AT&T Readying For the End of Analog Landlines 426
nottheusualsuspect writes "AT&T, in response to a Notice of Inquiry released by the FCC to explore how to transition to a purely IP-based communications network, has declared that it's time to cut the cord. AT&T told the FCC that the death of landlines is a matter of when, not if, and asked that a firm deadline be set for pulling the plug. In the article, broadband internet and cellular access are considered to be available to everyone, though many Americans are still without decent internet access."
Re:Never sacrifice proven infrastructure (Score:4, Interesting)
i've had voip since 2003. my inlaws just got phone via their cable service and i just cancelled vonage in favor of Time Warner. in all cases it's cheaper than landlines. $30 - $35 a month gets you unlimited local and long distance calling and a ton of features like caller ID and conference calling that they nickel and dime you for on POTS
Requirements need to be clear and solid (Score:3, Interesting)
Any proposed replacement must satisfy the following conditions showing it is a true improvement
a) be cheaper now and for the long term for customers
b) be more reliable
c) provide better 911 and other emergency services information
From the above
a) there will not be an initial upfront customer cost over and above current costs.
If it is to be cheaper overall the provider is to eat the up front cost and just delay reducing costs to the customer.
b) things like a touch tone charge are disallowed
c) it must not depend on power available at the customers site
d) digital features like allowing customers to add a digital description containing things like number of house occupants, ages, medial conditions to be sent along with a 911 call should be considered.
Bottled Water (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:VOIP sucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
When I moved to where I lived I had POTS go down 3 times due to storms. The last time, a lightning strike near my house (I live in Florida) really jacked it up. Through it all my internet was available. That's what convinced me to make the jump. Since I did switch, I've never had it go down.
If my power drops, or my VOIP isn't working for any reason, the calls to my home phone are forwarded to our cell phones. And we can still call out on those until power comes back.
If our cell phones don't work - then as you have said, there are bigger problems to worry about.
But really, I don't need the VOIP either except as I mentioned, I worry about my kids reliably dialing 911 on a cell phone. Once they are old enough to do that VOIP goes too.
I've found cell phones to be dependable enough for my needs. Google Voice pretty much clears up the few shortcoming there.
Don't take my POTS! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll keep my land line at my house active as long as possible.
I have three small kids and I need something absolutely reliable in case of an emergency.
While I do absolutely love modern mobile tech (Droid!), I prefer using a land line while at home. I simply don't enjoy having long conversations on a mobile phone. The newest phone at my house is a Nortel Meridian M9616CW which was (for me) the ultimate geek phone in the mid 90s. They seem to fetch a good price:
http://www.telephonegenie.com/customer/product.php?productid=16149 [telephonegenie.com]
The rest are all Western Electric, Automatic Electric and ITT phones from the early 40s - 70s that I've collected and repaired. They all work perfectly (even rotary dialing) on the Cox Digital phone service.
As the article mentioned, POTS is preferable in disaster areas. I live in an area of New Orleans that didn't flood in Katrina. The only way I was able to contact people in my neighborhood who stayed for the storm was on their land lines.
Crumbling Infrastructure (Score:3, Interesting)
We can hear other conversations on the line.
We call the 611 number, and they fiddle with it, it gets better. The next time it rains, the lines get noisy.
I'm completely unsurprised that ATT doesn't want to have land lines anymore. They're too cheap to be bothered with upkeep.
Re:VOIP sucks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you sure your kids will ever be able to use cell phone or VOIP reliably when the power is out
Cell Phones are unaffected by all but the longest term power outages. For VOIP, they make these things called UPSes. A standard "10 minute" computer UPS can keep a cable (or DSL) modem, home router, and VOIP appliance running for hours. When I was living in downtown New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina we had constant power outages and they often lasted for a good long time. I dropped $50 on a separate UPS to handle the telephony and network stuff and never had a significant outage of communications (The one time I did have a short outage, the DSL went too, so it would have killed a "pure" land line).
and/or injured to the point of being unable to speek or under duress and told not to?
Here I assume you're talking about the ability for 911 operators to find you based on phone number you're calling from. I don't know what hole you've been hiding in, but VOIP operators have been registering addresses with 911 system for years. You can tell them not too if you chose, but that seems like a sucker's bet me to me (I guess if you really feel your privacy is more important than the ability for the ambulance to get to your house...) You're partially right about cell phones here, but many if not most have GPS chips now, so you can still be found in an emergency. Some don't though, so it is something to watch out for. To be reasonable though, whatever TV may tell you, there are a fairly limited number of emergencies that will render you able to dial 911, able to survive until help arrives, but completely unable to speak. It's not impossible, but hardly a common occurrence.
Rural people (Score:3, Interesting)
Barring the sudden availability of much better internet access, this is bad news for my parents. They live about 15 miles from the nearest town, which is itself nothing to really speak of. Wireless is available, but they are on the very edge of the service area, so it is unreliable. They've been using a satellite-based service for a year or two, but the latency is terrible. A ping to google takes around 1.5 s (yes, seconds). I haven't tried to call anyone on skype from their house, but I imagine it would be unusable. Their cell phone service is somewhat spotty, as well.
Re:Never sacrifice proven infrastructure (Score:4, Interesting)
And on the flipside, those services don't fully and properly support 911 *and* you now have a single point of failure (no redundancy). Keeping the landline is worth it to me, I don't judge everything solely on price.
Byte Me AT&T (Score:2, Interesting)
Sadly, my family lives well below the poverty line and we've been struggling to get by since before I was born.
The only internet we can afford is dial-up and that's only possible through a landline phone.
Yes, I know it's slow, but it's what we have and we have to make do.
There is no way my family would be able to continue using the internet at all, if regular landline phone access ceases, and we can't afford a cell phone.
It's ridiculous that because the number of people who are stuck with things like dial-up is the minority in this nation, that we're being bit-by-bit squeezed out of society as a whole.
Preserve my ability to choose (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't want to pay more and get more, even if it's better value for the dollar. I want to pay less and get what I think I need. I want to make that decision. I don't want an unholy alliance in which The Government forces me to do what best for The Corporations.
The digital TV transition was different, because when it came down to it, those of us who prefer free broadcast TV still have that choice. (Most of us). We paid a one-time charge for a converter box, less than $20 with the coupon, ZERO DOLLARS PER MONTH, and life goes on. Yes, the transition was bungled, and the FCC lied when they said people who were getting adequate analog reception would get adequate digital reception, but by and large our freedom of choice was more or less preserved.
The important point is not that transition cost was small, the important point is that it was ONE TIME. The difference between what we have now--copper-wired POTS, plus DSL, plus broadcast TV, and the cheapest digital package from the three providers in my area (municipal electric company, Verizon FIOS, Comcast) is at least $30 a month. Not $30: that's $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + $30 + ... (Well, due to life expectancy, at least there's effectively a "senior discount!")
And the last time there was a big power outage where I worked, the spiffy new VOIP phone on my desk went out INSTANTLY. (No, in theory it shouldn't have, in theory there was no good reason, I'm just saying what happened). After about 90 minutes, nobody could get signal on their cell phone. (Again, there's "no reason why that should have happened," but it did). The older set of desk phones, which hadn't been disconnected yet, lasted a couple of hours. But the three plain old telephones that were still around, because it was easier to use with the fax machines than with any of the newer systems, were working fine five hours later. And based on admittedly decades-old experience, probably would have been working days later.
They will tell us that they can make the digital infrastructure just as reliable, and during the next big Katrina-like disaster the phones will all go dead and then they will tell us "but that SHOULDN'T have happened."
Re:VOIP sucks. (Score:3, Interesting)
The quickest way for them to offer broadband there it would seem would be DSL, which allows as much of the existing infrastructure to be reused as possible. They would have to install a line extender 1 mile from your home, or bringing fiber or coax to within a mile but this would still allow the last mile to be re-used. DSL can be carried over 1 mile of copper POTS cable from the CO but for longer distances from the CO, there needs to be additional components, line extenders etc to regenerate the signal. POTS, despite what they say is actually still provides the best infrastructure for bringing broadband to fringe areas and can be done relatively cheaply compared to replacing the entire network.
Re:VOIP sucks. (Score:3, Interesting)
the pots line at my companies main office goes down every time it rains from the north east.
POTS lines are so bad that as they lose customers they just keep moving people to the inner lines as the copper goes bad. I knwo some sections of cities that can't get DSL even though they are 500 from the trunk. why? the copper is so bad and their neighbors have all the good lines already used up.
POTS is dying of old age and neglect.
Re:VOIP sucks. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Majority (Score:3, Interesting)
Who said anything about getting rid of emergency services?
We could always replace the POTS networks with some kind of IP based telephony that is on a separate power system from the normal power grid, effectively making it every bit as robust as POTS service if not more so. Then in addition to voice you've also got data.
I'd imagine an engineering solution could be worked up so that you don't even have to replace most of the existing copper wiring, it would just be a matter of replacing the equipment at the head end and replacing all of your phone handsets. If you're feeling nostalgic for your old phone, there already exist converters that bridge the DTMF/pulse dialing to VoIP anyways, and they're cheep too.
Re:VOIP sucks. (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, I certainly understand that they would never willingly run new lines out here unless they were forced to. I don't think they would have run the old lines that are already out here if they hadn't been forced to, possibly combined with early settlers out here who paid dearly to have power poles put in. I don't fault the cable companies for not running cable out here, because it clearly wouldn't make economic sense for them to do so. I'm not even suggesting that the telcos should be forced to build out their infrastructure in rural areas like I'm in; in general, I'm quite opposed to most governmental and regulatory intrusion. I'm just stating the simple fact that if the telcos simply cut off analog phone service without building out their digital capabilities where they're not currently available, then a lot of people (though a small percentage of the population) would be cut off. I bring this up only because I suspect that a lot of people reading this thread may not be aware that there are technical limitations which make digital services like ISDN and DSL unavailable in some areas that have POTS service, even today.
I understood the limitations I'd face out here when I moved here, and I decided that I'd rather live on five acres with limited utilities and a wonderful view than an eighth of an acre with the neighbors' annoying kids trampling my front lawn every day, constant traffic noise, always overhearing my neighbors arguing with each other, and so forth. I'm not expecting any handouts. I'll get reasonable broadband when other nearby development happens to drag it into my area. There's continuing growth nearby, and my property will probably be surrounded by suburbs in a decade or so.
i dont think it will happon (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Isnt it ironic ? they are the ones withholding (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in Saint Charles, our electric company is a co-op. It's not owned by any sort of government, but it's not a for-profit entity either. It's owned by the subscribers and run by a board elected from and by the subscribers. I can't say that we have the cheapest rates in the state, but I know they're quite cheap, and I know for certain that our power is considerably more reliable than Ameren.
Co-ops are an easy answer to whiners who think "socialism" is a naughty word, and at least in theory, I prefer them slightly over government-owned utilities because I think they're likely to be slightly more stable when run that way. Subscribers choose the election period for members of the board, rather than having it mandated by state law or state constitution, the operating budget is inaccessible to raiding politicians, and when the mayor of Saint Peters was convicted of extorting and accepting a bribe from a red light camera company, our electric co-op was unaffected.
Either way, you're right - utilities aren't the place for profiteering.
Re:No Landlines? Hah. (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. The electromechanical switching systems went out in the 80s, but the digital switched network has been isolated, for good reason.
from Wikipedia:
and...
Yeah, copper wire really sucks...