Dead & buried by 2020, I'll bet.
Problem is, I think it’s part of the “sweetheart deal” for some companies to obtain basically monopolies in some areas IF they spent a few extra bucks and made sure that outlying areas were covered.
When I was young, in the late 60’s, there were still a few farmhouses near us without power or phone.
We’ve kept ours because it works in a power outage when nothing else does. For awhile though I’ve been warning the missus that sooner or later they are just gonna shut it down.
This younger generation, bah! Back in my day all we had were tin cans connected together by long strings between houses and it did just fine! It fact we LIKED IT ! WE LOVED IT! Bah, this younger generation.....bunch of whiners. /s
Everything is wireless nowdays. Why live in the stone age?
(I can’t seem to give up my land line either.)
The house was built before cable was available here & I’ve never had it. Don’t care to do business with AT&T or Commiecast. Not really that interested in dish TV either. If the landline service gets too bad, I’ll just get a 4G hotspot.
The problem is maintenance and rehab. If the technician is given the time to isolate the trouble and repair the bad section, the “old lines” become “great lines”. Telco companies like Verizon and AT&T purposely are allowing the network to fail to force the government to give them tax breaks to convert everything to fiber. I’d never thought i would see the day that someone like Randall Stephens would purposely destroy the 2nd largest landline network in the world, create an angry customer base and make technicians lie to customers just so he could save a few billion towards his yachts and private jets and world vacations.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
My phone calls fail to connect because I have caller ID.
Verizon is doing respectable business here in NJ with it’s 3-way TV/Phone/Interet Verizon FIOS bundle of services.
In that bundle, unlimited domestic land-line phone is $3X.XX of the monthly bundle cost.
However, Verizon Wirelss now has a “home phone” device offering in this area. It’s a device (not a cell phone) that connects to the Verizon Wireless cell phone service.
It takes a standard telephone in-house wire/cable plugged into a “land line” phone on one end and the other end into a standard telephone jack/receptor on the device. Service takes place over Verizon’s cell phone network.
The offer is priced at $20 flat per month for unlimited U.S. domestic & Canada calling. The device is plugged into a standard receptacle for its power and it delivers all the same functionality expected of a “land line” to the phone - including, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, 3-Way Calling, Voice Mail (*86), 411, 611, 911, Last Number Callback (*69), Caller ID (number only), International Calling (with iDial feature or an international calling card).
I am curious how the companies cost for providing the service results in the price-break of this “fixed” cell phone network service, compared to monthly charges for a regular cell/mobile phone.
There are no wires or cables to the house needed or needed to be maintained (falling trees on phone lines). With the stationary setting of the device, there is no “roaming” and communication is always using the cell tower(s) nearest the fixed location of the device. One question though is whether or not the communication remains strictly in the hands of the cell phone network, beyond the point of the closest tower, or if that closest tower is ONLY passing the communication to/from it and the nearest point in the landline backbone/switches/network - or not.
We got ooma when we went through the last power outage and our landline quit on us after about two days. Our landline was connected to the box about three houses away. And when it’s battery died so did our phone. Now we don’t depend on our landline but on cell phones charged up someplace else.
Landline is dying because of Al Gore (and others) Federal taxing of them. My landline has $30 of taxing on $30 in monthly services. $60 a month total. So someone else can have a free internet and free Obamaphone.
Phone companies of all sorts have been ripping us off for decades.
My only concern is if the competition from land lines is dropped, the cable companies and most importantly cell phone companies will jack up their rates even more than they have been.
I get TV (2 sets dvr), internet (5 PCs), and yes phone (3) for LESS money than my cell phone (3 only 1 is a smart phone) bill.
My school tax bill is a little less than my cell phone.
My property tax bill is a little less than my cell phone.
I heat my house for less than my cell phone bill I a live withing 30 miles of Buffalo, NY
My electric bill is less than a third of my cell phone bill.
Seems I can do a hell of a lot more with other utilities for a lot less money than a cell phone with crappy connections.
Question: While a text requires significantly less system resources than a long phone conversation why are the text charges so much higher?
I am not sure how this will work out for businesses.
I use to sell telephone systems to businesses that had as many as five lines in a rotary. They had hold and call transfer capabilities. Can cellular systems in the US duplicate this now?
Copper easily corrodes. Even temperature changes with the seasons can cause problems with connections between the Phone Company equipment and a customer.
Most of all, the issues come from the phone company doesn’t like properly maintaining their ‘outside plant’. This leaves the poor Service Techs applying ‘band-aids and duct tape’ type fixes to problems, rather than fixing them.
The phone companies also arrange the workloads for technicians to where they aren’t allowed time to properly fix anything. When a cable pair is bad, its quicker and easier to simply put the customer on another pair, rather than tracing out and resolving the issue, because they most likely have 10-15 other jobs to go and do for the day. When repeated year after year, you end up with a big cable nearly full of bad cable pairs.
Lightening is also the worst thing for the old infrastructure. Not much can be done about that.
I could go on for hours about all of this.
I just bought a new phone today. It was a classic bell systems phone with a rotary dial that was in real good shape. On the bottom there was a label, “Property of bell telephone - not for sale”
I bought it because I don’t think the grand kids have ever seen one...
Because they operated as one company they could afford to keep sizable crews in residential and commercial installation as well as maintenance and repairmen. My dad retired as a Special Services {Data Circuit Tech} for Bellsouth in about 1993 with 45 years service. When the split up come he had two choices. Stay with then South Central Bell or go to AT&T. He chose wisely and kept his job. Most who chose AT&T were out of a job in less than five years. Because AT&T owned the office he worked in called the old 4-A which was long distance switching and it was changed to ESS {Electronic Switching} he went back outside till retirement.
The Land Line Gris is not being maintained like it was. Used to anytime you went out especially into town you'd see one or several phone company trucks. Now they are rare with a handful of techs covering large areas. Which brings up several other issues. In the event of natural disaster it is harder to pull crews from point A and sent them to the disaster. This was Ma Bells strength. Used to you never saw sloppy work. For example if a buried cable podium {box} on the side of the road was damaged it was fixed ASAP. I've seen them stay wide open for months.
Used to be local workers took local trouble reports and all trouble shooting used local employees. A major outage such as all phones on a road being out brought an immediate response. Now Immediate response is a few days and the call center in wherever is oblivious to the fact that an entire community may be out.
Ma Bell did need some modifications such as allowing extension phones without charge but they had a reason at the time for it. Ringers on phones before the split took considerable current to ring the bell and they had to compensate for it. The old bell type ringers required a capacitor sitting accross the ringer. That was how they knew you had an extension phone. They could see it from the Test Board. The split came right at a time Ma Bell was undergoing a major changeover from mechanical to electronic systems. Judge Greene got credit for improvements he had little to do with in that respect.
Anyone believing that their cell phone makes them immune to any and all Ma Bell problems are in for a shock. The Cell Grid is completely dependent upon their Ma Bell Land Line Grid to function. They can not function without going from your cell phone to the tower to Ma Bells Cable Grid. I like my cellphone but my land line stays as well. BTW all the 911 Centers in the U.S. are also Ma Bell dependent to function.