Ask Slashdot: What Is the Future of Old Copper Pair Technology? 347
p00kiethebear writes "My father works for a large corporation that licenses ISDN lines (among a plethora of other services) including T1 and T3 technology. Surprisingly there are still large companies that use fifty year old T1 technology to handle their voice and data use. My father's 30 year career has been almost exclusively in helpdesk / troubleshooting T1 / ISDN technology and both he and I are worried about the future. Cable modems and DSL have replaced ISDN in most cases and it's now an archaic solution reserved for voice actors, tech support-terminal workers, large companies that need voice and video conferencing, and data and private users too far from the loop for DSL or Cable. My dad is still 15 years from retirement. Is twisted copper going the way of the dodo or is it here to stay for the foreseeable future?"
Copper? (Score:5, Interesting)
All of that wiring will be reclaimed. It's not worth as much as wiring as it is in thousands of other items. Even the copper coated steel wiring is worth more as other things. You have fiber and wireless and I don't see anything else soon.
Re:ATT is forcing users onto Uverse (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, copper will survive into the future, but there will be less of it, and the quality will be worse
Depending on how much less, and how much legacy customers are willing to pay, this could actually be convenient for an experienced support tech, of course...
Infrastructure decay should open up a vast supply of weird and ghastly problems with connections over those lines. The main question is whether there are enough high-rolling legacy customers(and/or enough institutional inertia) that there will still be demand for people to keep the remaining copper customers on life support, or whether the across-the-board solution to copper problems will be "This upgrade is Exciting and Mandatory"...
Rural America has nothing to fear... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm an engineer with one of the largest communications companies in the U.S.. It will be a long time before we see reliable high speed saturation in the more rural regions... mostly because of the prohibitive cost of deployment. OP's dad may need to move or telecommute at some point...but his skill set will be needed for some time to come.
Re:Circuit switching is (almost) dead (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems pretty clear to me that circuit switched networks will be phased out in the next 10 years.
They're coming back. They're just called "software defined networks" now. Look at what OpenFlow really does. [openflow.org]
Re:Copper? (Score:2, Interesting)
In our area, Verizon actually has been offering a free network upgrade from copper to fiber. (!)
Re:Copper? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Copper? (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't speak for the US, but here in Norway copper is going away because all the profitable areas have disappeared since in all densely populated areas people get faster and better broadband elsewhere or have switched to cell phones. The phone network that once had 2.6 million subscribers is now down to 800.000 and in rapid decline. What they're left with is a need to maintain a huge copper network more and more sparely populated and mainly with the elderly that don't use any expensive services. By 2017 they expect basic phone service to be gone, either they're pulling fiber or going wireless. The first pilot county is switching now 31st of August this year, after that the phones are literally dead.
P.S. As a substitute for the elderly they are offering phones that look like the old landlines, but that are really cell phones in drag, as far as I know they also contain a decent size battery (hey, you got the space right?) so as long as they can keep the cell towers up and running - or bring in mobile replacements - things should be pretty reliable.