what good is the landline phone network in the future?

I have been discussing with friends the future of all those copper wires running to every home and business in the US. I have heard that this is the subject of intense debate in telecommunication circles to the point where there are so many “good” ideas that no one will commit to anything.

Obviously, these wires don’t have any future for telephones. As I understand it, if you try to buy a new landline in an existing site in the many locations in the US, you will actually get a cell phone dressed up to look like a plain old telephone. I assume that when a new subdivision or large office building is put in, they still wire it for phones, but if you build a house on an empty lot in many areas, landlines are not available.

So, what ideas are being bandied about to repurpose this resource? It seems like it should be a tremendous resource, but I can’t think of anything that doesn’t fit better on the broadband connection to the house.

As long as it doesn’t interfere with my landline connection, I don’t much care what else they do with them.

They better not mess with my landline, though - there are no other tolerable options.:mad:

All those copper lines could be the basis of a massive network of telegraphs, just in case literally every other form of communication fails.

Don’t you folks get DSL over twisted pair?

If you don’t live in a town or city there is a good chance you won’t have a broadband connection to the house and an option is to use the landline with a technology called DSL.

The landline is also good in emergencies. When the electricity is out broadband is also dead. When the electricity is out you can’t charge your cellphone. But a dumb telephone with a landline still works.

I had something happen a few years ago which shook my confidence that this is always true.

My DSL went out, then a few hours later my dial tone disappeared. I filed a report, and three days later, which was the time frame listed when I filed the trouble report, they fixed the problem. The technician who called me to verify the problem was fixed stated that the substation had lost mains power so he had turned on the emergency power.

My questions are 1) Why didn’t the emergency power come on automatically and 2) why didn’t the phone company notice that for three days a substation had both lost mains power and had not switched over automatically to emergency power?

DSL has speed limitations that make it non-competitive with other broadband solutions. I am thinking about the future where literally everyone has access to cell service and as a result the copper becomes obsolete. Of course there are regulations that prevent that at this time, but perhaps that will change in the future.
My question is what will happen then? Having an actual wire to every home in the country seems like a great opportunity-but I don’t know what that opportunity might be.

What “good” ideas have you heard of? The best idea I’ve heard of so far is to slowly recycle the copper as the homes are torn down and replaced over the next century or so. If you’ve heard something better being discussed as a real possibility, please share.

Are fibre optic lines OK? Though if wireless/cellular/satellite broadband is cheap enough there may be less reason to wire up every single building with a hard line.

I was reflecting last week how strange it seems that two different technologies seem to be crossing each other as they move in opposite directions. We used to have television and radio networks that broadcast their signals out into the air for everyone to receive them. Now the modern equivalents of those signals travel along specific cables from their source to their destination. And we used to have personal communications systems like telegraphs and telephones that traveled along specific cables from their source to their destination. And now the modern equivalents of those signals are broadcast through the air.

The only thing a metallic loop can do that fiber can’t is deliver power.

There’s less active copper wire out there than you’d think. The days of each house having its own private pair running from the house to the switching office are long gone. More often, your “local loop” runs to a neighborhood wiring box, where it and all of your neighbors’ lines are connected to a device called a concentrator that interfaces the copper loops to a fiber line to the switching office. This wiring box is also where the DSLAM devices used for DSL connections live.

The wiring boxes aren’t new - different phone companies call them SAI, B-box, cross connect, and a few other regional variations. It’s adding the local loop to fiber concentrators and changing the connection to the switching office from a big cable with dozens of pairs to a fiber that’s new.

As a result of all this new digital infrastructure, some phone companies have been ripping out miles and miles of copper wiring and recycling it. Others are ignoring it until they’re doing other work along the cable route.

As someone who hasn’t had a landline in 15-ish years, I totally do not understand this POV.

If the cell service sucks, that wire is valuable.

But some years ago the phone company replaced my copper wire with fiber optic. They “mined” the copper from the system, I think. My phone service no longer gets scratchy every time it rains, but I need to replace a giant battery in my garage every couple of years.

Hmm.
Looks like there aren’t any good ideas out there!
My “good” ideas included DSL and security services (burglar alarms). Both have obvious problems that are today largely solved by wireless tech.

Interesting.
Years ago the only reason phone companies were important was that they owned the only wire to every house. Now it looks like that asset has degraded to the point of irrelevancy.

Folks in rural areas, like me, depend on the twisted pair for communications. Cell service is somewhat poor, and not even 4G much less 5G.

When I first moved here the DSL was 800K on a good day. No streaming videos and a Windows update could take 8 hours or longer.

They did run fiber down the local county road about 20 moths ago and now I have DSL at 15-18 meg. Its twisted pair from the terminal to the house, about 3/4 mile.

Spectrum cable is in town, but ends about 4 miles short of my location due to the housing density being too low.

Unless the build a cell tower closer to my house I see no change in the immediate future.

In a city/suburbs? Sure. However there are plenty of rural places that dont have cell service, or maybe 3G, at best. 5G needs a lot more towers than 4G as the signal doesn’t go as far from the tower. If its not economical to put up one 4G tower today what makes you think it’s economical to put up multiple 5G ones in the future?

As it stands now, landline is the only support for TTY.

Cellphones are dandy for texting, but not all Emergency Services support direct texting. I live out in the middle of nowhere. If my husband keels over, I have to text SOMEBODY, and depend on that person calling Emergency Services. If my “somebody” is out of state, he or she will have to call my Emergency Services through the non-emergency phone number.
~VOW

There are situations when cell service disappears, and a copper line would be helpful. I think that in NYC on 9/11, cell service went out since many of the antennas were on the Twin Towers. Not to mention the heavy cell phone traffic.

Then in 2004 or so, when most of the East coast had a massive power outage, cell phones stopped working. I don’t recall if it was the phone battery dying with no recharging options, or if the actual cell phone towers ran out of power. I remember people getting off of the ferries in Hoboken, NJ, from NYC looking for pay phones. Not many pay phones around either.

Zip lines?

I’ve heard that faxing over phone lines is mostly kept alive by the medical field. If a medical office needs to send a patient’s document or prescription to another, telephone lines are considered de facto-secure. Doing it via computer has all sorts of ways, malicious or accidental, for the data to be lost or misdirected and lead to possible HIPAA headaches.