Adios Landlines

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Adios Landlines

Postby 82_28 » Sun Mar 30, 2014 8:03 am

Could very well be. Landlines could go completely away quite soon.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 1638954500

Honestly, this makes no sense.

At decade's end, the trusty landline telephone could be nothing more than a memory.

Telecom giants AT&T T +0.31% and Verizon Communications VZ -0.57% 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.

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.)

The two providers want to lay the crumbling POTS to rest and replace it with Internet Protocol-based systems that use the same wired and wireless broadband networks that bring Web access, cable programming and, yes, even your telephone service, into your homes. You may think you have a traditional landline because your home phone plugs into a jack, but if you have bundled your phone with Internet and cable services, you're making calls over an IP network, not twisted copper wires.

California, Florida, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Ohio are among states that agree telecom resources would be better redirected into modern telephone technologies and innovations, and will kill copper-based technologies in the next three years or so. Kentucky and Colorado are weighing similar laws, which force people to go wireless whether they want to or not.

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.

New Jersey's legislature, worried about losing data applications such as credit-card processing and alarm systems that wireless systems can't handle, wants a one-year moratorium to block that switch. It will vote on the measure this month. (Verizon tried a similar change in Fire Island, N.Y., when its copper lines were destroyed, but public opposition persuaded Verizon to install fiber-optic cable.)

It's no surprise that landlines are unfashionable, considering many of us already have or are preparing to ditch them. More than 38% of adults and 45.5% of children live in households without a landline telephone, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That means two in every five U.S. homes, or 39%, are wireless, up from 26.6% three years ago. Moreover, a scant 8.5% of households relied only on a landline, while 2% were phoneless in 2013.

Metropolitan residents have few worries about the end of landlines. High-speed wire and wireless services are abundant and work well, despite occasional dropped calls. Those living in rural areas, where cell towers are few and 4G capability limited, face different issues.

Safety is one of them. Call 911 from a landline and the emergency operator pinpoints your exact address, down to the apartment number. Wireless phones lack those specifics, and even with GPS navigation aren't as precise. Matters are worse in rural and even suburban areas that signals don't reach, sometimes because they're blocked by buildings or the landscape.

That's of concern to the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees all forms of U.S. communications services. Universal access is a tenet of its mission, and, despite the state-by-state degradation of the mandate, it's unwilling to let telecom companies simply drop geographically undesirable customers. Telecom firms need FCC approval to ax services completely, and can't do so unless there is a viable competitor to pick up the slack. Last year AT&T asked to turn off its legacy network, which could create gaps in universal coverage and will force people off the grid to get a wireless provider.

AT&T and the FCC will soon begin trials to explore life without copper-wired landlines. Consumers will voluntarily test IP-connected networks and their impact on towns like Carbon Hills, Ala., population 2,071. They want to know how households will reach 911, how small businesses will connect to customers, how people with medical-monitoring devices or home alarms know they will always be connected to a reliable network, and what the costs are.

"We cannot be a nation of opportunity without networks of opportunity," said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler in unveiling the plan. "This pilot program will help us learn how fiber might be deployed where it is not now deployed…and how new forms of wireless can reach deep into the interior of rural America."


This is awful news.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby 82_28 » Sun Mar 30, 2014 8:10 am

Barbed wire telephone lines were local networks created in rural America at the end of the 19th century and beginning of 20th century. [1] In some isolated farmers' communities, it was not cost effective for corporations to invest on the telephone infrastructure. Instead, the existing extent of barbed wire fences could be use to transmit electric signals and connect phones in neighboring farms.

In 1902, the New York Times reported [2] that ranchers in Montana were inaugurating a telephone exchange in Fort Benton, with the goal of eventually connecting every city in the state. The main purpose of such networks was to transmit information about weather conditions and train schedules.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbed_wir ... hone_lines
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby slimmouse » Sun Mar 30, 2014 4:09 pm

Ive been thinking a lot about all of this increased microwave frequency raditation.

Theyre going to be beaming it from space soon, "so we can all have free internet."
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby FourthBase » Sun Mar 30, 2014 6:29 pm

When power goes out, copper phones work.
When power goes out, other phones don't.

This is retarded news, not just bad.

Shit goes down, and no copper?
No one gets to communicate.

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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby psynapz » Mon Mar 31, 2014 12:20 am

FourthBase » Sun Mar 30, 2014 5:29 pm wrote:When power goes out, copper phones work.
When power goes out, other phones don't.

This article was weird. It seemed to twist disparate concepts that sound alike into a kinda-sorta narrative that left me feeling a bit wtf-did-i-just-read about it.

First, it's not copper vs. broadband. Broadband DSL service is delivered over POTS copper, whether you use the analog dialtone service that usually comes along with it or not.

That analog dialtone service, whether you have DSL service on that line or not, is only analog for a few hundred yards until it goes into a friendly neighborhood multiplexer-demultiplexer cabinet where a fiber-optic trunk line from your nearest windowless unmarked brick shithouse they call a CO (for "Central Office", somehow despite it existing at a fundamentally decentralized level of the network topology) is broken out into a bunch of digital and analog channels from what was an entirely digital laser show on the other end, which unless you're getting fiber-to-the-home service (e.g., Verizon FiOS), is delivered to your house over twisted copper pairs. Including the DSL.

Second, cable and DSL broadband service aren't reliant upon the electrical grid until the pipe comes into your house, and even then it's only reliant upon the power grid if you're stupid (or poor, or uneducated) enough not to have battery backup on your cable/DSL modem and router. Wireless broadband service is also unlikely to be grid-reliant, at least not for a few hours. Now, if you're talking about a long-term shutdown (or a really big EMP) where the power grid's been dark but now the diesel stops flowing to the backup generators keeping the Internet afloat (trucker strikes come to mind), then we're already talking about a scenario where the POTS service would be dead too, because the COs (and the cell towers, for that matter) pretty much all rely on diesel generators if the power grid fails.

So... third, it's not "wired" vs. "wireless" either. The residential telecom services market's near-total abandonment of landline service does have a lot to do with the geometric growth in mobile phone usage, particularly since they got so damn useful to us in recent years, but that's not what AT&T et. al. are whining to the state legislators and the FCC about. They don't specifically want everyone to be wireless. They can sure as hell have as many twists of copper they want for some broadband IP service over DSL. They just want to stop delivering non-IP-based dialtone service period.

Fourth, the real story here is that poor, old and/or crazy people (among the non-homeless) have, like the rest of the people, a federally-secured right to an analog dialtone that can call 911 to reach emergency responders, even if they don't give the phone company a penny for a service subscription. That costs money and doesn't make money, and it's post-Bush-years America 2014, son.

The obvious compromise here would be for an amendment to the federal law that requires last-mile connectivity providers of any kind who have wires into any non-subscriber's domicile to provide to that domicile, free for the asking, a complimentary and federally-subsidized box they can plug a phone into in order to call the nearest 911 center. Since the address is fixed and known there's no excuse for it to not be E911 either. It could be reconfigured to provide seamless access to the security and medical monitoring systems that still rely on analog service as well, even without them paying for it. This stuff would be cheap to have even-poorer non-Americans build for them too.
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby mulebone » Mon Mar 31, 2014 1:52 am

Y'know, when pay phones started disappearing I didn't hear too many complaints. I also seriously doubt that the legion of cell phone addicts give much of a shit about "the poor or the old or the crazy." I really find it hard to believe that any of the meaty smart phone attachments that I see sitting transfixed at their phone altars ever lift their heads up long enough to notice that there are any poor or old or crazy people around.

A few years back I was driving home from work when I lost my brakes. Managed to get the car into a restaurant parking lot. I went in and asked the girl at the cash register where their pay phone was at. She looked at me kind of funny and said something like 'I think it's around the corner.' Instead of a phone I found the outline of where a phone used to be. Then I walked to a police station that was nearby & asked the cop behind the desk if there were any pay phones within walking distance. He gave me the same odd look. He asked me why I needed one & then offered to call my wife for me. Without that cop I 'd probably still be sitting in that parking lot.

For a few seconds I think I hated every cell phone user on the planet. Passionately.

I still refuse to get a fucking cell though. Stupidly stubborn I suppose.

I only allowed my two oldest children to have cell phones after they entered high school. That was prompted by a lock down in my oldest son's freshman year of high school. One of the older students had recorded a message on his family's home phone where he sang the theme to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. At some point, a woman from a doctor's office had called to confirm some upcoming appointment. Since the kid had a slight speech problem, when he said "shoot some b-ball," she thought he said "shoot some people," so she called the cops. Presto chango...lock down.

I still have my reservations about giving them the phones. It fits right alongside my reservations about entrusting their safety to a school system that seeks to foil people with guns by locking kids into their classrooms behind doors that have big glass windows in them.
Well Robert Moore went down heavy
With a crash upon the floor
And over to his thrashin' body
Betty Coltrane she did crawl.
She put the gun to the back of his head
And pulled the trigger once more
And blew his brains out
All over the table.
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby 82_28 » Mon Mar 31, 2014 2:16 am

What's your prognosis, Psynapz? I called one of my dear old "old phone numbers" I happened upon the other day and I was verbally accosted by a violent man.

I called asking whether or not their autoshop was willing to take my car in for brake work the next morning. Granted, this was a number from an ad from the 1970s and I was fully expecting it to be a dead number. That of course is why I called. To see if it was still living. But this guy threatened my life. The guy who answered the phone was like "I have to hand you over to another guy. Just look out he doesn't speak good English".

So the other guy gets on and begins screaming at me. Accusing me of something I didn't understand and that I obviously had only done randomly. If I see a number in an old photo I typically try to call it. Just to see. Like a number in a movie or old TV show or something. I think most people would be mortified at calling random numbers. It is fascinating to call phone terminations decades old -- just to see what you get. I guess it's safe anymore from a cell-phone and FREE so it is possible. There was always this spooky payphone on top of Lookout Mountain off to the side of Denver. We all wrote that number down and when it occurred to us, we would prod people to call it.

Remember the old walking past a ringing payphone and not answering it because you were too scared to?
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby justdrew » Mon Mar 31, 2014 2:29 am

82_28 » 30 Mar 2014 22:16 wrote:Remember the old walking past a ringing payphone and not answering it because you were too scared to?


this happened to me a few times, I always answer. usually a wrong number (I think about twice).

Once however, I was wandering through a fairly fancy part of San Fransisco about '92 and a pay phone near me rang. I answered it and it was a synthesized voice (aka "a computer voice"). I don't remember anything it said, but I remember it was fairly "beguiling" in nature and I had an intense feeling of being observed. After a short bit I "didn't buy it" and hung up. My intuition said some "art prank" was being played. I still suspect Sarfatti was playing around. :shrug:
By 1964 there were 1.5 million mobile phone users in the US
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby 82_28 » Mon Mar 31, 2014 4:28 am

Reminds me. I took this photo the other day.

Image

Two companies side by side that have long since not existed.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby 82_28 » Mon Mar 31, 2014 4:50 am

I took to taking photos of the old payphone mounts in various places, but I think they're all on a dead computer. Most people don't notice them, but I always for some reason do. They take out the actual phone but the wall mountings remain. Looking at the mountings results in wonderment of a not so distant past, yet very different in what was expected as far as telephony to the past. Again, not to blow my horn at all, but I wrote this the other day and it is somewhat relevant. It's satirical, but more serious actually. Anyways, 'tis been on my mind and the OP I started resonated with me because I had basically just gotten done writing that. Some here may enjoy it.

https://medium.com/life-in-pantarctica/3b2a46f7ee06
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby DrEvil » Mon Mar 31, 2014 11:03 am

82_28 » Mon Mar 31, 2014 8:16 am wrote:Remember the old walking past a ringing payphone and not answering it because you were too scared to?


Reminds me of a movie I can't remember the name of. It's a guy going to work, and he picks up a ringing pay phone outside his usual breakfast spot. The guy on the other end is sitting in a missile silo and is desperately trying to get a hold of his dad to say goodbye, because the nukes have been launched. Que desperate struggle to gtfo of town.
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby mulebone » Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:13 pm

Y'know, when pay phones started disappearing I didn't hear too many complaints. I also seriously doubt that the legion of cell phone addicts give much of a shit about "the poor or the old or the crazy." I really find it hard to believe that any of the meaty smart phone attachments that I see sitting transfixed at their phone altars ever lift their heads up long enough to notice that there are any poor or old or crazy people around.

A few years back I was driving home from work when I lost my brakes. Managed to get the car into a restaurant parking lot. I went in and asked the girl at the cash register where their pay phone was at. She looked at me kind of funny and said something like 'I think it's around the corner.' Instead of a phone I found the outline of where a phone used to be. Then I walked to a police station that was nearby & asked the cop behind the desk if there were any pay phones within walking distance. He gave me the same odd look. He asked me why I needed one & then offered to call my wife for me. Without that cop I 'd probably still be sitting in that parking lot.

For a few seconds I think I hated every cell phone user on the planet. Passionately.

I still refuse to get a fucking cell though. Stupidly stubborn I suppose.


After rereading that hunk of bullshit, I see that I could have saved myself a lot of pointless typing by just writing this:

THOSE DAG BLASTED KIDS & THEIR INFERNAL CONTRAPTIONS.

Better yet, let's try it from a different perspective:

Y'know, when public hitching posts started disappearing, I didn't hear too many complaints. I also seriously doubt the legion of horseless carriage addicts give much of shit about "the poor or the old or the crazy" cowboy. I really find it hard to believe that any of the meaty horseless carriage filler that I see transfixed at their multicolored stop light altars blink their eyes long enough to notice that there are any "poor or the old or the crazy" cowboys around.

A few years back I was sauntering home from a cattle drive when my horse lost a shoe. Managed to limp her into town. When I dismounted from old Bessie I asked a passing girl where the public hitching post was at. She looked at me kind of funny and said something like "I think it's around the corner." Instead of a hitching post I found two holes in the ground where a hitching post used to be.

For a few seconds I hated every horseless carriage user on the planet. Passionately.

I still refuse to get rid of old Bessie. Stupidly stubborn I suppose. Or maybe I just like to clean up horse shit.....


So this is what it feels like to get old & irrelevant, eh?

It do suck it.
Well Robert Moore went down heavy
With a crash upon the floor
And over to his thrashin' body
Betty Coltrane she did crawl.
She put the gun to the back of his head
And pulled the trigger once more
And blew his brains out
All over the table.
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby Forgetting2 » Tue Apr 01, 2014 7:43 pm

DrEvil » 31 Mar 2014 07:03 wrote:
82_28 » Mon Mar 31, 2014 8:16 am wrote:Remember the old walking past a ringing payphone and not answering it because you were too scared to?


Reminds me of a movie I can't remember the name of. It's a guy going to work, and he picks up a ringing pay phone outside his usual breakfast spot. The guy on the other end is sitting in a missile silo and is desperately trying to get a hold of his dad to say goodbye, because the nukes have been launched. Que desperate struggle to gtfo of town.


Miracle Mile. Late '80s. Good little B movie.
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Re: Adios Landlines

Postby ShinShinKid » Wed Apr 02, 2014 12:23 pm

Don't disconnect your land lines, otherwise, how will you exit the Matrix?
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