Also banks, lawyers and brokers.
Connections through a modem and phone line will be around for quite awhile.
There are many rural areas not served by anything except land lines. I don’t see our dysfunctional Government upgrading infrastructure any time soon.
I looked into satellite internet and it’s expensive. It also has latency problems. If you’re on a ranch in the middle of Oklahoma a 56k modem and landline may be your best option. Unless you’re really lucky and DSL is available, but it uses your copper landline too.
Yep. I currently live behind a tall hill and even on my personal Wi-Fi my cell phone service is lousy. Cell/smart phones are increasingly necessary in this modern world, but I still have to maintain a landline as well. Because without it I can’t make or receive a phone call in my place without it breaking up and creating a lot “HUH? I SAID…”-type conversations.
My landline is crystal clear at all times. It’s an added expense, but a heck of a lot cheaper than my cell plan.
I was shocked to learn AT&T is not aggressively running service into new neighborhoods.
My mom downsized into a home built about 6 or 7 years ago. Homes are still being built there. We’ve seen several finished in the past year and several more will be completed by the end of 2019.
The houses are wired for phone and cable. I don’t think CAT5 was run in my mom’s house. I ran a CAT5 line through the attic for her internet connection.
Called AT&T, no landline service offered. Ok, it’s old technology. So how about DSL or UVERSE? Nope. AT&T has no lines on that residential street at all. I was beyond shocked.
I found out nearly everyone on that street uses xfinity internet and tv.
AT&T should have run fiber on that street before it was even paved. They don’t seem interested in new homes.
I just couldn’t bring myself to call Comcast/xfinity. I called several providers and found CenturyLink. They had DSL service on the far end of that street. They extended the lines and hooked my mom up. She has a landline and DSL. She uses DIRECTV too.
In Michigan, when your landline goes out, the phone companies are not legally required to repair it, as per our wonderful legislature. I think that as a line goes dark, they will try to hook you up to a alternative system, or another provider. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any other companies in the copper wire business.
AT&T and Verizon have absolutely no interest in maintaining or expanding copper or fiber-to-the-premises infrastructure. The sole reason they continue to do so is because of local franchise mandates, and there they generally fail to even meet requirements. (Look at the disaster that FIOS expansion in New York City has been over the past 10 years, for example.) They want to be wireless companies exclusively, and will not run new physical infrastructure unless they are court-ordered to do so. And sometimes not even then.
The reason for this is that the major cable companies have split up territories among themselves so that there is virtually no direct competition among them. That way they can offer mediocre service at high prices and don’t have to worry about losing customers. Free enterprise! :rolleyes:
DSL over POTS (plain old telephone service) has an effective limit of about 18,000’ from the hub. I know at least two rural families that live so far in the country there are no nearby cell towers, and they’re too far away from the telephone switcher for DSL.
OTOH, the original telephone system is about the closest thing to universal service the U.S. will ever have. I’ll bet we could build repeaters/boosters/substations along the existing network cheaper than we could blanket the country with cell towers.
Eh, these days one might as well sign up for Starlink/OneWeb/Viasat/whatever, especially once the prices come down or if you don’t need a super-fast connection.
Yep, I remember it well. I think it was the massive spike in traffic rather than antennas being destroyed. But I could be wrong.
My landline went out too, but I at that time I lived downtown, not too far from the WTC. People that I knew a bit further from the site had working landlines.
I remember the catastrophic 2003 blackout. I don’t remember my cell phone service going out. At that point, I’d given up on land lines, so I have no idea what the story was with those.
After Hurricane Irma in 2017 there was NO cell service within 150 miles. The few landlines that are still out there were the savior for getting word to family that one was still alive. It took weeks before temporary towers were erected and one had to right on top of it for it to work. Fun times.
This sort of statement is idiotic. There is no “free enterprise” involved - these are utility companies. By definition they are granted a regional monopoly because without one it would be economically infeasible to invest the capital necessary to build the massive physical plant that reaching every residence and business requires.
Since telecom deregulation in the 1990s limited hardline competition has been established by legitimizing competing long distance companies and requiring the local Bell legacy companies to share their copper plant. The result has been vastly cheaper long distance and international telephone service and the rise of competitive local exchange carriers.
The same thing never happened with cable because at the time it was not seen as an essential communication service; it was for watching TV. And in the 2000s, it was assumed that de facto competition between cable broadband and DSL would be sufficient to lead to a healthy marketplace. And it did, until people realized that DSL couldn’t get any faster. Now the market is stuck.
But none of that matters if the companies won’t actually build the infrastructure anymore. AT&T, Verizon, and CenturyLink are all that’s left of the Baby Bells. Fiber to the premises is dead. FIOS expansion is dead. UVerse expansion is dead. Google Fiber never got off the ground.
What’s left of the incumbent legacy operating companies won’t install new copper unless you put a gun to their heads. Urban utility regulators don’t really care about it anymore since there are band-aid solutions like VOIP over cable or POTS-over-cell for new construction. Rural areas don’t have the political influence to demand anything better.
So until some breakthrough happens to make copper twisted-pair bandwidth competitive with cable, or another breakthrough occurs that makes true available-everywhere wireless broadband possible, the situation will continue to stagnate.
A major competition coming along in a few years for rural areas is satellite internet. While there is currently satellite internet it has very long latency–because the satellites are so far away. There are new internet satellite systems which will be much closer to the earth like Starlink:
and Oneweb:
In fact lots of them in development:
When I moved rural back in 2004, the only internet available was dial up or Starband Satellite. I don’t recall the price but it was certainly higher than dial up. Dish, with a transmitter, on the roof, Required running software on the PC that compressed and decompressed the signal in both directions. Many issues with the software not running correctly required many reboots to get it working.
Switched to DSL when it became available in 2006. Still on DSL because there are no alternatives.
I’m too far from a repeater to get DSL, so I’m on HughesNet. Works pretty good (GaryM, I would consider Hughes if I where you). I have two dishes. One for TV (DirecTV, Hughes for internet). Our cell phone service works, sort of. Sometimes you have to go outside. Sucks in the winter.
Our land line is pretty unreliable, and they really don’t care. Lost it last winter twice for a few days. Currently, the old landline pedestal by the road is destroyed. Pieces of plastic (I need to get that cleaned up) just laying around. The new one is laying on its side next to the wires that are just sticking out of the ground wrapped in electrical tape. I guess I should be thankful that they at least taped up the connections.
Seems they are giving us a not so subtle hint that the two houses on this trunk really aren’t worth the bother.
Sorry to not answer the OP. I suspect most of that copper will be abandoned in place.
If you can get cell phone reception at all at your house you can get much better reception using antennas and repeaters.
The Government can use them to operate Orwell-style “telescreens” in every home. For our own good, of course.
How do you get internet without a landline?
I’m using a computer that is connected to the internet that way. My brother’s computer uses wi-fi… but that is provided by landline internet. I know you can buy data for a smartphone, but the concept of buying “data” for a desktop does not compute (pun only mildly intended).
I get internet through the cable company. It’s significantly faster than DSL through the landline network. It’s don’t have cable tv, just internet through them.
My understanding is that it’s specifically the medical field. Or, rather, those covered by the HIPAA rules. A bank accidentally discloses some personal information and it ends with ‘We’re very sorry.’ Same with a lawyer or brokerage. The penalties for medical info leaks are apparently quite severe.