12 ms·

AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California

152 points by kungfudoi 3y ago

istillwritecode 3y ago
My wife keeps a land line because of superior voice quality for calls to her family. I find it handy because I can give a number to businesses when they demand one. We never answer that phone (it has been silenced from ringing). AT&T has no broadband service in my area - they offer only DSL and I live in a fairly rich area of silicon valley. The problem is that my utilities were put underground when the house was built in the 70s, so it's too expensive to upgrade the utilities.
- h_tbob 3y ago
  Facetime audio has super high quality. It's noticeable. If you use voip you can get "hd audio". If they turn it off... have her try that! Not trying to argue, just offering a solution.
- Faaak 3y ago
  Dumb question, but it's the same in France and Switzerland, and year the fiber optic coverage is quite good. They just use the existing conduit. Fiber creates no interference and usually they run alongside telephone cables
  - crote 3y ago
    The issue is that a lot of countries didn't install their telephone cables in conduits, but put them directly into the dirt. Adding fiber to it requires digging up the entire run, which is of course quite expensive.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  > give a number to businesses > never answer that phone Yes. A long time ago had to give a landline number to school, to have a discussion with them 6 months later on why they expected us to ever pick it. We only ever used that line for international phone calls, and after cancelling it it basically made no difference in our life, except the savings. We give our mobile numbers when asked for landline, bullshit numbers to spam companies, block the ones that still get a real number, and ask relatives to call us on any other reliable service (international call quality was garbage anyway)
- colechristensen 3y ago
  One thing which is absolutely infuriating is the noise cancellation of iPhones. For me, with multiple people, it frequently aggressively mutes the microphone in noisy environments such that they're speaking and it's entirely silent on my end. You can't turn this off, there's no setting. I can't speak to my parents if they're outside and it's windy or if they're in the car, or often if they're just on speakerphone inside. It's ridiculous.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  If you need to give out a number that you'll never pick up, why not just use any random non-working number?
  - serf 3y ago
    it's often useful to have that line dump to a voicemail in the off chance that someone important did happen to call. it's also useful to own the line you claim to own in the off chance of a verification of some sort.
- vel0city 3y ago
  POTS would have had the same voice quality as a decent VOIP provider, as upstream from your home they were converting it to ulaw anyways. This would have been better than the early GSM codecs. But these days with VoLTE "HD Voice" uses a superior codec. Most chat apps will use a codec that's better than ulaw as well. So there's a lot of places to go that offer significantly better voice quality these days.
- voidwtf 3y ago
  “superior voice quality” Superior to what? With VoLTE the only calls I make these days that sound bad are people on POTS lines.
josh2600 3y ago
I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household. US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.
- dangus 3y ago
  Citation needed. The US is #8 in median speed for home broadband and #13 in mobile. Considering that anything above 15mbps is enough for 4K Ultra Netflix I think the US is doing just fine. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - swarnie 3y ago
    Christ do you remember 15mbps? those were dark days.
    - devoutsalsa 3y ago
      I'm grateful for 5mbps when traveling.
      - anotherhue 3y ago
        * Weeps in 56k tones *
        ben_w 3y ago
        I don't think I ever got more than 20kbit on my 56k modem. Usually more like 12.
- h_tbob 3y ago
  I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid, or if it's just not as population dense as other countries with faster speeds? According to this statistic, it's not very dense, meaning it's super expensive to build broadband. Because it's pretty much a question of physical area covered, not number of people serviced. This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=US&most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=U...
hiddencost 3y ago
My mom told me she was worried her cell phone might run out of battery and then she'd be unable to call 911. It's funny how used to charging our phones we've become.
- dangus 3y ago
  An amusing but generally harmless boomerism. Obviously, an apples to apples comparison would be a cell phone that is plugged in, since a land line has to be plugged to a power source (the phone line). (To me, it doesn’t matter if the phone line is more reliable than mains power, because it’s probably not more reliable than a charged phone with a “backup battery.” Then you’ve got Apple shipping satellite SOS-equipped phones which must count for something.)
drmpeg 3y ago
I've kept my AT&T landline mostly to reduce the amount of spam calls on my cell phone but also to see just how long it would last. It fails every year or two from squirrels sharpening their teeth on the wires. The last time I had it fixed, the service guy told me I was the only active line on the street. I've had the number so long, it used to be (415) instead of (650).
- dangus 3y ago
  I personally think that this reason to keep a landline also became outdated. There are so many tools and features on cell phones to identify and stop spam, and it seems like carriers are finally starting to get ahead of it. At this point the people I know in my life who still have landlines mostly get spam on them especially because they aren’t actually using the landline for much, so almost 100% of the calls going over the land line are low-value even if they’re not spam. I.e., everyone I know with a landline isn’t calling friends or family on the landline, it’s more like a contact phone number to give to the electric company.
  - SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
    Landlines are irreplacable in case of power outage. As someone who lives in developing world we often have power outages, when if you have no charge left in your cellphone, you cannot even call emergency. Landlines are independently powered and never failed even at most serious multi-day blackouts; even municipal water pumps stopped working, but phones kept functioning..
    - dangus 3y ago
      Sure, but we were talking about the US, which is so developed that it doesn’t even have 3G anymore. Americans own over one personal motor vehicle per household, they could charge their phone with their car if they really had to. Less than one hour of the California minimum wage buys you a 30W solar panel or a large spare battery to charge your phone. The risks are minimal. And I’ve definitely had phone lines go out in the past. All it takes is one tree falling. The lines are on the same poles as the electric service. Sure, they were more reliable, but not by any measure that makes them worth keeping around (especially since the vast majority of lines sit completely inactive).
bcook 3y ago
The telephone companies seem to actively push for you to get rid of your land line. My monthly bill recently dropped $75 ($50 for local-only phone service + fees like 911), when I canceled my land line. My 100mbit VDSL2 bonded internet line is $75, so it was a very noticeable monthly decrease. My ISP/Telco is Windstream in the eastern USA.
- voidwtf 3y ago
  The equipment is aging and expensive to maintain.
Rediscover 3y ago
If anyone is wondering about first reponders' use of land lines, that necessity is to be alleviated with the United States setting aside some spectrum in 700MHz back in 2012. Do a search for "band 14" - here is something to look at: FirstNet https://www.firstnet.com/coverage/band-14.html https://www.firstnet.com/coverage/band-14.html [My household used to be required to have a land line ages ago and I still pay (slight) attention to things in this space. I do not have first-hand experience any more with such matters.]
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
It is insane how reliable landlines are, though. When the power goes out, you can make "candles" by connecting a 0.47 uF capacitor to a LED leg and connect both ends to the red and green phone wires; there's enough voltage to power a couple of them without the phone going off the hook. In an emergency, the lines don't get clogged like cell phone towers, and the Telco infrastructure is much more protected than wireless (you'd have to bomb a pretty big building with no windows to take out a small area's lines). It's probably fine in the grand scheme that we lose these properties. We'll just reinvent them later if it turns out we miss them.
- vel0city 3y ago
  > In an emergency, the lines don't get clogged like cell phone tower Back in landline days I was in a couple emergencies where my phone only gave error tones or recorded messages of being too busy. Even in the ancient circuit switched times one could have easily run into a situation where whatever destination out you were trying to go would have been totally full. This idea POTS would never get clogged is a myth. They could handle a lot more capacity than cell phones at the time, sure, but they did still eventually get flooded. And in one of those times, I couldn't get a POTS call out but I could send an SMS and it would eventually get through.
tamaharbor 3y ago
In order to maintain her home telephone service, my home-style conscious mom was forced to go from a from a single copper pair through the wall to three massive black boxes mounted in a very conspicuous location in the dining room.
datapolitical 3y ago
And there are internet providers there https://go.silverrapid.com/internet/ https://go.silverrapid.com/internet/
rconti 3y ago
I'm lucky that I am in Sonic's service area and get 10Gbps symmetric fiber service for $50/mo. It exposes the lie of the incumbents slow-walking new tech and bandwidth increases. They _just don't want to_ because they _don't have to_ compete with anyone, and they'd rather print cash for their shareholders. They have the capital to build these networks far faster than a small regional ISP can. Multi-gig speeds, FTTP are profitable. There's just no incentive to innovate. They're just rent seekers. It's more profitable to charge more and deliver less.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
  They won capitalism. The prize is you don't have to compete anymore, you don't have to innovate, and you get to charge more and deliver less. Getting companies to this position is foundational to the incentive structure of our economic system. Once they win, that's it. They get to stay there forever.
  - grecy 3y ago
    I worked in IT for a large telco for four years that has a monopoly on an extremely large part of Canada. After years there, learning the insides, working closely with marketing and sales and all the rest…..I agree with you 100%. They literally have guaranteed teed profits in the form of VERY large government subsides. Of course they chase them, so instead of FTTH or other interesting initiatives they were hell bent on installing fax lines and copper because they had enormous subsidies.
    - simfree 3y ago
      Canadians love their monopolies full stop. It's a cultural issue where each sector has its handful of heavyweights, of which you have a choice of 1 or 2 to use locally, and even if there is a third option most Canadians just won't consider it. Comparatively, the US has thousands of small banks & credit unions, and tons of small and midsize ISPs that provide a 3rd or 4th option in areas like MDUs where they can make a go of it.
  - xhkkffbf 3y ago
greendave 3y ago
I live less than. a mile from a mid-sized town (15k peopl), 25 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley. The only reliable internet access available is 8mbit DSL using copper and satellite (HughesNet). No cable, no fiber, dodgy cell service, and at last try Starlink was not remotely reliable. Last big rainstorm we lost service for 5 days. I’d love to be able to ditch copper, but if AT&T is allowed to pull the plug, it means expensive, high latency satellite will be the sole option.
- bearjaws 3y ago
  I live in Florida and found Starlink worked mostly fine in a rain storm (occasional disconnects). This is using their newer portable receiver though, which one did you use?
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >will be the sole option. I mean this sincerely: you could move. In 2012, I left the Castro Valley part of sfEastBay and moved to a small Southern town with fiber optic 10gbps available at every electric-supplied address (I lived 8 years inside a rustic national forest with a fiber/copper jack on my ramshackle cabin's powermeter).
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > In 2012, I left the Castro Valley part of sfEastBay and moved to a small Southern town Apropos of anything else, I can't imagine the culture shift from the Castro in SF to a small southern town...
    - piperswe 3y ago
      Castro Valley != The Castro. Castro Valley is just north of Hayward.
      - FireBeyond 3y ago
        Ahh, I stand corrected!
jmyeet 3y ago
Let's give them a choice: 1. Keep supporting landlines; 2. Relax that anywhere symmetric 1Gbps fiber is available for under $60/month; or 3. Leave the service area, transferring existing assets to a municipal authority who can then build and install symmetric 1Gbps fiber to their residents. Pick one.
linsomniac 3y ago
Or they could just do what Century Link has done here in Colorado: Let it rot in the ground. The pedestals around all seem to have lost their covers and are just sitting exposed to the elements, an eyesore (and they were no beauty to begin with :-)
- callalex 3y ago
  Did they “lose their covers” or did tweakers steal all the copper? That’s a big problem in the US.
  - linsomniac 3y ago
    The copper still seems to be there, it's just all exposed to the weather now. I'll have to keep a closer eye on it when I drive past.
fortran77 3y ago
My 90 year old mother can't always figure out her cell phone. The land line is what she uses most. I don't care what the specific technology is, but a phone that's plugged in, and always available (no "off" switch) and just makes and receives calls with the familiar UI (lift phone off hook, enter number on keypad) is still a requirement for many people.
- ac29 3y ago
  No particular reason that "land line" phones need wired service though. My office uses 5G service for internet and ATA VOIP adapters for the phones. The experience of using the phones is exactly the same as when they were on traditional copper circuits provided by the phone company 10 years ago.
oatmeal1 3y ago
Does she not have wired internet? VoIP sounds like a remedy.
thelastgallon 3y ago
The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both. With Virtual Power Plants, the grid can be reimagined and it will happen faster if competing ideas/companies battle it out in the marketplace for consumers. Second best is for electric utility to offer fiber, like EPB of Chattanooga, TN.
- jmspring 3y ago
  I would not want PG&E (northern CA power company) in charge of any more infrastructure in California. They already have shown incompetence by shifting maintenance funds into bonuses instead of actual infrastructure maintenance.
  - thelastgallon 3y ago
    Thats why the city should own lines. PG&E needs competition. There was a recent post, some small utilities are providing electricity a lot cheaper than PG&E.
    - jmspring 3y ago
      That assumes cities are competent. The coop that provides power and fiber where my cabin is in Plumas County (far north eastern CA) is great. They even have redundant electrical feeds PG&E as well as from Nevada. That said, after many years of living in Santa Cruz, CA - there is no way in heck the city here could manage any of that competently.
  - crote 3y ago
    The trick is to make the power companies non-profits: split the network part from the generation&selling part, and give it proper oversight. It's what Europe has been doing for decades.
- gst 3y ago
  > The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both. Something similar is the case in the European Union, as the electricity network is usually a different company than the electricity providers. The network is often owned by some municipal company and charges customers only for the transport of energy over the network. For the energy itself customers can choose from dozens of different providers, some of them generate their own electricity, others just buy and resell electricity on the market.
solfox 3y ago
I wonder about low income households and if cell phone or internet providers have the same obligation to provide baseline service as do landline? If not, this seems like an important hurdle to cross before dropping these customers…
- asadotzler 3y ago
  I live in a rural area not far from silicon valley and there is no cell coverage here and there is no broadband. The trees are too tall for satellite (redwood forest) and so when AT&T pulls out, we, and our little neighborhood of about 50, half of whom are fixed income seniors, will have no connection to the outside. A couple neighbors on the hillside can get satellite but the latency's too much for wifi calling so that doesn't work. Fortunately we have a ham radio operator who can reach the sheriff if something catastrophic happens.
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
What I have not seen here ours why I still have a landline. Telcos are required to have five 9 uptime for landlines in the USA. (That's less than 6 minutes a year.) None of this is promised or regulated for internet based voice solution.
justina20 3y ago
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ijhuygft776 3y ago
Didn't they get paid too much by the government to install those lines?
- Tempest1981 3y ago
  And don't they (and Comcast) have special rights to the phone poles? iirc, Verizon can't use them to install 5G micro-cell towers. (This was in California)
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Probably. Camp Seco is an old mining town. However, it looks like there's some EBMUD land out there. Would be interesting to see if they could be goaded into maintaining comms infrastructure. Certainly there are going to be some utility employees out there doing whatever. https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2270377,-120.8562145,3a,90y,202.28h,76.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s1nJuinEvXCRWVwYnLc27nQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2270377,-120.8562145,3a,90y,...
pkaye 3y ago
If someone wants to remove the old lines from the pole to the house, who would do that now? I don't use my landline anymore and trying to cleanup the clutter of old lines.
- coryrc 3y ago
  In Seattle area there's https://wirefreesky.com https://wirefreesky.com I saved $250 by just using wire cutters. Previously the power company removed the cable line for me, because their cherry picker was too tall and just drove into it and it snapped. Luckily I was using DSL.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Wirecutters should do the job I think?
  - ijhuygft776 3y ago
    legally, maybe not, but in my experience, every time you reactivate the service, they ask to replace that wire from the street to the home even if they don't need to so that they can overcharge ATT/customer... they even often try to replace the existing box on your house with an extra huge one for no practical reason.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      Sure, but if you're 100% certain that you will never use their service again that's not such a huge issue. I did the same with a power line on my Canadian property where they kept that line powered up even if I wasn't using the service because we were all on solar and wind. They didn't want to send someone out to take out the road side fuse. I called them and asked them who would be liable if due to their refusal to power down the line someone would get injured and they sent someone out immediately :) That wasn't a theoretical risk by the way, the first stretch of that line must have been many decades old. Algoma Power... no love lost between us.
- beau_g 3y ago
  When some branches brought mine down in a storm, I cut mine off on the house side, spooled it up secure with electrical tape, and hung it low on the pole on the street side. Probably shouldn't disconnect it at their box but past there it's yours if you own the house.
Animats 3y ago
That's going to be hard for people on criminal home confinement. Those anklets connect to a base station that connects only to an analog land line. Most of those things are obsolete technology.
- mchannon 3y ago
  As the former wearer of such an appliance (also married to another former wearer of a different such appliance) I can confirm this is no longer the case.
- Fezzik 3y ago
  Don’t they have a few GPS-only units now where all the hardware is in the ankle bracelet? I work criminal-law-adjacent and I feel like I see booths for them at conventions. If so, this sounds like a great opportunity for more vendor grift… I mean government thrift.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    Yes gps bracelets have been a thing for years
- ketzo 3y ago
  Wow. Fascinating (and extremely important) edge case. Out of curiosity, what led you to knowing this?
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Do they not work with an ATA (VoIP to POTS adapter)? If not currently, is this a technical matter (can’t work) or an administrative matter (detectable and not permitted)?
beenBoutIT 3y ago
Have California cell networks gotten to the point where they'll be able to handle the mass calling that follows disasters? Curious how people will contact emergency services and friends/family in the critical time following an earthquake/fire/etc.
- tjohns 3y ago
  Not if the power goes out. Unlike landlines (which are required to have generators at the central office), cell towers are only required to have a battery backup that lasts a couple hours. When we had the rolling blackouts in the bay area a few years ago, Comcast's cable network was the first to go, but the cell network didn't last much longer.
- foolfoolz 3y ago
  for the most part, things are much better than they were 10 years ago. you can go to a baseball/football game and your phone works. you can go to a concert and your phone works. a big part of this has been capacity upgrades, protocol upgrades, and a shift from telecom traffic to internet traffic it has always been difficult to contact emergency services following an earthquake / massive fire. it might actually be more scalable now. and you have more options of who/how to contact
  - fragmede 3y ago
    it works at a football game because they know about it and send in extra equipment to handle it.
    - kalleboo 3y ago
      My test always used to be midnight, new years eve, when everyone wanted to say happy new year at the same time. On 2G/GSM, the whole network would drop for 30 minutes, just zero reception on the phone. On 3G, you'd have reception but calls were impossible and texts mostly failed. On 3G+HSDPA, texts also worked fine but data became unusable as people sent fireworks photos On early 4G, not much changed from HSDPA since the networks were busier from more people using smartphones and social media On LTE Advanced and 5G it's all a non-event now, everything works fine
inferiorhuman 3y ago
I'm pretty sure Verizon is doing similar things with their copper infrastructure on the East Coast – they've more or less abandoned it in favor of fiber in certain regions. For anyone curious, Camp Seco is not a particularly remote part of California but it is pretty sparsely populated. It's about an hour outside of Sacramento and Stockton according to Google maps. I wonder if AT&T will ever get the bright idea to try this in a more populated area (like the Bay Area). The condo I'm in now has underground utilities. Sonic's abandoned DSL and their rebranded AT&T fiber. If they ever roll out fiber, the HOA's on the hook to trench from the street and to each of the buildings because Sonic cannot / will not use another utility's conduit. The phone wiring predates twisted pair, and I'm betting the coax is equally antique. High speed internet? Yeah, right.
pizzafeelsright 3y ago
Related, I am not sure how to teach a toddler to call 911. My cell is locked and I'm not giving them the pin or face. Without a land line I am considering an exterior alarm wired to an inside panic button. In the evert I collapse from choking on a banana slug what does my toddler do? So far the I instructions are to ring the trusted neighbors.
- kallistisoft 3y ago
  On some Android phones pressing the power button 5 times in a row will call emergency services. I learned this the hard way when I was very drunk and fumbling with my phone - cue a call back from 911 where I had to awkwardly explain in the middle of crowded bar that the call was made accidentally. If you have a young child you may want to consider disabling this feature as it's very easy to accidentally trigger and law enforcement is required to respond if they don't receive and intelligible response!
  - MereInterest 3y ago
    I learned this when the power button on my Pixel 3 started repeatedly firing. My phone started repeatedly rebooting, opening the camera, and calling 911, all with no user input. Because the phone was booting up and initializing the camera, the GUI would take a while to respond. It would display the “slide to cancel”, sometimes overtop the camera GUI, and wouldn’t respond when I tried to cancel it. The only thing that stopped it was running out of battery. This started at 10 PM on a Friday night, and lasted a few hours.
    - callalex 3y ago
      Yet another reason it should be a crime to sell a phone with a non-removable battery.
- mlindner 3y ago
  On iphone you can call emergency by just holding both side buttons at the same time.
- 3y ago
thyrsus 3y ago
A decade or so ago, we had an ice storm take out power for much of the town for five days. Because the copper pair was still intact and powered by the central office, we never lost phone service. This week, after heavy rain, the copper lines, which one technician said had cheap paper insulation, stopped working. A different technician got outgoing calls working again, but incoming calls (the higher voltage ring signal) were still failing, and AT&T told their technician not to fix it. We were forced to transfer our service to fiber, which was already present for internet. The AT&T fiber router can drive our existing handsets, with replacement crawlspace wiring reasonably priced. My UPS lasts 90 minutes, nowhere near five days. Sometime over the next year, I'll probably get a Generac attached to our gas line - the tree canopy makes solar impractical. I'm lucky that I can afford these worse alternatives. Many can't. Enshittification is seeping into the physical layer.
- voidwtf 3y ago
  Enshittification? The original delivery mechanism, copper, was convenient to carry electricity over. However, copper has high maintenance costs due to moisture intrusion, breakages, and signal degradation. It also has theoretical upper bound on bandwidth. In many locations the copper may never even make it to the CO anymore and may be served by a pedestal with fiber and a small battery backup. Is replacing the deteriorating, limited, copper infrastructure really enshitification? I expect telecommunications, not power deliver, personally.
- crote 3y ago
  Keep in mind that many gas lines require electricity to operate. There are plenty of pumps and control stations along the line, after all. If you want to have electricity during a multi-day regional power outage, your best bet is a generator fueled by a propane tank, or some kind of long-life gasoline.
fmajid 3y ago
The companies that used to make phone switches (Nortel, Lucent) went out of business over 2 decades ago and they are unmaintainable. Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive, and the market of Luddite little old ladies like Pereira who cling to landlines is just not large enough to make it financially viable, unlike the market for broadband. What Verizon did was sell the business to Frontier, a company everyone knows is going to go bust, but Verizon is rid of the liability. It’s long pas time regulators stopped the quixotic quest to preserve and outdated technology there is simply not enough demand to keep alive.
- fy20 3y ago
  Maybe they can see what is happening in the UK? They are planning to switch off the analogue part of copper phone lines next year, and people who still want a "phone line" (most people just use mobile phones) will be switched to VOIP service. Almost everyone has internet and phone provided by the same company. For the last few years it's been a standard feature in all "modems" to have a analogue POTS interface. It just needs to be switched on in software.
  - fmajid 3y ago
    Exactly, you need to have Internet service, and the phone is an add-on to that. What you won't get is a standalone emulation of Alexander Graham Bell's Plain Old Telephone Service without also having to pay for the broadband.
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Frontier, Windstream, and Lumen are all really odd companies that are holding the bag on providing POTS and DSL to rural areas. From what I've heard from people in those companies, the universal service fund is the lifeblood of the companies. Much like Google, they're trying to find new revenue sources, and unlike Google, are having some success in their diversification efforts, but that universal service fund money really would be difficult to do without. With Starlink maturing and competing services in at least the planning stages, I wonder how much longer the government will keep the basis for rural copper going.

152 points by kungfudoi 3y ago

My wife keeps a land line because of superior voice quality for calls to her family. I find it handy because I can give a number to businesses when they demand one. We never answer that phone (it has been silenced from ringing). AT&T has no broadband service in my area - they offer only DSL and I live in a fairly rich area of silicon valley. The problem is that my utilities were put underground when the house was built in the 70s, so it's too expensive to upgrade the utilities.

h_tbob 3y ago
Facetime audio has super high quality. It's noticeable. If you use voip you can get "hd audio". If they turn it off... have her try that! Not trying to argue, just offering a solution.
Faaak 3y ago
Dumb question, but it's the same in France and Switzerland, and year the fiber optic coverage is quite good. They just use the existing conduit. Fiber creates no interference and usually they run alongside telephone cables
- crote 3y ago
  The issue is that a lot of countries didn't install their telephone cables in conduits, but put them directly into the dirt. Adding fiber to it requires digging up the entire run, which is of course quite expensive.
makeitdouble 3y ago
> give a number to businesses > never answer that phone Yes. A long time ago had to give a landline number to school, to have a discussion with them 6 months later on why they expected us to ever pick it. We only ever used that line for international phone calls, and after cancelling it it basically made no difference in our life, except the savings. We give our mobile numbers when asked for landline, bullshit numbers to spam companies, block the ones that still get a real number, and ask relatives to call us on any other reliable service (international call quality was garbage anyway)
colechristensen 3y ago
One thing which is absolutely infuriating is the noise cancellation of iPhones. For me, with multiple people, it frequently aggressively mutes the microphone in noisy environments such that they're speaking and it's entirely silent on my end. You can't turn this off, there's no setting. I can't speak to my parents if they're outside and it's windy or if they're in the car, or often if they're just on speakerphone inside. It's ridiculous.
PeterisP 3y ago
If you need to give out a number that you'll never pick up, why not just use any random non-working number?
- serf 3y ago
  it's often useful to have that line dump to a voicemail in the off chance that someone important did happen to call. it's also useful to own the line you claim to own in the off chance of a verification of some sort.
vel0city 3y ago
POTS would have had the same voice quality as a decent VOIP provider, as upstream from your home they were converting it to ulaw anyways. This would have been better than the early GSM codecs. But these days with VoLTE "HD Voice" uses a superior codec. Most chat apps will use a codec that's better than ulaw as well. So there's a lot of places to go that offer significantly better voice quality these days.
voidwtf 3y ago
“superior voice quality” Superior to what? With VoLTE the only calls I make these days that sound bad are people on POTS lines.

josh2600 3y ago

I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household. US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.

dangus 3y ago
Citation needed. The US is #8 in median speed for home broadband and #13 in mobile. Considering that anything above 15mbps is enough for 4K Ultra Netflix I think the US is doing just fine. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/united-states
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- swarnie 3y ago
  Christ do you remember 15mbps? those were dark days.
  - devoutsalsa 3y ago
    I'm grateful for 5mbps when traveling.
    - anotherhue 3y ago
      * Weeps in 56k tones *
      - ben_w 3y ago
        I don't think I ever got more than 20kbit on my 56k modem. Usually more like 12.
h_tbob 3y ago
I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid, or if it's just not as population dense as other countries with faster speeds? According to this statistic, it's not very dense, meaning it's super expensive to build broadband. Because it's pretty much a question of physical area covered, not number of people serviced. This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=US&most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=U...

hiddencost 3y ago

My mom told me she was worried her cell phone might run out of battery and then she'd be unable to call 911. It's funny how used to charging our phones we've become.

dangus 3y ago
An amusing but generally harmless boomerism. Obviously, an apples to apples comparison would be a cell phone that is plugged in, since a land line has to be plugged to a power source (the phone line). (To me, it doesn’t matter if the phone line is more reliable than mains power, because it’s probably not more reliable than a charged phone with a “backup battery.” Then you’ve got Apple shipping satellite SOS-equipped phones which must count for something.)

drmpeg 3y ago

I've kept my AT&T landline mostly to reduce the amount of spam calls on my cell phone but also to see just how long it would last. It fails every year or two from squirrels sharpening their teeth on the wires. The last time I had it fixed, the service guy told me I was the only active line on the street. I've had the number so long, it used to be (415) instead of (650).

dangus 3y ago
I personally think that this reason to keep a landline also became outdated. There are so many tools and features on cell phones to identify and stop spam, and it seems like carriers are finally starting to get ahead of it. At this point the people I know in my life who still have landlines mostly get spam on them especially because they aren’t actually using the landline for much, so almost 100% of the calls going over the land line are low-value even if they’re not spam. I.e., everyone I know with a landline isn’t calling friends or family on the landline, it’s more like a contact phone number to give to the electric company.
- SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
  Landlines are irreplacable in case of power outage. As someone who lives in developing world we often have power outages, when if you have no charge left in your cellphone, you cannot even call emergency. Landlines are independently powered and never failed even at most serious multi-day blackouts; even municipal water pumps stopped working, but phones kept functioning..
  - dangus 3y ago
    Sure, but we were talking about the US, which is so developed that it doesn’t even have 3G anymore. Americans own over one personal motor vehicle per household, they could charge their phone with their car if they really had to. Less than one hour of the California minimum wage buys you a 30W solar panel or a large spare battery to charge your phone. The risks are minimal. And I’ve definitely had phone lines go out in the past. All it takes is one tree falling. The lines are on the same poles as the electric service. Sure, they were more reliable, but not by any measure that makes them worth keeping around (especially since the vast majority of lines sit completely inactive).

bcook 3y ago

The telephone companies seem to actively push for you to get rid of your land line. My monthly bill recently dropped $75 ($50 for local-only phone service + fees like 911), when I canceled my land line. My 100mbit VDSL2 bonded internet line is $75, so it was a very noticeable monthly decrease. My ISP/Telco is Windstream in the eastern USA.

voidwtf 3y ago
The equipment is aging and expensive to maintain.

Rediscover 3y ago

If anyone is wondering about first reponders' use of land lines, that necessity is to be alleviated with the United States setting aside some spectrum in 700MHz back in 2012. Do a search for "band 14" - here is something to look at: FirstNet https://www.firstnet.com/coverage/band-14.html https://www.firstnet.com/coverage/band-14.html [My household used to be required to have a land line ages ago and I still pay (slight) attention to things in this space. I do not have first-hand experience any more with such matters.]

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

It is insane how reliable landlines are, though. When the power goes out, you can make "candles" by connecting a 0.47 uF capacitor to a LED leg and connect both ends to the red and green phone wires; there's enough voltage to power a couple of them without the phone going off the hook. In an emergency, the lines don't get clogged like cell phone towers, and the Telco infrastructure is much more protected than wireless (you'd have to bomb a pretty big building with no windows to take out a small area's lines). It's probably fine in the grand scheme that we lose these properties. We'll just reinvent them later if it turns out we miss them.

vel0city 3y ago
> In an emergency, the lines don't get clogged like cell phone tower Back in landline days I was in a couple emergencies where my phone only gave error tones or recorded messages of being too busy. Even in the ancient circuit switched times one could have easily run into a situation where whatever destination out you were trying to go would have been totally full. This idea POTS would never get clogged is a myth. They could handle a lot more capacity than cell phones at the time, sure, but they did still eventually get flooded. And in one of those times, I couldn't get a POTS call out but I could send an SMS and it would eventually get through.

tamaharbor 3y ago

In order to maintain her home telephone service, my home-style conscious mom was forced to go from a from a single copper pair through the wall to three massive black boxes mounted in a very conspicuous location in the dining room.

datapolitical 3y ago

And there are internet providers there https://go.silverrapid.com/internet/ https://go.silverrapid.com/internet/

rconti 3y ago

I'm lucky that I am in Sonic's service area and get 10Gbps symmetric fiber service for $50/mo. It exposes the lie of the incumbents slow-walking new tech and bandwidth increases. They _just don't want to_ because they _don't have to_ compete with anyone, and they'd rather print cash for their shareholders. They have the capital to build these networks far faster than a small regional ISP can. Multi-gig speeds, FTTP are profitable. There's just no incentive to innovate. They're just rent seekers. It's more profitable to charge more and deliver less.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
They won capitalism. The prize is you don't have to compete anymore, you don't have to innovate, and you get to charge more and deliver less. Getting companies to this position is foundational to the incentive structure of our economic system. Once they win, that's it. They get to stay there forever.
- grecy 3y ago
  I worked in IT for a large telco for four years that has a monopoly on an extremely large part of Canada. After years there, learning the insides, working closely with marketing and sales and all the rest…..I agree with you 100%. They literally have guaranteed teed profits in the form of VERY large government subsides. Of course they chase them, so instead of FTTH or other interesting initiatives they were hell bent on installing fax lines and copper because they had enormous subsidies.
  - simfree 3y ago
    Canadians love their monopolies full stop. It's a cultural issue where each sector has its handful of heavyweights, of which you have a choice of 1 or 2 to use locally, and even if there is a third option most Canadians just won't consider it. Comparatively, the US has thousands of small banks & credit unions, and tons of small and midsize ISPs that provide a 3rd or 4th option in areas like MDUs where they can make a go of it.
- xhkkffbf 3y ago

greendave 3y ago

I live less than. a mile from a mid-sized town (15k peopl), 25 miles from the heart of Silicon Valley. The only reliable internet access available is 8mbit DSL using copper and satellite (HughesNet). No cable, no fiber, dodgy cell service, and at last try Starlink was not remotely reliable. Last big rainstorm we lost service for 5 days. I’d love to be able to ditch copper, but if AT&T is allowed to pull the plug, it means expensive, high latency satellite will be the sole option.

bearjaws 3y ago
I live in Florida and found Starlink worked mostly fine in a rain storm (occasional disconnects). This is using their newer portable receiver though, which one did you use?
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
>will be the sole option. I mean this sincerely: you could move. In 2012, I left the Castro Valley part of sfEastBay and moved to a small Southern town with fiber optic 10gbps available at every electric-supplied address (I lived 8 years inside a rustic national forest with a fiber/copper jack on my ramshackle cabin's powermeter).
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > In 2012, I left the Castro Valley part of sfEastBay and moved to a small Southern town Apropos of anything else, I can't imagine the culture shift from the Castro in SF to a small southern town...
  - piperswe 3y ago
    Castro Valley != The Castro. Castro Valley is just north of Hayward.
    - FireBeyond 3y ago
      Ahh, I stand corrected!

jmyeet 3y ago

Let's give them a choice: 1. Keep supporting landlines; 2. Relax that anywhere symmetric 1Gbps fiber is available for under $60/month; or 3. Leave the service area, transferring existing assets to a municipal authority who can then build and install symmetric 1Gbps fiber to their residents. Pick one.

linsomniac 3y ago

Or they could just do what Century Link has done here in Colorado: Let it rot in the ground. The pedestals around all seem to have lost their covers and are just sitting exposed to the elements, an eyesore (and they were no beauty to begin with :-)

callalex 3y ago
Did they “lose their covers” or did tweakers steal all the copper? That’s a big problem in the US.
- linsomniac 3y ago
  The copper still seems to be there, it's just all exposed to the weather now. I'll have to keep a closer eye on it when I drive past.

fortran77 3y ago

My 90 year old mother can't always figure out her cell phone. The land line is what she uses most. I don't care what the specific technology is, but a phone that's plugged in, and always available (no "off" switch) and just makes and receives calls with the familiar UI (lift phone off hook, enter number on keypad) is still a requirement for many people.

ac29 3y ago
No particular reason that "land line" phones need wired service though. My office uses 5G service for internet and ATA VOIP adapters for the phones. The experience of using the phones is exactly the same as when they were on traditional copper circuits provided by the phone company 10 years ago.

oatmeal1 3y ago

Does she not have wired internet? VoIP sounds like a remedy.

thelastgallon 3y ago

The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both. With Virtual Power Plants, the grid can be reimagined and it will happen faster if competing ideas/companies battle it out in the marketplace for consumers. Second best is for electric utility to offer fiber, like EPB of Chattanooga, TN.

jmspring 3y ago
I would not want PG&E (northern CA power company) in charge of any more infrastructure in California. They already have shown incompetence by shifting maintenance funds into bonuses instead of actual infrastructure maintenance.
- thelastgallon 3y ago
  Thats why the city should own lines. PG&E needs competition. There was a recent post, some small utilities are providing electricity a lot cheaper than PG&E.
  - jmspring 3y ago
    That assumes cities are competent. The coop that provides power and fiber where my cabin is in Plumas County (far north eastern CA) is great. They even have redundant electrical feeds PG&E as well as from Nevada. That said, after many years of living in Santa Cruz, CA - there is no way in heck the city here could manage any of that competently.
- crote 3y ago
  The trick is to make the power companies non-profits: split the network part from the generation&selling part, and give it proper oversight. It's what Europe has been doing for decades.
gst 3y ago
> The best thing to do is for the city to own both fiber and electricity, and let providers compete for both. Something similar is the case in the European Union, as the electricity network is usually a different company than the electricity providers. The network is often owned by some municipal company and charges customers only for the transport of energy over the network. For the energy itself customers can choose from dozens of different providers, some of them generate their own electricity, others just buy and resell electricity on the market.

solfox 3y ago

I wonder about low income households and if cell phone or internet providers have the same obligation to provide baseline service as do landline? If not, this seems like an important hurdle to cross before dropping these customers…

asadotzler 3y ago
I live in a rural area not far from silicon valley and there is no cell coverage here and there is no broadband. The trees are too tall for satellite (redwood forest) and so when AT&T pulls out, we, and our little neighborhood of about 50, half of whom are fixed income seniors, will have no connection to the outside. A couple neighbors on the hillside can get satellite but the latency's too much for wifi calling so that doesn't work. Fortunately we have a ham radio operator who can reach the sheriff if something catastrophic happens.

WaitWaitWha 3y ago

What I have not seen here ours why I still have a landline. Telcos are required to have five 9 uptime for landlines in the USA. (That's less than 6 minutes a year.) None of this is promised or regulated for internet based voice solution.

justina20 3y ago

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ijhuygft776 3y ago

Didn't they get paid too much by the government to install those lines?

Tempest1981 3y ago
And don't they (and Comcast) have special rights to the phone poles? iirc, Verizon can't use them to install 5G micro-cell towers. (This was in California)
inferiorhuman 3y ago
Probably. Camp Seco is an old mining town. However, it looks like there's some EBMUD land out there. Would be interesting to see if they could be goaded into maintaining comms infrastructure. Certainly there are going to be some utility employees out there doing whatever. https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2270377,-120.8562145,3a,90y,202.28h,76.18t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s1nJuinEvXCRWVwYnLc27nQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2270377,-120.8562145,3a,90y,...

pkaye 3y ago

If someone wants to remove the old lines from the pole to the house, who would do that now? I don't use my landline anymore and trying to cleanup the clutter of old lines.

coryrc 3y ago
In Seattle area there's https://wirefreesky.com https://wirefreesky.com I saved $250 by just using wire cutters. Previously the power company removed the cable line for me, because their cherry picker was too tall and just drove into it and it snapped. Luckily I was using DSL.
jacquesm 3y ago
Wirecutters should do the job I think?
- ijhuygft776 3y ago
  legally, maybe not, but in my experience, every time you reactivate the service, they ask to replace that wire from the street to the home even if they don't need to so that they can overcharge ATT/customer... they even often try to replace the existing box on your house with an extra huge one for no practical reason.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Sure, but if you're 100% certain that you will never use their service again that's not such a huge issue. I did the same with a power line on my Canadian property where they kept that line powered up even if I wasn't using the service because we were all on solar and wind. They didn't want to send someone out to take out the road side fuse. I called them and asked them who would be liable if due to their refusal to power down the line someone would get injured and they sent someone out immediately :) That wasn't a theoretical risk by the way, the first stretch of that line must have been many decades old. Algoma Power... no love lost between us.
beau_g 3y ago
When some branches brought mine down in a storm, I cut mine off on the house side, spooled it up secure with electrical tape, and hung it low on the pole on the street side. Probably shouldn't disconnect it at their box but past there it's yours if you own the house.

Animats 3y ago

That's going to be hard for people on criminal home confinement. Those anklets connect to a base station that connects only to an analog land line. Most of those things are obsolete technology.

mchannon 3y ago
As the former wearer of such an appliance (also married to another former wearer of a different such appliance) I can confirm this is no longer the case.
Fezzik 3y ago
Don’t they have a few GPS-only units now where all the hardware is in the ankle bracelet? I work criminal-law-adjacent and I feel like I see booths for them at conventions. If so, this sounds like a great opportunity for more vendor grift… I mean government thrift.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  Yes gps bracelets have been a thing for years
ketzo 3y ago
Wow. Fascinating (and extremely important) edge case. Out of curiosity, what led you to knowing this?
sokoloff 3y ago
Do they not work with an ATA (VoIP to POTS adapter)? If not currently, is this a technical matter (can’t work) or an administrative matter (detectable and not permitted)?

beenBoutIT 3y ago

Have California cell networks gotten to the point where they'll be able to handle the mass calling that follows disasters? Curious how people will contact emergency services and friends/family in the critical time following an earthquake/fire/etc.

tjohns 3y ago
Not if the power goes out. Unlike landlines (which are required to have generators at the central office), cell towers are only required to have a battery backup that lasts a couple hours. When we had the rolling blackouts in the bay area a few years ago, Comcast's cable network was the first to go, but the cell network didn't last much longer.
foolfoolz 3y ago
for the most part, things are much better than they were 10 years ago. you can go to a baseball/football game and your phone works. you can go to a concert and your phone works. a big part of this has been capacity upgrades, protocol upgrades, and a shift from telecom traffic to internet traffic it has always been difficult to contact emergency services following an earthquake / massive fire. it might actually be more scalable now. and you have more options of who/how to contact
- fragmede 3y ago
  it works at a football game because they know about it and send in extra equipment to handle it.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    My test always used to be midnight, new years eve, when everyone wanted to say happy new year at the same time. On 2G/GSM, the whole network would drop for 30 minutes, just zero reception on the phone. On 3G, you'd have reception but calls were impossible and texts mostly failed. On 3G+HSDPA, texts also worked fine but data became unusable as people sent fireworks photos On early 4G, not much changed from HSDPA since the networks were busier from more people using smartphones and social media On LTE Advanced and 5G it's all a non-event now, everything works fine

inferiorhuman 3y ago

I'm pretty sure Verizon is doing similar things with their copper infrastructure on the East Coast – they've more or less abandoned it in favor of fiber in certain regions. For anyone curious, Camp Seco is not a particularly remote part of California but it is pretty sparsely populated. It's about an hour outside of Sacramento and Stockton according to Google maps. I wonder if AT&T will ever get the bright idea to try this in a more populated area (like the Bay Area). The condo I'm in now has underground utilities. Sonic's abandoned DSL and their rebranded AT&T fiber. If they ever roll out fiber, the HOA's on the hook to trench from the street and to each of the buildings because Sonic cannot / will not use another utility's conduit. The phone wiring predates twisted pair, and I'm betting the coax is equally antique. High speed internet? Yeah, right.

pizzafeelsright 3y ago

Related, I am not sure how to teach a toddler to call 911. My cell is locked and I'm not giving them the pin or face. Without a land line I am considering an exterior alarm wired to an inside panic button. In the evert I collapse from choking on a banana slug what does my toddler do? So far the I instructions are to ring the trusted neighbors.

kallistisoft 3y ago
On some Android phones pressing the power button 5 times in a row will call emergency services. I learned this the hard way when I was very drunk and fumbling with my phone - cue a call back from 911 where I had to awkwardly explain in the middle of crowded bar that the call was made accidentally. If you have a young child you may want to consider disabling this feature as it's very easy to accidentally trigger and law enforcement is required to respond if they don't receive and intelligible response!
- MereInterest 3y ago
  I learned this when the power button on my Pixel 3 started repeatedly firing. My phone started repeatedly rebooting, opening the camera, and calling 911, all with no user input. Because the phone was booting up and initializing the camera, the GUI would take a while to respond. It would display the “slide to cancel”, sometimes overtop the camera GUI, and wouldn’t respond when I tried to cancel it. The only thing that stopped it was running out of battery. This started at 10 PM on a Friday night, and lasted a few hours.
  - callalex 3y ago
    Yet another reason it should be a crime to sell a phone with a non-removable battery.
mlindner 3y ago
On iphone you can call emergency by just holding both side buttons at the same time.
3y ago

thyrsus 3y ago

A decade or so ago, we had an ice storm take out power for much of the town for five days. Because the copper pair was still intact and powered by the central office, we never lost phone service. This week, after heavy rain, the copper lines, which one technician said had cheap paper insulation, stopped working. A different technician got outgoing calls working again, but incoming calls (the higher voltage ring signal) were still failing, and AT&T told their technician not to fix it. We were forced to transfer our service to fiber, which was already present for internet. The AT&T fiber router can drive our existing handsets, with replacement crawlspace wiring reasonably priced. My UPS lasts 90 minutes, nowhere near five days. Sometime over the next year, I'll probably get a Generac attached to our gas line - the tree canopy makes solar impractical. I'm lucky that I can afford these worse alternatives. Many can't. Enshittification is seeping into the physical layer.

voidwtf 3y ago
Enshittification? The original delivery mechanism, copper, was convenient to carry electricity over. However, copper has high maintenance costs due to moisture intrusion, breakages, and signal degradation. It also has theoretical upper bound on bandwidth. In many locations the copper may never even make it to the CO anymore and may be served by a pedestal with fiber and a small battery backup. Is replacing the deteriorating, limited, copper infrastructure really enshitification? I expect telecommunications, not power deliver, personally.
crote 3y ago
Keep in mind that many gas lines require electricity to operate. There are plenty of pumps and control stations along the line, after all. If you want to have electricity during a multi-day regional power outage, your best bet is a generator fueled by a propane tank, or some kind of long-life gasoline.

fmajid 3y ago

The companies that used to make phone switches (Nortel, Lucent) went out of business over 2 decades ago and they are unmaintainable. Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive, and the market of Luddite little old ladies like Pereira who cling to landlines is just not large enough to make it financially viable, unlike the market for broadband. What Verizon did was sell the business to Frontier, a company everyone knows is going to go bust, but Verizon is rid of the liability. It’s long pas time regulators stopped the quixotic quest to preserve and outdated technology there is simply not enough demand to keep alive.

fy20 3y ago
Maybe they can see what is happening in the UK? They are planning to switch off the analogue part of copper phone lines next year, and people who still want a "phone line" (most people just use mobile phones) will be switched to VOIP service. Almost everyone has internet and phone provided by the same company. For the last few years it's been a standard feature in all "modems" to have a analogue POTS interface. It just needs to be switched on in software.
- fmajid 3y ago
  Exactly, you need to have Internet service, and the phone is an add-on to that. What you won't get is a standalone emulation of Alexander Graham Bell's Plain Old Telephone Service without also having to pay for the broadband.
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Frontier, Windstream, and Lumen are all really odd companies that are holding the bag on providing POTS and DSL to rural areas. From what I've heard from people in those companies, the universal service fund is the lifeblood of the companies. Much like Google, they're trying to find new revenue sources, and unlike Google, are having some success in their diversification efforts, but that universal service fund money really would be difficult to do without. With Starlink maturing and competing services in at least the planning stages, I wonder how much longer the government will keep the basis for rural copper going.