tus of old rural landlines for old rural home phones was. He said it all w ould be abandoned in 5 years (2020). It would be replaced with VOIP over t heir required satellite service (Dish). Cost would start at $19.95/mo witho ut all the current taxes but I'm sure they'll want you to take more service s. Sounds pretty shaky if you need to dial 911 in a hurry and coverage is down due to weather.
Does VOIP even work via sat? I would think the delay would be a problem. But I guess if that's the plan, it must work, but I wonder how well?
tus of old rural landlines for old rural home phones was. He said it all w ould be abandoned in 5 years (2020). It would be replaced with VOIP over t heir required satellite service (Dish). Cost would start at $19.95/mo witho ut all the current taxes but I'm sure they'll want you to take more service s. Sounds pretty shaky if you need to dial 911 in a hurry and coverage is down due to weather.
bucks a month..........
I think the problem there is that in those very rural areas, the choice of cell phone carriers is limited, if available at all. I'd wonder how many are going to find one at all, let alone at $10 a month. Also, the $10 a month cell phone plans I've seen, you get maybe 200 mins, if that. With existing copper, you can talk to your friends and family locally all you want and even long distance is cheap. For unlimited voice on cell, it's typically $35 - $40 a month. But that still isn't bad, provided one can get it where the need it. .
We have a landline thru the local provider because cell phones don't work down here in The Holler and they are the only option besides satellite for internet - which from what I've heard really really sucks . We have 2 of the pay-as-you-go cell phones for use when we're out and about , but generally only use them for emergency or long distance calls - we don't have LD service on the land line because of the cost .
Has anyone said that Frontier isn't still providing landline service on copper? The reason all providers want to get out of copper is that it's a whole separate, dying, costly infrastructure to maintain and probably has lousy profit margins compared to VOIP. The future is VOIP over infrastructure that supports not only that, but cable TV, interent, etc.
By getting out of copper I mean the typical twisted pair, 22g? stuff, ie the old installed base that POTS runs on and that we're talking about. If Century is doing cable TV, internet and VOIP on copper it must be on coax or similar, not the old POTS stuff.
Nope Regular old CAT 3, 3 pair flooded burial cable. I am not sure how they are getting away with it but I assume it is multiple channels of data on the wire, merged in the DSL modem. I also think they are using
2 pair if you have the TV package. I am getting 10 meg DSL on a single pair tho. The fiber concentrator is about a mile away.
I took a look at Century website, it looks like the TV is via DirectTV, ie sat, not copper, no? So, from what I see, looks like they have a higher speed DSL service for the internet and phone part.
IDK what "flooded" cable is. gel filled? But whatever it is, they are using 3 pairs and only going 1 mile at which point you have fiber. Doesn't sound like what is strung up on the poles in rural America for POTS, been there for 50 years, has unknown number of taps, bridges, etc, that we're talking about. It's apparently higher speed DSL, which has all the problems DSL has always had, because it relies on the old, existing copper. I'm sure you're aware of the iffy nature of DSL. I would agree that it can be part of the solution for some areas. Even then, the phone company is going to have to put in new infrastructure, eg the fiber part to get close to the last mile or so, taking out that part of the copper. I also wonder if you'd find most rural places with limited infrastructure have enough pairs to give everybody 3?
Perhaps I should have said "most providers" want to get out of copper. The OP's experience with ATT, apparently the largest local phone company in the USA, being an example. The broader problem and driving force behind it is that in probably 90% of the customer base where they have copper, better competing alternatives are already available, eg cable, fiber. They definitely want to get out of maintaining that copper infrastructure, because it'costly to maintain, customers have been leaving it in droves and it's not competitive at all with the alternatives.
You chose to live in a rural area, no doubt in part to 'get away from it all'. Every decision comes with a price, and the price of getting away from it all is the additional expense of bringing it to you once you change your mind.
You can enjoy your rural amenities, or move to a more densely-populated area with better internet options. Or, you can make the argument that providing internet service to rural areas should be considered a common good, a public utility, same as rural electrification and postal delivery - and like them, provided as a government service paid for via taxpayers. Of course, if you take that approach, doubtless some of your neighbors and your local internet provider will oppose it. If you succeed in persuading enough people to make the local government seriously consider it, at that point your local internet provider will either file suit against the government, or suddenly announce that providing high-speed internet to rural households *is* economically feasible after all, just to block the public development of actual competition. It's played out both of those ways in the state I live in.
They acquire it in order to acquire local monoply rights as the internet provider. They have no interest in supporting the lines. It's cheaper for them to lose customers and pay the fines if/when customers file complaints with the PUC than to perform the necessary maintenance on the lines. If you search Frontier and rural online you'll find tons of complaints about their poor service and decaying infrastructure.
Yeah, there's no way they're doing any of that over the "old copper"...we still have the ATT (Southwestern) hard line to the house for precisely the reason others noted; it's rural, we have long-run electric service lines from co-op that are subject to outages w/ only one or two meters being affected and it still works often when other doesn't because while Cu, it is almost all buried line now rather than on-pole so ice doesn't take it down.
BUT, those advantages aside, we're _only_ 5 mi or so from the central station in town and the dialup connection could never reach even 56k. W/ a negotiating modem, occasionally might see 44k, but it was rare.
We'll keep the landline as long as it is available for those reasons, because in bad weather the cell isn't all that reliable and while we know do have a wireless 4G connection, it also takes power...
"Rural electrification" is _NOT_ a public utility; they are member-owned cooperatives with only some accessibility to loan guarantees provided via the Rural Electrification Act.
Around here Century Link is partnered with Dish but they are starting to offer Prizm which is their name for the bundled service. You give up your Dish service and get it all down the existing copper.
Yes, silicone filled 3 pair cat 3.
They are only using a single pair for POTS and DSL. I understood they hook up another pair if you get TV
With the number of people ditching POTS, "pairs" is not a problem and as I said, I think they only need 2 pair for the bundle. They will need good copper but what they are using here is what was installed in the 1980s when Sprint took over from United Telephone.
It looks like Century Link is trying to squeeze a little more life out of their copper infrastructure and remain a player against comcast. Comcast sucks to badly around here that it will not be a huge problem. CL did have contractors working on all of the tombstones, cleaning up bad splices and generally freshening up the installations before they rolled out Prizm here but it is still the same basic copper. I understand if the telco still has old pulp cable on the poles and you are seeing nitrogen bottles along the road, they are not likely to be able to support DSL but I think most places were upgraded sometime in the last 5 decades.
Cooperatives provide the public utility, which is the service to the public of something such as phone, electricity, or water. Only difference is that a coop is member owned, as compared to an investor owned or privately held company. Either way, the point is the same: the federal government brought electricity to rural areas. It took FDR to propose it as part of his New Deal and an act of Congress to provide public money to make it happen, 'cause the private sector said Nope, there's no profit in doing that.
Of course this might have been FDR's first step at taking over the electric service for the entire country, which he tried to do while running the publicly owned utilities into bankruptcy. Thankfully, we have checks and balances.
Which isn't the typical installed base of copper POTS that has been there for 50 years in many cases. I'm curious as to when and why they installed that? If they had to bury it, install it, etc, why would any company lay that instead of fiber, coax, that could give 100X the bandwidth?
If you get TV through a twisted pair, where is the channel selection done? Must be at the far end. You couldn't possibly put all the channels that customers want today on one wire, like is done with cable.
There you have the dual edge sword. People are ditching POTS where they can and moving to better solutions. I'll bet in many of those cases, the DSL twisted pair offering isn't as good as the other options that are available, so the freed up lines aren't going to do much good. And in the rural areas we're talking about, like the OP, people aren't ditching POTS, because it's the only local phone service.
I'll bet many rural areas they don't have gel filled twisted pair. We don't have it here in suburban NJ. We also went through this headache back in the late 80s, when ISDN was going to give voice plus another
64Kbit channel for data. The problem was that the transceivers had to deal with the existing installed base of wire and it was a mess. A lot of time was spend trying to profile it, figure out what rates they could support across the installed base of the whole country. The issues were that there were bridge taps, wire gauge changes, etc that all created problems and made transmission more difficult. I was involved in it at that point and I don't recall anyone saying, no problem, we have gel filled twisted pair to work with. The best compromise was
144Kbits per sec, which became the ISDN standard.
Ultimately, ISDN went nowhere. Later, as technology improved, DSL came along, which was basically the same thing, using the existing wire digitally, but at higher rates. Nobody replaced the wire, the whole point was *not* to have to have better wire. So, I'm real skeptical that much of the installed POTS wiring is gel filled. It might be in certain locations, for whatever reason. For example this Century cable is apparently buried. Here in suburban NJ, it's strung on poles. Same polls tha have been there for 50 years. In towns here, it's buried, IDK what actually they have for wire product.
Yes, I'd agree with that assessment. Which is why I modified my statement that *all* providers are getting out of copper to "most". I can see it as a fit in some places, for some people, etc. I don't see it doing much in the way of most providers moving away from copper though.
Apparently not if you look at all the problems with DSL. I couldn't get it from Verizon, here in suburban NJ. And lots of people that do get it, report slow speeds, reliability issues, etc. And I have cable, some nearby towns also have FIOS in addition to cable, so the Verizon copper is dying. And Verizon is seeking to get out of copper POTS infrastructure.
Sprint did it in the 80s when they bought "dial tone" from United Telephone. It is all underground.,.
I am not sure how they do it but it is done on the box you get from CL. I imagine you are right that they only send the channels you are watching but it supports at least 5 channels at a time. (4 ST boxes and the DVR) They came out and pitched it to me but I wasn't happy with the way the boxes worked so I didn't bite. I actually did sign up but I canceled when I figured out they had lied to me about the DVR.
That is the situation here. I can get Comcast that has internet speeds
2-3x what I get from DSL but it is down so much I was not interested in it. Comcast is also horrible when it comes to fixing your problems.
Verizon is committed to FIOS but you do not have to look hard to find people who hate it. It all gets back to these companies wanting to make money and have the absolute minimum number of employees. I would not be surprised if Verizon spun off all of it's land based communication and went totally wireless, contracting out the fiber backbone to the towers.
I have CL w/ DSL. I don't subscribe to TV, but have a Roku that gives me lotsa stuff (netflix, youtube, etc). As far as I'm aware, I'm still on a single twisted pair (POTS). I get an actual 1.2M per second, dwnld.
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