The Dismantling of POTS: Bold Move Or Grave Error? 582
New submitter TheRealHocusLocus writes "The FCC is drafting rules to formalize the process of transition of 'last-mile' subscriber circuits to digital IP-based data streams. The move is lauded by AT&T Chairman Tom Wheeler who claims that significant resources are spent to maintain 'legacy' POTS service, though some 100 million still use it. POTS, or 'Plain Old Telephone Service,' is the analog standard that allows the use of simple unpowered phone devices on the wire, with the phone company supplying ring and talk voltage. I cannot fault progress, in fact I'm part of the problem: I gave up my dial tone a couple years ago because I needed cell and could not afford to keep both. But what concerns me is, are we poised to dismantle systems that are capable of standing alone to keep communities and regions 'in-touch' with each other, in favor of systems that rely on centralized (and distant) points of failure? Despite its analog limitations POTS switches have enforced the use of hard-coded local exchanges and equipment that will faithfully complete local calls even if its network connections are down. But do these IP phones deliver the same promise? For that matter, is any single local cell tower isolated from its parent network of use to anyone at all? I have had a difficult time finding answers to this question, and would love savvy Slashdot folks to weigh in: In a disaster that isolates the community from outside or partitions the country's connectivity — aside from local Plain Old Telephone Service, how many IP and cell phones would continue to function?"
It is a terrible idea (Score:2, Insightful)
"Bold Move Or Grave Error?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably both.
It's hard to keep analog transmission lines when you can transmit thousands of times the same information using a digital channel that costs the same (or even less).
But communication is not *just* about cheapness, it's about reliability. Analog lines are far more resilient than digital lines, and a wise one should take this in consideration on the long term.
A cheap telephone line that I can't use when I really need is a useless telephone line.
by the way, are you americans happy with your broadband internet connection? What do you think it will happen with your telephone services when it will be serviced using the same technology by the same players your Internet connection is served now?
"Can you hear me now?" (Score:5, Insightful)
The call quality on both cell phones and IP phones is worse than those on traditional phone lines. IP phones echo and stutter. Cell phones give no aural feedback in the earpiece of the person speaking, which is why everyone is always yelling over their cell phone, and cut out when no one is speaking, which sounds like a dropped call. I think anyone who enjoyed two, three, or more decades in the last century, making phone calls over POTS lines, would agree that we have taken a step back in call quality. Every phone call is like an overseas call from the 1970's. Pulling up the POTS lines would be a mistake.
Re:Cell phoe reliability (Score:5, Insightful)
So are POTS. Especially for long distance.
The big argument against dropping POTS is that cellular is simply not available everywhere you need a phone. In basements. In rural areas. Yes, you can bypass those limitations but I'm not seeing any legislation that forces the Really Big Corporations to do that.
Guarantee that everyone who needs a phone line can get reception, work on your redundancy and backup, nail the corporate weasels down tight and no problemo.
Otherwise, leave the damned wires alone.
Self-contradiction... (Score:3, Insightful)
We'd be replacing one highly centralized system with a different one. Hardly a problem in itself.
Wire is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember that the wire used to deliver POTS service also delivers DSL. No wire, no DSL.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Good points.
On the other hand, cell phones are useless a few hours after a electrical blackout (as no one will be able to charge their phones), while thousand of POTS users (ha! I can't avoid smiling while typing it!) can be served using a big enough diesel generator.
Hell broke havoc in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo em 2009 [wikipedia.org]. Cell phones were useless because *everybody* (and the neighbor's kitten) was trying to call someone by cellphone to call for help or simply tranquilize their relatives. The ones tha managed to do that were the ones with analog phone lines (as the analog phone operators can redirect their power supplies in order to keep the phone lines working).
At that time, I already had switched my analog phone line to a VOIP one. My relatives lives far away, and I managed to call them 4 or 5 hours later, thanks to a very kind supermarket manager that borrowed me a power plug from the place (they have a diesel generator) to charge my pretty, advanced but useless smartbrick, I mean, smartphone.
There's no single, easy and cheap answers to complex problems.
This should be amusing (Score:2, Insightful)
If they get rid of the POTS, they pretty much get rid of phone service. Internet comes in by an rf link. We're pretty much the last house in the canyon we live in to get rf link internet or cell service. Everybody else uses smoke signals, satellite internet, or POTS.
Why doesn't the FCC do something useful, like bug the White House phones, and let the free market take care of the POTS demand?
Re:History.... learn from it! (Score:3, Insightful)
The Northeast US is notoriously cheap and short-sighted (and I say that having spent most of my life in this region). If power/phone/etc. were installed underground instead of strung up on toothpicks, surrounded by trees that are never trimmed, the infrastructure would be far more reliable.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
Cell phones can be *immediately* useless in an electrical blackout, because cell towers are grid dependent and often do not have battery backup. Some do, and the phone companies have mobile tower units they can send out to supplement towers that are out, but still, the cell network doesn't "just work" in a blackout the way POTS does.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation you described in Rio and Sao Paulo is not unique to cell phones. POTs systems have a limit on how many calls they can support as well, the dreaded "all circuits are busy message" here in the states. The reason POTs lines are less susceptible to that now is that fewer people are using them so it doesn't happen as often. A common solution to this is to tell people just to text instead of making calls, that helps reduce the load on the cellular infrastructure.
depends on the company. (Score:4, Insightful)
there are two lines of thought.
sensible and socially responsible:
why disable an existing and working system that has advantages over the new system? at the very least, make outgoing calls free for emergency purposes.
shortsighted asshole capitalist:
it costs money to maintain, so just unplug it as soon as contractually possible. when they somehow manage to call your support staff, tell them that they will need to upgrade to your cable internet + VOIP service and transfer them to sales. if they are rural and thus too far out to actually make a profit from installing new cabling, tell them they cant get it and politely hang up. be sure to use your hired company that keeps track of online forums and rating sites to blast anyone that is upset.
which do you think your telecom is going to fall under?
Re:My First FRiST P0sT!1!! -- with pride. (Score:5, Insightful)
AC: Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Good question, although I Sens an odd bit of d3r1s1ve m0ckery from yous.
Because it was built that way. Your local bell telephone exchange was designed to stand alone and not just provide electricity to operate telephones. From that single building It completes calls between its own subscribers and those in other directly-connected exchanges, even if long haul circuits are down.
But in the digital subscriber age we are starting to see roll-outs of nationwide services that only appear to be local. They demonstrate sudden, surprising, even shocking failure. Router restarts, failures to push software updates, failure to connect to centralized RADIUS servers, failure to complete DSL login and even failure of DNS lookup within the telco's own Internet can cause confusion and backlogs that disrupt IP phone service.
I grant that no mob with torches has ever marched up to the Phone Company and demanded that they pull the plug to prove that the service they provide is resilient to inter-network failure.
In fact, these vulnerabilities extend to the use of local; electrical power. I have known a few people who buy in to these IP-phones supplied by the local cable company who are shocked to discover that it stops functioning soon after their electricity goes out. And it's not just a house thing, a MERE few hours into an ice storm many pole-mounted cable company amplifiers that rely on city power depleted their (may I say, 'dipshit'?) battery packs and whole neighborhoods lost their phones regardless of whether they had emergency power.
Meanwhile the POTS providers who had sunk a larger investment into provisioning their remote buildings, carried enough batteries to keep going for a couple of days.
What we have here is a general attention to infrastructure and disaster preparedness in the interest of rolling out things that work almost as well, most of the time.
Re:Answer: None (Score:5, Insightful)
Until fiber optic cable cable to the home is as common as copper it won't be a suitable replacement for POTS.
I *almost* agree. Saying we should keep POTS until it can be replaced with fiber, however, is like saying everyone should stick with driving Yugos until it becomes feasible for everyone to buy a Ferrari. Wireless technologies are a good interim solution until fiber can be deployed ubiquitously, especially in very low density areas.
And I *almost* agree with this. I have this one caveat: that a wireless interim solution actually be implemented before POTS is killed. If the data transmission corporations want to kill POTS they should be eager to cooperate in setting up an adequate replacement in terms of coverage, accessibility and reliability.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
As I said, there's no single, easy and cheap solution for complex problems. :-)
Anyway, you missed the point. Sandy was a grain of dust compared to the 2009's Brazil blackout. Go to wikipedia and give a peek on the red painted map - the area is equivalent to 1/3 of the continual USA!
No one managed to borrow a plug from nowhere, as nobody (except the one with diesel generators) had power to lend in a 100 miles radius!
The problem you described ("all circuits are busy") can be overcome to restricting the service to communitarian and emergency services phones. How do you propose this can be done using cell phones?
Take in consideration that I'm not advocating the "end of cell phones". I just arguing that cell phones, ALONE, will not be reliable in emergency situations. The really bad ones.
Re:Self-contradiction... (Score:5, Insightful)
[Parent's emphasis retained]
If the current POTS were highly centralized - you'd have a point. But it isn't, it's widely distributed. The ring-and-talk voltage for my analog POTS phone comes from a phone center just a few miles away. Folks at the south end of the county have their own center, as do the folks at the north end of the county, etc... etc... (If an accident or disaster severs our links to the outside world, our local system continues to operate just fine.) Will this be true of an IP based network?
And that's the real key as to whether or not an IP based system is sufficient replacement for the POTS - will it provide equivalent support (I.E. will it continue to work even if I lose power to my house as the current system does), and will it fail (at the system level) as gracefully? While I doubt the POTS is entirely bulletproof, short of damage that physically destroys the system (which are rare event indeed, even on the national scale) it's robust as hell. After all, they've had over a century to refine the design.
AT&T has a valid point. (Score:5, Insightful)
We have this impression of the reliability and stability of the POTS network partially because it is ubiquitous and invisible. Yet, as someone who has spent most of my adult life working in and around copper twisted pair, I can tell you POTS isn't as "reliable" as you think.
You have the impression that POTS is reliable because there's a small army of men and women maintaining it. AT&T is claiming that it is costing them a fortune to maintain the copper twisted pair infrastructure to the standards dictated by the FCC for a rapidly dwindling number of customers. People are leaving copper-pair services by the thousands every day: some are going wireless, some are going to pure-play VoIP providers, and even the "cable company" (or the telephone company's own fiber).
Copper wire only lasts 20-30 years hanging from the side of a pole, on average, before it will likely need to be replaced. Especially in urban areas, where cable replacement isn't cheap, most of the landline phone companies are staring down the barrel of 50-60 year old copper infrastructure that may have as many as 75% of the pairs condemned.
Let me put it this way. No IT department for a business in a 100-year-old building facing a phone rewire job would replace all that 50-year-old 25-pair with.. more Category 2. The minimum they'd pull is Cat5e or "6", and even more likely they'd pull a significant amount of fiber, if not to the desk at least to a departmental wiring closet. That's the same decision the phone companies want to make.
From a strictly technical/engineering perspective, it's 100% the right choice. Copper loop is functionally obsolete in almost every way.
Not about VoIP either (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about dropping POTS in favor of wireless. It is about using VOIP instead of POTS, wiring still required.
This isn't about dropping POTS in favor of wireless. It is about using any technology that isn't specifically named in federal law as subject to pricing, quality and access regulatory controls.
Re:History.... learn from it! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've lived in Central, Upstate and Western NY. The phone system is usually more reliable than the power grid. To the point where we usually get at least two or three blackouts every winter (and more during the summer), but I can't remember the last time the phone line went down. And with POTS, you don't need to worry about no power for VoIP, or not being able to recharge your cell phone (the network often becomes overloaded during blackouts anyway). With generators becoming cheaper, it's less of an issue but we're not yet to the point in which cell phones or VoIP are more reliable than POTS.
Communication isn't stupid. Telephones are. (Score:2, Insightful)
He didn't say that communication is stupid; it clearly is not.
What is stupid, however, are telephones. They are an ineffective, archaic, 19th-century fossil that has no place in the modern world.
Voice-only communication is by far the worst type of communication. It is prone to misinformation and misunderstanding creeping into conversations, and this is even between two people who have known each other for years, and natively speak the same dialect of the same language. It gets much worse when there are people who speak different dialects of the same language, or worse, people who aren't native speakers of the language being used. Any native English speaker who has called a support line and been directed to an Indian call center knows what I mean. "James" may speak something resembling English, but over the phone it's damn near impossible to understand.
Voice-only communication also generally doesn't leave any sort of a useful record of the discussion for the participants of the call (although third-parties may be intercepting and recording voice communication, but this is usually does clandestinely and without providing such records to the call's participants). This helps contribute to the miscommunication problem mentioned earlier.
And then there's the fact that voice-only communication often gives a very misleading glimpse into the person's emotions. It's nowhere near the amount of information gleamed when talking face-to-face, or even making a video call. This is yet another source of misunderstanding that makes voice-only communication nearly useless. It's usually better to have the basically no emotional information conveyed by textual forms of communication.
Then there's the inconvenience that telephones bring. "Phone tag" is something we've all experienced, and it's a stupid waste of time. Then there are the hours upon hours that can be spent when calling the support line of a commercial entity, for example. Even when the phone call does go through, it's usually very disruptive to whoever is receiving it, as well as anyone around them.
It's not 1876 any longer. These days, we have so many alternatives that voice-only communication should be the very, very last resort in all situations. For business transactions of any sort, websites or email are better. For keeping in touch with friends and family, it's obvious that email, social media and family gatherings are better. For quickly getting in touch with somebody, send an SMS.
Make a phone call only in extreme, life-threatening emergencies only, where other forms of communication are not suitable. Other than that, voice-only telephone communication is by far the worst commonly used method available today, and should be completely avoided.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on the cause of the blackout.
Here, our last days long blackout took out anything that needed wires. This is because it was an ice storm that took down wiring as well as trees which took out more wiring. POTS was not fully restored until after power was. This is because the power company had to replace poles before the Telco could string new wires.
Re:I hate phones ANYWAY. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Communication isn't stupid. Telephones are. (Score:1, Insightful)
Really? You must certainly have a type of personality that makes it difficult for you to communicate with somebody over the phone. Speaking over the phone is much easier than SMS or email. First off, you can speak faster than you can type. Second off email/texts lacks voice inflections that can indicate someone's mood and emotional response. No, you don't get facial queues but it is certainly better than text. Voice provides me with enough context I need for most situations. Third it's far more interactive, I don't have guess if someone received my message, nor do I have to wait for someone to compose a reply. If someone makes a point I don't quite understand, I can interject and get clarification before they progress further and vise versa. As far as video calls go, its too inconvenient. I find textual communication cold and impersonal. At my workplace there is a saying, if you want to say something nasty about someone, use email. Perhaps you prefer that style of communication. I don't.
Re:Communication isn't stupid. Telephones are. (Score:0, Insightful)
I suspect the problems that you encounter are that you have no reading comprehension skills, and your writing skills are pretty damn horrible, too. Those are not problems with the GP, but rather they're problems with you.
I know you have no reading comprehension skills, because the GP addressed each and every point you brought up, an hour before you even made your comment!
Like the GP says, it doesn't matter how fast you can communicate using a voice call if the message gets misunderstood, which is often the case. Textual methods of communication offer much, much less room for confusion.
And it's better to have no information about facial cues (not "queues"; this is another example of your reading comprehension problems, and your inability to write properly) or perceptions of emotion, than it is to get misleading ones like so often happens over the phone.
The synchronous nature of phone calls is not a benefit, as you put it. If there's a delay before somebody responds to an email or an SMS, it's usually because they're busy with something more important than getting back to you. A phone call ends up forcing them to deal with something less-important (your call). That's highly inefficient.
The GP is correct about phones being stupid to use these days. And the problems you encounter with other media are not inherent to those media, but rather just problems with your own reading and writing skills.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:4, Insightful)
The NYC solution is fine for dense urban areas, the Texas solution is fine for sparse rural areas. But the US consists of much more than huge metropolis's and spare rural areas. Neither solution works too well for suburban areas (where there often won't be a block with power for a considerable distance) or semi-rural and low density areas (where can often have apartment complexes where you can't have a generator). (I live in area which faces both problems.) With the except of sparse rural areas, the POTS has proven itself to be a fairly robust system. Any potential successor has a high bar to match, and relying on the kindness of random strangers or for 'everyone' to have a generator fails to meet that bar.
Re: Communication isn't stupid. Telephones are. (Score:3, Insightful)
Texting is less rich than voice is less rich than video is less rich than in-person communications. A good way to measure is: How likely are you to misinterpret a joke and become offended?
Re: Communication isn't stupid. Telephones are. (Score:5, Insightful)
And don't forget; The NSA can't track and tap the phones of us with POTS like they can you folks with cell phones. Therefore they must force all of us to have cell phones so we can be tracked and listened to. Warrants are only needed with POTS.
deregulation (Score:4, Insightful)
I work for a phone company. This move is about deregulation, nothing more. Phone companies biggest competitors are cable companies, that's obvious. But what's not so obvious is the huge regulatory hurdles phone companies have to overcome while cable companies are almost completely unregulated. The FCC is almost entirely in AT&Ts pocket.... hell, most of the people working for the FCC probably used to work for AT&T. This will pass just like everything else AT&T wants, they basically write their own regulation now.
What will happen? What are AT&T's goals?
Phone service is more profitable in areas of high population density. For years AT&T has been abandoning rural exchanges, selling them, and focusing on big cities. They are exponentially more profitable than rural areas. The problem however is these exchanges usually cover areas that are both highly profitable and areas that actually lose money. So the phone company, by law, has to shift the burden across the entire exchange. So the city peoples prices go up, so the rural people can have phone service. The cable companies however just refuse to serve rural people. This is exactly what AT&T wants. Imagine the footprint of your local cable company, that is the exact same footprint AT&T wants for their phone service. Outside that? Get a cellphone.
The article seems to want to argue the primary reason to hold onto POTs is its relighability. During a disaster it stays working... well no, it doesn't. Basically it works like this, there is a primary switch and it can reach out a certain distance before call quality goes down. So then they have remotes that basically act as repeaters. Both the switch and the remotes have rooms full of car batteries. I'm not kidding they really are car batteries. They are all hooked up to a giant charger and if the power goes out the batteries continue to power the switch or remote for, at most, 36hrs. Often far less. If there is a power outage in the area, the batteries provide power long enough for the techs to drive a generator to the site. If there's a major power outage (think hurricane) the techs end up driving in circles from remote to remote with the 2 or 3 generators they have on had charging up each remote as much as they can before moving on to the next. At most this can last a few days. There are only so many techs, and so many generators. The techs get tired, the generators take hours to charge the remote up so they never get it above 25% before they have to move on to the next failing remote. etc... etc...
POTs networks have very high alarm rates (I worked in the NOC for a while) Equipment is constantly failing. Mice, car accidents, etc... POTs networks are not redundant, have no fail-safes. If any part of the wiring leading back to the CO gets damaged, you lose your service. Once we switch people to IP service, all those problems go away. The network auto-corrects. We can have a degraded cable (bad pairs) and the equipment works around it. Rather than having to send a tech out every time a single pair is damaged, you now only have to send them when a certain percentage of the pairs in a binder are failing.
So IP service IS better. But AT&T doesn't want to switch people to IP service because it's better... they want to be able to force people to take it weather they want it or not. They want to then treat the service as a data service (completely unregulated) and not be subjected to annoying PSC complaints about their services. The real solution here would be to make data just as regulated as phone service and then let AT&T provide whichever they want... but that's not going to happen.