USA Today

That could hurt a lot of people.

Many remote areas that will be the first to lose landlines may not be able to get reliable cell service.

That is really sad...I guess I'm sentimental as I broke into the Bell System working on C-wire, Bird-wire, iton wire and such in the rural area's of Ohio...Feel sorry for some of the folks in the hills where cell service is poor at best !!!!

...bob...

I can just see my FD Dispatch center runing on Optimum voice and skype LOL

We still have Verizon land line and rely on dual apperance to run a backup office. The dual option is not avaiable on any other service.

We thought of using remote call fowarding but would need to transfer at least 10 lines under conditions that may be our most busy period (storms, flooding etc)

The public tends to complain when the FD or PD do not answer their phones.

Competition will bring more services? Yeah right. All that will happen is that the rates for whatever customers can get will go through the roof.

What this is all about is regulated subscriber rates. With the requirements being dropped, the mandated rates will also go away.

OK, OK, so there MAY be competition in some areas for wired telephone service. I can agree with that and there is a chance that some subscribers in those areas may benefit. Still, I see the subscribers in the now unregulated areas getting the sharp stick in the eye.

For decades, our government has provided a means for nearly everyone in this country to receive electricity and telephone service. They've done this with much smaller government.

Now that we have record-breaking government (with regard to size), we are losing things that have been household staples forever. What is wrong with this picture?

I still have to wonder. Let's say that Verizon is no longer required to provide service in Richmond, IN (actually, I believe that they've already sold that former GTE territory to Fairpoint). Let's go one step further and follow Verizon's typical course of action and they close up their wired shop in that city. Who will provide the wired infrastructure to the existing (grandfathered) subscribers?

If I understand this whole scenario, ILECs can literally walk away from their regulated requirement to provide basic wired service once the state lifts this requirement. Maybe I'm missing something here?

As I understand the report, RBOCs can walk away if there are 2 alternatives present. To me, taxes and seemingly endless tacked-on fees are speeding up the disconnection of land lines.

We do a lot of work here in MN with Charter for their voice service...Their big thing is all about "build cost" if the cost to get service to an area is more than they want to spend or can make off the customer..they drop out of the picture..Flat out refuse to provide service to the customer or area !!! It still is and always has been " All about the money"

...bob... :shrug:

Comcast, Verizon & RCN are the same way in the towns that they service. Areas that appear to present a poor RoI, get the "dark zone" label slapped on them.

Wonder what will happen in the countys that require a building fire alarms primary connection to be wired POTS, no VOIP allowed.

In Arlington (the town I live in) the fire department has switched over to a wireless monitoring/reporting system. The old cable-based system is being/has been disconnected.

Here is a link to the system that the town is using:

https://www.sigcom.com/products/details/?id=6

Organizations can convert to the town's new wireless system, go with a private monitoring company or just have their panels go unmonitored.

It's a conspiracy to let the government do it's thing without interference from 'the great unwashed'!

I'll bet that the universal service tax won't be repealed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Around here the FD does not do any monitoring it is all done by private central stations, the rub is the local fire marshal will only allow wireless or cellular as the secondary method. Primary must be POTS unless something has changed since I last looked a few years ago.

All commercial buildings must have monitored systems so going unmonitored is not an option

The fire marshal gave us (the FD) a problem about monitoring our own buildings via our own alarm loop till we proved to them a failure of the monitoring system woud generate an a "trouble" in the dispatch office within 5 seconds.

They wanted us to contract with a central station company so they coud call us by phone when one of our buildings had an alarm.

Now that I think about it, the monitoring is done back at the Community Safety Building as opposed to the fire stations themselves. The reason for the switchover is that it was felt that the cost of keeping the cables & related equipment was getting out of hand. The town has been removing call boxes because so many people have cell phones that the boxes are no longer needed.

Sorry for hijacking my own thread....Returning to the topic @ hand.

It's not hijacking, it's a good discussion about what will happen when POTS goes away.

There are lots of devices that just do not work on VOIP, most cannot handle FAX. My Dish boxes take 4 or 5 trys to report my usage on Vonage.

The days of reliable 24X7 phone service will be over if it happens.

Both of my Cannon all-in-one units can fax, but fax machines are fast becoming a thing of the past. Documents can be scanned and sent as a pdf.

We used to have direct alarm monitoring here in our city. The phone room in the basement of our city hall was COVERED in 66 blocks and wire. 5 years later they were totally empty as they no longer wanted the liability of directly monitoring alarm systems. I still run into the old dry loop wiring in the older office buildings though.

This is Telecom News and we like to keep it very much on the topic of the news article. So let's stick to the news article and if other discussion is need around the other aspects of this let's start a new topic in the appropriate category. Thanks.

It's been worked out that the scrap value of the copper cabling in the UK local loop exceeds the value of British Telecom the dominant operator and owner of most of the local loop.

Only about 20% (retail) internet connections in the UK are cable; the rest are ADSL.

POTS may be losing popularity (13% UK adults live in a home with mobile but no landline phone) but the DSL services need copper to run over, and it's maintaining the copper that costs the money.

I can see some real problems with this. Spotty reception forget it. In this case, a couple died within 20 yards of there house after the phone dropped the 911 call 9 times.

https://ca.mg5.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=03gekselflnu6

I get some really terrible reception in my townhouse even though the cell tower is only 4 blocks away!! with the dipole cell antenna pointing my way! the dropped calls has happened on the last 2-3 phones.

At my old job we used to install Tunstalls in retirement homes; bad idea but hey!I'm only the guy installing, not selling or a consultant. Instead of having an alarm in every room that lights up a board at the front desk and pages a nurse through a dedicated line, basically every resident had its own CA38A to dial out.

Anyway, in my last couple of years doing that, more and more of retirees didn't have a landline, creating headaches to the home's administrators.

32%, increase of 200% in 6 years is huge! Not worried about phone per say, more about cable/copper/fiber Internet; don't want to be obligated to have community WiFi for multiple reasons: monitoring/privacy, bandwith restrictions, meteorological impacts, for instance.

I guess progress is always scary at first, and we always adapt through all the bitching and moaning. :shrug:

Speechless!

I'm inclined to think that phone companies are fiercely lobbying for this not because they want to promote competition but rather because they wanted to save costs on maintaining the landline communications infrastructure. Let's admit it people, minimal competition means more profits, right? Or maybe i'm just thinking like this because I don't trust anything that AT&T does. Besides, while it is true that mobile technology is already in place, there are still areas where you don't get a signal, and in some places, its sporadic at best. While it's true that landlines will be gone in the future, I don't think that such time has arrived.

The states aren't moving fast enought for at&t so they've gone to the FCC to override the state laws. Story here.