skippy the bush kangaroo: will the cry in the next year be

Thursday, December 31, 2009

will the cry in the next year be - "let the landlines go!"

at&t certainly hopes so.

the federal communications commission is delving into the future of communications with a request for comments on an all-ip telephone network. last week, at&t filed its comments, which shows someone at the carrier is reading gigaom, or at least the writing on the wall when it comes to landlines. in a 32-page filing, ma bell asked the fcc to eliminate regulatory requirements that it support a landline network and to provide a deadline for phasing it out. - gigaom

Labels: corporations, fcc

posted by Cookie Jill at 8:48 AM |

4 Comments:

The problem with this is that landlines have significant service guarantees that IP phones do not have. Landlines are self-powered and do not need electricity at the consumer end to operate them. The landline wiring closets have battery power to operate for as long as 24 hours in the event of a power outage, and often have supplemental generators that will allow them to operate for significantly longer than that in the event of a natural disaster. All of this is mandated by a large number of regulations at both the state and federal levels in order to guarantee that the landline infrastructure stays up and going as much as possible in the event of a widescale power outage or natural disaster.

IP phones, on the other hand, go out anytime the power goes out. Need to call the electric company to report that your power is out? Tough f**cking sh*t. You ain't doin' it. You'll use your cell phone to do that, you say? Well, cell phone towers have *NO* battery or generator backup requirements, and they go out in the event of a large-scale power outage too. When you consider that a lot of cell sites are actually antennas sitting on top of commercial buildings or disguised as a cactus or palm tree in a residential area attached to a box the size of an ordinary household fuse panel that has a power line and a phone line going into it (the phone line being how it communicates with the rest of the cellular network), this makes more sense as to why that has to be so. The majority of cell sites are simply not located in places where auxiliary power can be provided.

So -- yeah, the landline network is an obsolete white elephant, much like the paperback book is an obsolete white elephant in today's era of ePaper and eBooks. But it's a white elephant with a reason for being, and doing away with it is not a reasonable thing to do unless we can get the same sorts of service guarantees out of IP phones that we currently get out of POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). Which right now, is simply impossible because there are no (zero) service guarantees provided anywhere in the IP protocol or in the current IP network structure, the network as a whole may be fairly resilient, but it routes *around* damage to the power infrastructure, rather than operating *through* damage the way the POTS infrastructure does.

-- Badtux the Technology Penguin

commented by

BadTux, 10:43 AM PST

BadTux's points are extremely valid. I think this may be a basis to establish a guaranteed level of IP service, as a precondition for ending landline commitments once proven to be reliable.

commented by

mahakal, 10:57 AM PST

I could envision bringing fiber to the curb, with existing copper infrastructure being used for power only.

commented by

mahakal, 11:04 AM PST

I received a rude awakening last winter. We had a power outage, but the landlines still worked fine.

However my DSL service, running over the same copper pair went out for the duration. There's a terminal about 500 ft. from my front door, so I was able to ask about it the next time a service guy came by to tinker.

Law requires them to guarantee POTS in the case of an outage, but not net access, even if shared on the same wiring. So naturally, they don't.

commented by

Chuck, 12:59 PM PST

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