atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General Telecom News A date set for the end of POTS?

This article was referenced in the TCI newsletter this month:

https://m.spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/telecom/internet/the-end-of-the-public-phone-network/

Interesting... I don't think it will happen that quickly, but we'll see!

If it's going to save the big boys that much money, they will probably get it done. I wonder what's the plan for the rural areas. The US has a lot more rural miles than the UK does.

That's what I was thinking Bill. Rural area's and older people who don't want to switch over. There is still a lot of places that cannot get DSL or other forms of high-speed internet. How will they get VoIP?

My aunt lives on a very rural part of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Verizon does not offer much of anything to residential customers there besides POTS service. Comcast came in about 5 years ago and took a bunch of their customers with their "bundled" services mainly because they are the only broadband provider for the majority of that area.

When I was up there visiting her in the summer I ran into one of her neighbors who had worked for Verizon. He told me that they were not going to roll out FiOS in the area because the cost of the fiber infrastructure upgrade was too expensive for the low population density (the return on investment would be non-existent.) Apparently they were trying to develop some type of long range wireless service that could provide all of the "bundled" services to compete with Comcast.

Verizon's plan is to stop the expansion of FiOS. It will install & support the service in areas where it already exists and where it has started the process of gaining entry.

Beyond that, Verizon wants to switch over to a wireless delivery system for areas where FiOS does not exist.

If Verizon was bent on doing away with TDM service....even in areas where FiOS and wireless are not going to be offered....I suppose it could install some sort of converter (think Vonage/Packet 8). The interface towards the customer would be TDM, while communication towards the network would be IP. Verizon would support the devices much the way they support FiOS hardware.

If not by 2018,..... IMO, definitely in the next 8 to 10 years.

Here in NYC south of Wall Street which still has entire office buildings without power or any service, Verizon is replacing it entire copper cable network with Fiber and FIOS. NO more copper.

Same here in rural Ky after the devastating tornadoes of March 2012 hit.
Even the mom and pop CO's are putting back nothing but fiber, no copper.

We're seeing that crap with most new large building construction in Verizon's (former Bell Atlantic) territory as well. Not so much in the former GTE areas. They are still doing copper with fiber only for HICAP circuits.

We are also doing a booming business troubleshooting fax, modem and alarm line issues as a result.

Most of the new larger buildings that I've seen in the Bell areas still have a fairly small-count copper feed (say, 100 pair) that I assume is for those issues. One new apartment building that I saw recently had about twenty pairs already cross-connected to the copper. I'm pretty sure that I know what those pairs were feeding.