The Times They Are A-Changin'

[AET]

Stumbled upon this article on accident today

Made me shudder, particularly this line
It will probably take a while, but home landlines could become as archaic as the rotary phone.

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/108504/10-things-not-to-buy-in-2010

[Greg G.]

It's already partly true.  One thing I keep seeing when know-nothings are selling rotary phones is they claim it will still function when the power is out.  Not true if your only service for a land line is the cable company.  They're run through a modem which needs power, so if the power is out, so is the modem and hence the phone.

I rarely buy DVDs unless there was a very good reason.  I quit renting them from brick & mortar stores when I first found out about Block Buster by mail, and later switched to Netflix.

[bellsystemproperty]

How are you going to make phone calls with Magickjack when Windows gets it daily blue screen of death?!  The call quality tends to be pretty bad also.

I totally disagree with the article saying to use online back up over physical in your home hard drives. It can take hours-even days on most DSL or even cable connections to upload all that data. Not to mention the whole privacy issue there...

[dsk]

  Yes!!!

Home Telephone Service

It will probably take a while, but home landlines could become as archaic as the rotary phone.

I have heard it from some of my students, and now its my turn yo say:

I do not (want to) understand this!

dsk

[ntophones]

I love that line, d_s_k!

[Dan/Panther]

OOMA and Magic Jack, may be the beginning of the end for land lines.
Not in the next few months, but by the time Tom reaches middle age, I doubt you will see landline service.
D/P
JMHO

[Jester]

All that aside, I doubt that article will convince anybody on this forum that rotary phones are a bad investment--especially Tom.

[AET]

I am sure by the time land lines become obsolete, there will be many ways to run rotary phones off your cell phone provider.  Where there's a will there's a way.  Just reading those words made me mildly sick.

[Jester]

Tom,
I'm with you there, brother.  What the article implies is that modern technology is real progress, and "obsolete" is inferior because of quality as well as an inability to work with newer designs.  We all know that's not true, but we will still be forced to deal with that mentality eventually.

[Greg G.]

The key word here is "adaptation".  We've already found ways around land lines that don't support pulse, I'm sure we'll find a way to still make them work w/o a real "land line".  

[jsowers]

Not only does a cable modem not work when the power is out, the amps on the pole (or whatever the disgusting ugly humming boxes mounted on poles that Time Warner uses for Road Runner) don't work when the power is out. I found that out a while back when my neighbor across the road had her power lines actually short together and it blew the "fuse" on the power line. Maybe Donna knows what I'm trying to write about? It's a thing on one leg they can pull that interrupts the line. Anyway, the Time Warner guy showed up before the Duke Power guy, who had to come from another town. The amp box is on that pole across the road from my house and all the cable was off down the road! My power was off, but my land line phones worked fine.

My local telco is also a cable provider, competing with Time Warner. They offer IP phones via their cable and are actually putting themselves out of the land line business. On their website touting their Digital Phone, they actually do recommend you keep your land line in case your power goes out, because they can provide both. I wonder how many people do that?

The phone lines on my road are suffering as of late. Both me and my mom (who lives two houses up) have had problems with water in the lines in the past month. Mom's happened on the day our last snowstorm hit and you haven't lived until you've plugged a 500DM into the network interface during a snowstorm so you could hear it ring. All you could get was a half ring and then just a ding-ding-ding. They did come and repair it the next day. They put her on a different pair of wires and for that I am very grateful.

I'm sure Donna has stories of working in storms that would put mine to shame. I appreciate the work those guys--and gals--do.

[rp2813]

What really bugs me is that the masses have come to accept the inferior transmission quality and dropped calls related to cell phones as a tolerable level of service quality.

You can bet that anyone with a land line who experienced choppy transmission or having calls cut out completely would be dialing 611 to report a service issue.

Furthermore, the land line will never go away completely.  Perhaps the residential version will, since they have never been the main revenue source for telco providers, but businesses will continue to use them, I would think, and you can bet that our national security system will never, ever be using i-phones instead of land lines.

[bwanna]

boy, where do i start with this topic.

the downside of VoIP
  1)location not recognized by 911 call centers (the call the call is identified by IP address)
  2)no service during power outage
  3)life line & some home security systems will not operate with VoIP

that being said, att (& i'm sure the other owners of telco infrastructure)is definitely doing away with copper feeder cable. two reasons for this being  the cost of maintenance & the fact they are required to lease the lines to combined local exchange carriers.

att's concentration now is fiber build ups to cell towers, to meet the high demand for wireless services.yes, there is still a physical presence to wireless.

att's tv & internet service, called uverse, is fiber fed to a node. the distribution cable is copper. same with a T-1. it might be fiber fed. but, only to a certain point, the last leg to the subscriber is still copper.

btw, jonathan, the "cable" service provided by your local telco would be uverse if thru att. i think verizon calls their comparable service vios. this is a totally different animal than cable tv/internet.

i think ralph is correct when he says businesses will continue to use traditional POTS.  the max capability of VoIP provided numbers is 2 or 3. then you have the compatibility issues with the customer's system to take into account.

lastly, while there is major activity to make all this new technology available in densely populated areas, rural areas are still primarily copper dial tone.

sorry for rambling. you all know this stuff hits way close too home for me.

gettin off the soapbox now. 

[Jim Stettler]

boy, where do i start with this topic.

  3)life line & some home security systems will not operate with VoIP

I work for a local school district as an alarm technician. we have  200+ separate fire and security alarm systems.

A couple of years ago they switched all the phone lines to Voip. We are on a Government only line card at the monitoring site (Central Station).

Our fire drills wer dispatching BRT"s (Big Red Trucks). To government sites in DC, Hawaii and Nevada.

The caller Id info was no clue an which accounts were sending garbled account #'s because they all came up with the same Main #.

The IT department had done this without our knowledge, once we determined what had happened. We pointed out the code requirement for at least 1 CO based line.

The final solution is that the 2 911 copper lines come into the fire panel w/ an alarm jack (RJ31x). Then 1 goes to security (RJ31x) then 911 then PBX.
The second line goes to fax and 911 then PBX.
The advantage w/ this copper being 911 lines is that they get top priority w/ trouble conditions.

I was talking to a Simplex (fire alarm) technician today. They are having the same problem again, he had close to 25 possible accounts. we were able to elimate our 5.

Jim S.

[AET]

Donna, I wish more women could talk telephone like you do!  Always seems like a guy thing.