The whole thing is very complicated because you have many new technologies. In the POTS days, each town had its CO as well as one or more "exchanges". Today, the exchanges are nearly meaningless and the area codes are becoming that way especially when phones are going mostly VOIP. IMHO, the carriers do need to be regulated. We essentially have a small number of carriers now in the US. Your TV cable companies compete with satellite and FIOS. Your phone provider competes with the cable tv, providers as well as the several VOIP providers. So, essentially Verizion, Comcast, Time-Warner, et. al provide essentially competing services. The issue is that the governments have not yet caught up to the industry.
Here in my section of Providence I frequently see drop lines just dangling off a pole and laying in the street. And it stays that way for a good long time too before someone realizes it's not HV cable and cuts it down.
In article , snipped-for-privacy@panix.com says... [Moderator snip]
Can't be any worse than the guys at Cox. Here's my story.
A few years back I worked for a state government office. We had three locations and had to have network connectivity in each. One of them was in the RI State House.
When we in the I.T. unit moved out of the sub-basement of the State House to the new facility we had a 10mbps fiber link at the new place, and two 2mbps VAN circuits over coax to the State House and our other office.
This required moving our cable modem for the van up one level in the state House. Well, the closet that we went into had a cable amplifier in it. Signal was way too hot.
I asked the Cox guy if he [had] an attenuator. "What's that?" he asked. So then I realized, ok, if you need loss in a hurry what do you do?
I told the guy to get a spool of coax and connectors. We were going to build a poor man's attenuator.
[I] had him roll up 200 feet of cable and crimp new ends on it. We put that between the amplifier and the cable modem and all of a sudden we had just enough loss to get the signal within acceptable limits.
Of course we had other interesting problems. One particularly wet spring we noticed wicked latency on the VAN link over to the State House. So by now we were on a direct extension basis with the level II guys at Cox. The called me back and told [me that] the manhole at the base of Francis St. was filled with water. They pumped it out, dried it out and everything was fine. They had to put an automatic sump pump in the manhole for that spring.
But all the troubles we had with Cox paled in comparison to the general idiocy of the Verizon guys.
For example - I had a hunt group on the phone system and one element of the hunt group wouldn't transfer on busy. I traced it down and found out it was what Verizon called a P-Phone. In other words, that allowed you to hook a Nortel style set to the line and use the advanced features on that. I tried to have Verizon delete the line and just punch a new one down and I'd draw it into our punchdown block. Oh no. Can't do that.
I asked them to disconnect the P-Phone and remove it from the hunt on their side. No can do.
At this point since I work for the state, my next call is to the PUC where a former colleague is a commissioner. All of a sudden Verizon was ready to play ball.
Then of course there were times where a phone tech would need a line so he/she would DISCONNECT the line from a punchdown and clip on, and then fail to replace the line.
Like I said, Cox may have issues but Verizon really sucks.
Hey, go and google the term "HERF". You can build your own. Just imagine the joy of a mobile mounted unit with a rear [facing] RF horn. Cops chasing you? Zap em'.
So, you're saying that customers who were paying for POTS tariffed circuits can suddenly be moved onto lower quality wireless services with no warning and the PUC doesn't have anything to say about it?
IMHO, the advantages of retaining copper are as follows. (note that conditions will probably vary from one region to another),
--reliable power: During Sandy we lost power for five days, but our copper based POTS never stopped working and it was absolutely critical for us in the situation. Unfortunately, the projection for both weather is more violent storms and the projection for power lines is for more outages*. IMHO, a telephone line these days should have a minimum of a solid
8-12 hours of backup capacity, because that will all be regularly needed after a nasty storm. Hopefully we won't have more "Sandy's" with extended multi-day outages. But a 12 or even 20 hour outage won't be usual, especially for suburban customers.
--some regulatory protection: As others mentioned in thsi thread, legacy POTS retains some protection from state and federal common carrier regulators, but modern FIOS does not. It seems that communiation carriers are taking an aggressive profit-seeking approach, meaning individual customers with unsolved problems will have little recourse.
--is FIOS even available? I know a lot of people who want it but can't get it because the lines haven't been run yet. In our complex, the Board rejected the Verizon proposal because it was too cumbersome and unsightly--Vz wanted to put in a large junction box next to the front door, then run the calbes around the exterior of the buildings. All our other utility lines run underground. When we first got wired for cable TV, they made a big sloppy mess (left coax running along on top of sidewalks!) and they to jump on them to clean it up. They fear Vz would dol the same thing, and in this world they're probably right.
As to repair of POTS lines. This hasn't been easy--it takes repeated calls and sitting on hold waiting to get to a knowledgeable repair rep and for them to send somebody out. In my area, once a guy actually shows up the repair is easy--he just switches your line "to another pair". Given that many no longer have a POTS line, there are extra pairs available.
I don't know reliability and repair responsivness for FIOS. But from people I know with cable phone service, repair support has been poor, despite their TV ad claims of great customer service.
*The regulators are starting to push the power companies to improve their reliability, but it's a touch and costly challenge. In older communities, there are many mature trees, ready to fall over after a violent storm. In some areas new lines have not kept pace with population growth and there is less redundancy. Another problem is that utilties have been forced to close their oldest coal plants. This might be a problem every summer when power consumption breaks new records, but there isn't enough generating and transmission capacity to meet the load.
One thing about copper--others have reported that the telephone network actually doesn't use very much. Rather, your phone line goes to a modern digital concentrator and from there on fibre to the central office.
Right, but POTS services are. People, who had POTS services under the tariff suddenly are being moved to a non-tariffed service against their will because of the inability of the telco to properly fix the tariffed service.
That should have some Verizon executives being grilled in the state house pretty heavily, I would expect.
Verizon has publicly said it is transferring many services over to non- regulated status. At this point probably a very small aspect of service remains regulated; maybe the barebones POTS line; anything beyond that is a "premium service". New carriers are barely regulated, if at all.
As to the issue of telephone service regulation, these days the public attitude is that "regulation bad, deregulation good". Even if a state legislator complained, few would listen.
Anti-trust is another principle that has fallen by the wayside. Comcast, a growing telephone service provider and a big cable TV provider, owns Universal and NBC. Years ago, film production was ordered to be separate from exhibition. Likewise, several of the Baby Bells have merged back together, contradicting the Divestiture.
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