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?"
History.... learn from it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?
Because POTS will work in some of the worst environmental conditions possible. It survived the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has been through hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and even meteor strikes and kept working. Yes, some parts of the system failed, but for those parts that were still connected as long as a local power source (often just a battery bank) supplied power the system kept working.
It was on the back of the POTS system that the internet was born, and has always been a backup to every computer network system... even if it wasn't perfect at least *something* would get through in terms of data.
Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
2. The same applies to your house. What good is a fixed, "simple" phone if your house isn't there any more?
3. One of the biggest issues when a disaster strikes is locating people. POTS doesn't do anything to help with this.
POTS was great but it's had it's time and we need to stop supporting it and move on newer technologies.
Re:"Bold Move Or Grave Error?" (Score:2, Interesting)
I know, it's AC, so nobody will see this; however, ...
We can all see the excellent strides AT&T have made in providing IPv6 to their residential customers. And the excellent strides providing fiber to the home.
In case you don't deal with AT&T, both of these statements are highly laden with scarcasam. To point, AT&T have been pretending to give a dam about IPv6 for nearly a decade now, and were beaten in putting fiber to the home by their competitors Verizon, and even now by Google.
Sure, they roll out such technologies to a few residences in response to being "technologically behind", but the number of residences who receive such items are so low that one would think it's only been deployed to the homes of AT&T corporate executives.
Re:This should be amusing (Score:2, Interesting)
Let the 'free market' take care of pots demand? Without government subsidies, the copper wouldn't have been strung out to your middle-of-nowhere canyon house in the first place, and certainly wouldn't be maintained over the long term. Your terrible cell service is an example of the 'free market' handling it. I'm not arguing with your conclusion, just questioning whether it really gets what you're after.
IP telephony sucks (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who builds and installs large phone systems for a living, I cringe whenever a customer tells me "Yeah we've got a T1, coming in over Time Warner."
A traditional copper PRI from Verizon is the ideal service I like most of my customers to have, I never get anywhere near the same level complaints of call quality issues or service outages for a traditional PRI that I get for any PRI coming in over the internet. Well, except after hurricane Sandy, after that storm we had a number of customers switch over to an IP based PRI or a pure SIP solution. It made sense since it took Verizon months to fix their wiring, but a lot of these customers that switched wanted to immediately switch back as soon as Verizon was available again since the quality was so god awful.
I have no problem with Verizon using fiber and IP based telephony in the back end since I they're not going to be able to maintain their legacy equipment forever. But, don't send everything down the same pipe and just install a $200 Adtran on-site and expect it to be anywhere near as reliable. Especially since a lot of the support engineers for these carriers have no idea how to do anything with an IAD. I've had support engineers tell me I need to send a SIP redirect to forward calls out with the proper caller ID, well sure I'd love to except I'm being handed a PRI and the SIP side of things is all them.
Anyway, for customers that have rock solid internet and a separate dedicated pipe for a SIP trunk, I have no problem going native SIP all the way to our equipment. My problem is when someone out in the boonies thinks they'll save a ton of money switching to VoIP service from their cable provider. Instead it just means dozens of billable hours trying to explain to this customer that while their internet service is excellent for checking Facebook, good voice quality requires a solid internet connection with little to no packet loss and very low latency and nothing we can do to their PBX will change that. Although as one coworker pointed out, as the number of people who grew up using cell phones all their life increases, the less complaints we will receive. People who are used to POTS lines are going to be used to picking up a phone and having excellent call quality, people who grew up with cell phones are much more accustomed to jitter, echo, and poor call quality so I'm sure they'll be fine in a pure IP telephony world.
Re: History.... learn from it! (Score:4, Interesting)
VoIP is great as long as there is reliable internet connectivity to wherever your service provider decides to locate their servers. For a system that is comparable to and as resilient as POTS, service providers would need to place a VoIP gateway at each of their central offices. While that is certainly doable, the question is whether service providers will do that of their own accord without someone like the FCC mandating it to ensure that there can be reliable communications should a flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, lightning storm, or other form of natural or man made disaster.
Re:Cell phone reliability (Score:5, Interesting)
Over what wiring, DSL? Those copper phone lines are going to be scrapped and DSL will be gone too. No, Fiber will not replace them because it isn't profitable enough. Verizon considers FIOS to be a mistake. This is all about AT&T and Verizon completely abandoning wireline and replacing it with wireless. Unlike wireline POTS, wireless is completely regulated and comes with zero quality of service guarantees. There are zero requirements that a cell phone site stay up during a power outage. The government tried to require that each cell site have 8 hours worth of backup power available, but the wireless industry fought it and won. There are zero guarantees about the signal strength being adequate in the entirety of the wireline markets being abandoned. When it is all said and done there are going to be many homes with zero telecommunications at all. Don't count on the FCC to provide consumer protections either. The FCC chairman is a former cable company lobbyist. Might as well ask a former CEO of BP to oversee offshore oil drilling safety and disaster mitigation.
Wireless is also more lucrative because they can charge many times more for data. Why provide 100s of gigabytes on a wireline when at the same price you can offer single digits worth of gigabytes and charge up the wazoo with overages. This reform is more about the Verizon and AT&T raping and pillaging of the consumer via overpriced wireless data in areas without cable internet and allowing cable companies to become the monopoly for all wireline based communications than it is about promoting technical innovation. Replacing wireline with wireless is much like the power company deciding that providing wired electricity is too expensive and selling batteries to their customers is a suitable replacement.
Re:History.... learn from it! (Score:4, Interesting)
San Diego has allowed utilities to add extra fees to everyones' electric (SDG&E) bills to cover undergrounding for decades. Seeing as nothing was actually getting buried this got to be a sore point back in the 90's, neatly solved by the city formally allowing SDG&E to keep the money without burying anything. A new effort started ~10 years ago. The first neighborhood in the program had open trenches and dug up streets for two years while the various utilities and the city dickered over who would pay for what, and ended up with electric/cable being put underground while phone lines were left on the poles. Really the only people who are getting all of their cables put underground are the rich ones who have ocean views: those neighborhoods vote for assessments and then each homeowner coughs up $6-12K to pay for it. The rest of us are paying an extra $3.50 per month and can expect our poles to disappear sometime between next week and the scheduled end of the current undergrounding program: 2067.
Be careful what you wish for.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:2, Interesting)
The the four largest blackouts in the past 10 years:
2003 The Northeast (United States and Canada) blackout affected ~55 million people and most of them were without power for 2 days. Some had no power for up to several weeks.
2005 - Java and Bali had a blackout for ~7 hours, affected ~100 million people
2009 - Brazil - The blackout affected 60 to 87 million people and the longest outage was ~6 hours.
2009 - India - About 620 million people lost power in two separate events on consecutive days. The first one last about 15 hours, and the second one had power mostly restored within 3 days.
Curiously, only the Brazil blackout was caused by wind or rain. Heat seems to do more damage to power infrastructure than blizzards or hurricanes.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is that 25 years ago, it took a direct hit by a category 5 hurricane to make a visible dent in the phone network. There was no need to rebuild the phone network, because most of it never quit working in the first place. After Hurricane Andrew, people came home to neighborhoods so completely destroyed, they had to count streets and driveways to find the wreckage of their house... and more often than not, if they plugged a legacy-style phone into a phone jack, it worked. You can use Google to find stories from the Miami Herald about people who came home to a pile of rubble... and a very loud "off-hook" sound coming from a phone buried underneath.
Compare that to now, where a goddamn slow & sloppy tropical storm (like Isaac) can take out U-verse and Comcast for at least half the day (Which is exactly what TS Isaac did, in northern Dade and southern Broward counties) just because a few distant neighborhoods (where their regional network operation centers are located) lost commercial power for a day, and they didn't have enough backup power to keep them running. It's DISGRACEFUL.
As for #2, your house might not be "there" (in the sense of being habitable) any more, but if the storm is still in progress, working phone service is still a good thing to have.
Re:History.... learn from it! (Score:2, Interesting)
A better example would be the 9/11 attacks on NYC that took out large swaths of Internet and cellular service ... yet POTS still worked, occasionally in an island, but it worked none the less.
The Internet was designed to work in unreliable conditions, which coincidently is how it turns out working.
The POTS was regulated into having a certain level of reliability. It is considered by the US government as critical infrastructure, and has legally required SLAs attached to it. This is why a REAL T1 (not some other circuit with 1.5Mbs of data), carrying 24 DS0 channels still costs $1500/month, but you can get 10Mbs for a couple hundred. The T1 can carry voice, so its regulated as such, and thats why you'll have the AT&T guy at 1am in your data center trying to resolve issue with the circuit without sen asking them to. The phone company sees that it works or they get the shit fined out of them.
This happened because it turned out that once everyone got phones, we realized how awesome they were in emergency situations and how many resources could be saved thanks to being able to communicate with anyone in the country quickly and reliably.
I'm fine with dumping POTS, but I want the Internet to have that same sort of regulation behind it to ensure that it works far far better than it does now.
We also need to switch to PoE if we're going to dump POTS and supply power from the CO so at least ONE device in the home can stay powered on from offsite power if the mains fail.
Re:It is a terrible idea (Score:2, Interesting)
I was out of power for 12 days after Sandy. I had POTS telephone service for much of that. I did not have cable. And my neighbors' FIOS didn't work either.
POTS is a great resource in disasters. I predict it will be removed. Then someone will come up with an idea for a reliable backup service that will cost 100 times the cost of keeping POTS, and we will give that money to some corporation(s).
Re:It is a terrible idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree. However, I could agree to dismantling of POTS if they FIRST also lessen regulations on a swath of HAM for use by the public, and also legalize packet radio over CB, Family band, and other public use frequencies. We have the technology to radio for help in times of emergency -- Indeed HAM operators are sometimes on the scene in disasters before paramedics arrive. They already play a role in Earthquakes and other times when infrastructure is threatened. Lower the barrier for the common man to have greater ability to communicate first then I'll reconsider my stance on our keeping wired POTS going.
We have the technology for radios to negotiate to noise free channels automatically -- hell, my cheap wifi router does this. The cellular system exists, but we need a similar mesh network for the common people. The EM spectrum belongs to We the People, give us back some damn air waves instead of charging us for all of them. It's the information age, yet outdated packet radio laws remain repressive to progress. Problem is that the government can't just throw a kill switch on public powered wireless devices -- Like they can on the Internet (and probably telephone too).
It would be foolish to ignore that the government has an Internet Kill Switch, vast spying infrastructures, and a pro-censorship anti-discourse agenda whereby government agents actually plan to expose porn habits to silence dissent, while considering migrating any communication medium to IP based services. Furthermore -- The price of bits does not reflect the cost to distribute them. Cellular plans make a mockery of POTS long distance fees, and though it's never been cheeper to move bits the prices aren't going down nearly as fast as in foreign markets with actual competition. We need less regulation of the public sector and more regulation of the private sector's price fixed oligopoly before I'd ever advocate for tossing POTS out. Additionally: Unwarranted metadata collection is too powerful a tool already [kieranhealy.org] -- If Snoden can infiltrate PRISM, so can spies from enemy states.
Beware: When those in power advocate change, the changes suggested never give those they have power over more freedom.
Re:Cell phones are better in a disaster (Score:4, Interesting)
> One more thing...and this is a FCC policy thing...We could create an "emergency" mode where a quad-band cell phone will talk to any network in range
Most high-end Android phones ALREADY have all the hardware they need to do that. Google "MSM8960", and be happy knowing that it's inside most of the high-end Android phones sold in the US over the past 2 years or so. The only reason why an AT&T Galaxy S3 (for example) can't roam on Sprint or Verizon is Qualcomm's fucked up licensing model, and American cellular carrier business policy. Ditto, for Sprint and Verizon phones roaming on AT&T and T-Mobile, but in THEIR case, it's even MORE fucked up... most of THEIR phones CAN roam on GSM, but they get Qualcomm to hardcode the radio modem firmware to blacklist AT&T and T-Mobile so it'll refuse to use them, but still allow GSM roaming outside the US.
LTE is still problematic (mostly by carrier intent), but as far as network cross-compatibility within the US goes, 800-vs-1900MHz and CDMA-vs-GSM hasn't been a hardware-limited constraint on high-end Android phones and recent iPhones (since at least the 4 or 4S) in YEARS.
Re:I LOVE phones, so Cap'n Crunchably delicious (Score:2, Interesting)
Cell networks are wonderfully resilient to "brain damage" eg a earthquake or tornado can take out one 10 mile area of coverage without disrupting the entire network. However the weakest point of the cell network is the HLR.
HLR, or home location registrar is where the billing takes place in a cell network. When you get your physical bill, this is processed from the calls you made stored in the HLR, so for the sake of the OP's question the HLR = CO. The HLR stores all calls and data billing. When you roam, the roaming HLR contacts your HLR and verifies that your phone is registered for service, and active, it does not care about plans or data allotments.
So the short answer is, a cell network will continue to function in perpetuity provided it's powered. The only thing centrally controlled is activation and physically sending you a bill. If your bill cycle is the 24th of the month, sometime on the 22nd of the month the "mothership" eg AT&T in Texas contacts the HLR, downloads the calls and data numbers made, and then calculates it against your plan. Realtime data usage you get on your phone basically does this.
I speak of this because I worked for AT&T Wireless at some point in time, what I describe above is based on the 2G system which is also identical to Verizon and Sprint's CDMA system since both were compatible with AMPS which was decommissioned years ago. The GSM system is slightly more complicated, but not so different in that it works otherwise in a similar same way. The tools CSR's query the HLR, which reps simply refer to as "checking the tower" they can see all the voice calls and SMS messages sent (and even send SMS messages from the HLR to anyone.) Keep in mind that the authentication is horribly overcomplicated in that a CSR may have like 20 passwords to access the various tools and systems, this is usually why reps do not want to troubleshoot something "with the network" because the network itself is not a simple "oh there is a problem with the network" but more like "there is a problem with that specific tower, HLR, HLR database, roaming database, sms or data connectivity" Basically CSR's can only troubleshoot "the problem with the user's phone" and not "a problem inside the network" because that can take hours, there are dedicated technicians that don't speak to customers that handle that.
So going back the OP's question. When there is a signal problem a tech is dispatched to the street corner of the reported problem, they make a call/sms/data query and if it works, they close the ticket as "no problem" and there needs to be quite a few reports before a tech will be dispatched because the vast majority of cell users reporting problems, are problems they created themselves, like trying to call from inside cement bunkers (basements, garages, convention centers.) If a HLR is disabled, everyone on that HLR is affected and everyone roaming on that HLR is affected, nothing else. When cell carriers share sites, they share the physical structures, not the power, or cables. So it's entirely possible to have a AT&T phone and Verizon phone lose wireless access at the same time because the power is out at one cell site's HLR, but if they were registered on a roaming HLR somewhere else their calls may get something like a fast-busy signal or a recording that the phone needs to be activated. Your phone contains a roaming database profile that say's it's allowed to use certain tower ID's. So a HLR for AT&T and a HLR for T-Mobile within a mile of each other will both be seen by your AT&T sim card in the phone, but your phone will not attempt or use the T-mobile HLR under any circumstances automatically.
So to answer the question I'm replying to. Yes the HLR contains the subscriber data and is basically independent of the carrier itself. It's possible to manually register phones on a HLR, or deactivate them independant of the central billing system, and this is often the reason why people ask about "calls" they don't remember making. They may have been (as part of tro