Thats how things used to be when everyone had a wired phone. Something like 60% of the population doesn't anymore. Providers are running away from and spending as little as possible on the sort of infrastructure you described.
That's their wish, but they can not force. The copper is regulated, the fiber is not. The Suits have been making noises about "maximizing our investment" which means "coerce people to giving up copper..." For example, I cannot upgrade my DSL because FIO$ is available here.
Bingo, why do you care if it takes a week to fully recharge a
75AH deep cycle battery....?
Unless you can make good threats...their legal basis is iffy.
Bingo. And FIO$ keeps going up in cost.
There is nothing active between the FIOS CO and your ONT. If your ONT has power, there's no reason for it to go down.
They better; a CO is required to have backup power and does.
Verizon isn't a charity but it IS a public utility.
For what it's worth they gave us fios service (albeit with no long distance, and
10 cent local calls) for the price of what copper basic service should be, around $30/month (most of which is taxes or pseudo-taxes).
I would. I can see the local stations' antennas from my living room, so I figured I didn't need a fancy antenna. I didn't--until digital.
Before, in severe whether, we got just a trace of fuzz. After, fog or drizzle kills it completely.
With the internal charger? It would look like a bad battery and shut down, if the charger design is any good.
How do you propose a way to force them to keep copper when a lot of 'copper' circuits are only metallic for the last mile or less? IOW, it's already mostly a fiber backbone. That last mile has the highest maintenance costs, and will be replaced no matter what you want. The line to my house has had an intermittent hum problem that they can't find. When it shows up I call on a VOIP number to report it. The line clears up about three to five minutes before they arrive, or it starts working right after they verify that there is a problem.
I haven't seen a real Central Office in decades. Just small switching centers that are being replaced with packet switching hardware. Most are the size of a one car garage, to have room to store spare boards & equipment.
service, so they either go out of business and leave you with NO phone service at all, or they switch to something that they can market, namely FIOS. Then they can upsell you for broadband Internet service.
equipment run out of fuel, or are flooded, or get knocked over by an earthquake too...
If Verizon was making so much money with FIOS, they would be pushing it into the majority of the country where it remains unavailable. The reason VZ stopped building out FIOS service is because it has not been profitable for them. However, as far as overall profits are concerned, have you checked the annual reports of the major TELCOs? Almost all of the them are making money hand over fist.
I'm getting into politics now but I consider phone service to be a national security asset, which should not be an "unregulated" private enterprise. I believe it should be heavily regulated, if not downright managed by the government, just as I believe should be the post office. the railroads, the airlines, and the energy utilities. It seems to me that when those assets were heavily regulated or even government run, back in the 1940s - 1980s, it didn't stop this nation from growing the largest and financially strongest middle class in world history. Is it only a coincidence that the market instability and closing of opportunities for upward mobility in our society has coincided with progressive deregulation of those same assets?
I remember seeing the Central Office in Ft. Worth, with a lot of big batteries (they said some of the batteries were from old submarines). The batteries were supposed to be able to power everything for at least
24 hours, with generators for longer outages.That was about 31 years ago.
BTW, they had more operators come to work during snowstorms and after football games.
Operators, 3i years ago? they must have still been a Strowager type Central office if they were that out of date. My home town had it's first generation ESS Central Office before that. It replaced some
1920's design junk. The batteries were designed for the application. I doubt submarine batteries would last long in that application since C.O. batteries are on float charge 99.9% of the time.
I operated a pull-out-out-the-cord-and-plug-it-in switchboard for a few days in 1973.
On Navy ships in the late 1970s, we still had click-click-click rotating stepper switches.
Not many were left by then.
Strowger stepper.
Like but much smaller. Just served one building.
Well, same principle, I think, though it doesn't look the same. I wasn't trained on it, but by watching it work, I think I figured it out. I think we had two-digit numbers. Pick up a phone and a one-axis rotor would step to the correct line of ten. Another would then select the first rotor out of ten. Then one or two would connect that phone to one of ten or a hundred lines to the other side, and the process in reverse would select the right destination phone.
Sounds like keeping that battery charged is a perfect application for a small solar panel.
Don't get the stab at the government or is that just an election leftover.
Tomsic
That's right and one of the things that has changed now is moving the batteries that ran the wired telephone system from the central station to the user's property. There's no reason to be content with limited battery time or even in-house batteries though. The batteries could easily be set up to charge with a solar cell and the battery could also be put into the cabinet that services the neighborhood - also with a solar panel to charge it. FIOS and U-Verse should be pushed to do that.
Tomsic
CO's are still around; it's just the switches in them are far smaller. And they still have generators. And fuel. In the derecho in July, the CO down the road was on generator for several days.
For whatever reason, FIOS always runs to a CO, not to a DLC in the neighberhood.
You can't be forced to have FIOS for dialtone in any case I have seen; as FIOS is not regulated. An obvious example: where there is no AC power such as a building site. And while it is true the DLC has only hours of batteries, the telco has an obligation to keep it powered.
As for the ""too big a battery fable..."; it's not worth debunking again.
They give you fiber service at the regulated price, since the copper's been removed you can't have copper service anymore. And by 'copper' I include 'century-old, time-tested, reliable service.'
The test is going on right now. Conventional telephone service is highly regulated; cell phone service much less so.
I'm wondering what would happen if regulations were to be removed from conventional service. I'll guess that subscrber prices would rise rapidly and traditional companies would exit asap. However, clever new companies might well figure out how to keep the copper around if there were fewer regulations.
Tomsic
When I moved, last spring, I thought I could take the cable box with me and watch the recorded stuff until I got satellite hooked up. The shows are recorded on the local disk drive but, he's right. Without communications with the mothership, the box is no more than an expensive door stop.
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