This is exactly the reason why I find all the gleeful tearing out of old POTS copper lines very distressing. This was a proven system with incredible reliabili

This is exactly the reason why I find all the gleeful tearing out of old POTS copper lines very distressing. This was a proven system with incredible reliability, which worked in power outages for residential users due to centralized backup systems, and still has plenty of usefulness. Until we come up with some universal multi-layered standards which provide at least the same level of uptime and utility, it seems more than a little premature to pull all of it up as a matter of course. Obviously in many places there are space constraints, but that is not usually an issue in arguably the most important use case, at home.