Cutting the cord [Telecom]

An article in The Economist says that the Negroponte Switch has hit the "knee point" on the curve: from here, it's all downhill for the wireline carriers.

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Bill Horne

Reply to
Bill Horne
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You could see this coming years ago. Right around the time of the Communications Act of 1996 as a matter of fact.

So it begs the question, what happens to the FUSF fee? After all there is no longer any necessity to build out the network. Just pop a tower and you're good.

Reply to
T

With the US cellphone paradigm where the cellphone owner user pays for the "airtime" on incoming calls, perhaps there needs to be an additional option:

Why don't US cellphone providers have a service where you get an additional incoming number (to the same cellphone) but the caller pays for the "airtime" (like it is done in many other countries)?

Reply to
David Clayton

What makes you think there would be a market for this? I believe one cellco actually tried this (using 1-500 numbers?) and discontinued it for lack on interest. Such numbers wouldn't be dialable from many corporate phone systems anyway. Why shouldn't people pay for their own mobile devices? It's the owner of the device who benefits from having it, not innocent callers.

Most cell users don't pay for airtime anyway: they have a package that includes far more "minutes" than they will ever use in a month.

-GAWollman

Reply to
Garrett Wollman

Wireless doesn't work in my concrete and steel condo with a hill between me and the closest cell site.

Seems like the PUC should regulate and require ubiquitous signal access if wireless is to become the primary carrier.

More seriously, the masses have no idea how poor the grade of service is with their little toy radios.

***** Moderator's Note *****

"Little" or "Toy" doesn't matter nearly so much as "radio".

It's just not possible to get the same standard of reliability from a radio transceiver as from a hard-wired telephone, but the Tweentysomethings[tm] that grew up with cell phones glued to their facial ornaments have gotten so used to the poor quality that it seems normal to them.

In fact, I think we have cell phones to thank for the success of VoIP: cellular lowered the bar so dramatically that VoIP's latency, dropouts, and poor voice quality seem like an improvement by comparison.

Bill Horne Moderator

Reply to
Sam Spade

There have been caller-pays experiments over the years in the US, all of which were complete failures, because the number of people who think that they are so important that other people will pay extra to talk to them vastly exceeds the number who actually are.

The North American numbering plan doesn't have room to add a lot of special area codes for caller-pays mobile, but we have the 500 and 533 codes assigned to "personal communication services" which are allowed to charge extra to the caller. Probably not by coincidence, most of the 500-NXX prefixes are assigned to Verizon, Cingular (AT&T) and Sprint. Nonetheless, I have never seen a 500 number in use. Has anyone else?

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By the way, even though the US is mobile pays, most US customers don't care about the per minute cost because we have bundles that include more minutes than we ever use. The actual per-minute cost that US users pay is among the lowest in the world if you add in the real cost to the callers of "free" incoming calls. (Yes, I know that in some caller-pays countries there are bundles that include mobile-to-mobile minutes.) We also have the ability to port numbers between mobile and landline, which you'll never see outside North America, so we can drop your landline, keep your number, and your callers don't notice anything changed.

R's, John

Reply to
John Levine

We've had Vonage since its inception. No doubt we had those kinds of problems the first year; perhaps longer.

But, that is long past us.

We also have AT&T wireline service, which is our published number. But, it is toll restricted so many outgoing calls must be made on our Vonage service. And, I use the Vonage line for my consulting business.

Neither my wife nor I can tell the difference between the quality on the Vonage and AT&T lines.

Reply to
Sam Spade

Huh?

I've never experienced "latency, dropouts, and poor voice quality" on any of the VoIP systems I've used (two at work and Comcast's at my parents' house). Methinks you are confusing the technology with some particularly poor implementation.

-GAWollman

Reply to
Garrett Wollman

The article fails to address the counter-trend. Using FIOS to bring high-speed internet and TV to the home gives landlines a foot in the door and the ability to set a special price for a triple combo.

Reply to
Ron

.......

That is indeed something that doesn't happen anywhere else AFAIK, but it sort of makes a mockery of a geographical based numbering system because it breaks the link between service and location.

The original article at the start of this thread seemed to say that the cost of incoming calls was an issue, the responses here seem to say that it is not.

Reply to
David Clayton

That, however, is far from ubiquitous. Around here AT&T is only placing fiber where it is easy to do.

Reply to
Sam Spade

No more than it already does. Now that most mobile service in the US is from national providers, it is quite common for people to move around the country and keep the same mobile number. I know people in California with Virginia mobile numbers. Since mobiles invariably charge the same for calls anywhere in the country, it's easier than telling their friends about a new number.

Portability, on the other hand, is local only. If you have a New York number, you can only port it among New York providers. In practice that doesn't matter since pretty much all of the inter-service portability is from landlines to mobiles rather than the other way, but if the person in California wanted to port his Virginia mobile to his California landline, he couldn't.

R's, John

Reply to
John Levine

I believe local number portability is limited as to rate centers, or approximately so.

***** Moderator's Note *****

That's something that has always confused me with CLEC and Cellular providers: they have much wider "local" calling areas than most ILEC's, and I don't think they're using the ILEC rate centers, or are simply defining an entire LATA as their "Rate center".

Bill Horne

Reply to
Sam Spade

Totally agree. They're providing what I consider sub-par service. Put it this way, I can set my Vonage service to 64kbps and still get decent quality service. A cell phone still sounds like a bad sideband transmission.

Reply to
T

Moderator noted::

I though it went without saying. Cellular shares a heavily-used radio spectrum. What kind of speed will your internet connction via cellular give you? How great is that streaming video functionality, especially in HD? Cellular is fine for phone calls and texting and for someone with really light internet use. Meanwhile, both cable and FIOS keep upping the bandwidth they provide to their users.

Oops, missed.

Reply to
Ron

.......

Keep in mind that number portability also extends to... VOIP and similar services. So yes, indeed, you can get a pseudo landline with that Virginia mobile number (or a Va. landline number, for that matter) which will work anywhere in the world you've got an internet broadband connection.

Reply to
danny burstein

John Levine wrote: ..

A bit of trivia: LNP for wireline-to-wireline came along a few years before porting to or from a wireless carrier.

Reply to
Sam Spade

Here's what the FCC says. But, they don't define "same geographic area." Surely, it can't be an entire LATA (?)

Under the Federal Communications Commission?s (FCC?s) ?local number portability? (LNP) rules, so long as you remain in the same geographic area, you can switch telephone service providers, including interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers, and keep your existing phone number. If you are moving from one geographic area to another, however, you may not be able to take your number with you. Therefore, subscribers remaining in the same geographic area can now switch from a wireless, wireline, or VoIP provider to any other wireless, wireline, or VoIP provider and still keep their existing phone numbers.

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Reply to
Sam Spade

That's an interesting question. Given the way that LNP works, there should be no technical bar to porting a number anywhere in the LATA, but the telcos I've asked will only port within the same rate center.

This is of some interest to me because my home phone number is in Trumansburg, has only our rural ILEC and one Sprint prefix, and everyone else is in Ithaca. T'burg is a local call to Ithaca, but nobody will port my T'burg number, just my Ithaca number.

R's, John

Reply to
John Levine

[[ snip -- FCC language on LNP portability limits ]]

In the early days, 'same geographic area' was interpreted as 'rate center', especially by ILECs known to be 'hostile' to porting numbers away from them. This makes it possible to have 'consistent' LD billing, by looking only at the NPA-NXX of the destination number.

Where this is not an issue (usually due to the small geographic footprint of the NPA), the 'same geographic area' may extend to the entire NPA, but -never- beyond the NPA bounds.

As a practical matter, if the 'ported to' LEC has a POP within the rate center of the C.O. servicing the exchange from which the number originally came, the number will 'port'.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

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