AOL IM feature a lot more, bringing my cell phone costs upwards to $200-$300 thanks to overage fees. Ofcourse, the highest they could sell me was 1000, which I would quickly go over before halfway through the month.
I also tried to get them to automatically take the monthly charges from my Visa check card (same card I used for manual billing) and every month they would fail to debit the account, and they would shut off my phone until I gave em a ring to give them the same credit card number they were supposed to be automatically billing.
Now, I hadn't switched providers up to this point because T*Mobile offers the best coverage in my area, and I knew if I switched, not only would I have to get one of those newer shoddy flip phones (yuck) but it most likely wouldn't get any signal where I live.
About the end of June, they once again shut my phone off, and I figured maybe if I didn't call them they would figure it out that they were supposed to use the SwiftPay service for the automatic billing. They had the phone completely booted off the system (the phone wouldn't log in at all) by a few weeks ago. So, I gave in and tried logging in online to pay the bill. The website acted like they never had my number setup!
So I called them up on the land line. They charged me for June, July, and August, though I was unable to use the phone the entire time, and August it was booted off the network. I was furious at this and there respose was pretty much too bad too sad. So I told them I didn't want service from them any more and that was that.
Then they gave me a buzz the other day asking me to come back and try their new UNLIMITED text messaging! What a crock! I have actually been happier with out the cell phone these last couple months, and don't plan on getting another provider.

Re:A land-line...?

[cmallinson]

Sorry, but if you disconnect a land-line service, you will have no dial tone... just a faint ground hum.

It depends how many lines the phone company has available in the central office. If there are many to spare, they will just do a "soft-disconnect" and leave the line live. Most of the time, somebody hooks it up again anyways, and they only have to do a software change to activate it again. Saves a lot of money.

The Reason Is...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Class Warfare.

Seriously.

The top tax bracket used to be 80%, now it's half that. Minimum wage, in the 1960's, actually allowed a single wage earner to support a family of four. Every time Forbes runs for President, he floats out his flat tax proposal (further lowering the top tax bracket), but his proposals only tax salary, not income, and he gets all his money from investments.