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Status of Copper Based Landline Telephones [telecom]

The great sunset date by the FCC for Landlines has come and gone, and my 2 landlines at 2 different locations are at this time are still operating. I have had a recent pair change done on one of the lines, and the tech told me he knew of no plans to force retirement at this time.

My understanding is that carriers may continue to sell Copper Based Landlines, but are no longer required to do so by the FCC. In fact based on my experence, AT&T in the old Bellsouth region is not only offering Copper Based landlines including mine, but in fact has a website where you can still order one today.

Is anyone aware of any tracking of this issue anywhere on the internet? I read a lot of issues of Telecom Digest around the sunset date, but it appears that analog retirement has not really been covered here.

I have been investigating alternatives which do not require internet access to work. I am trying a 4G router, specifically a Yeacomm P21, that has an available RJ11 that is able to place and receive calls on a standard landline phone using a mobile network.

Does anyone else have any other ideas? At one time even AT&T had a similar box, and Verizon tried to migrate Hurricane Sandy people whose lines were damaged over to such a box but ended up putting in fiber to replace the damaged copper lines. Considering the so called "sunset", I have seen very little promotion of any such boxes.

I am thinking about the many lines used for fire alarm and elevator emergency phones. Any idea what building owners are doing in this regard?

Reply to
Albert Erdmann
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In Switzerland, they had to be replaced either by GSM (and 4G/5G presumably, because 2G is already obsolete, and 3G will become obsolete soon), or VoIP.

I heard of some cases where they still had the analog dialing devices (the WSG35-2 was very popular, it was a modem that could also just dial and then switch to an analog microphone). They now plugged those to the ATA port of a VoIP router. As long as the dialing device uses DTMF to dial, it works like a charm.

Then you just need to either ask those systems to poll the central monitoring system every now and then to check they are still operationnal (which most of those systems did anyway in the past already). They usually used DTMF for checking-in, which works best when decoded at the ATA itself.

If they used real modem modulation, they are better off replacing the modem part completely by an IP signaling or GSM system, although my tests have shown that the VoIP network can still mostly work at 2400 bits/s with e.g. V22bis seems to still work. I could not get higher speeds even with parameter tweaking and no codec conversion. I used real modems on both sides: using a DSP directly attached to the VoIP network might get much better results.

Reply to
Marc SCHAEFER

In some jurisdictions, buildings where elevators are mandatory are also required to have backup power sufficient to return those elevators to the recall floor. Of course that does not do much for older buildings that were never retrofitted, and I'm not sure what requirements are imposed on the emergency phones specifically.

This is brought to mind by the fact that our building was closed for two days this past month in order to perform preventive maintenance on the automatic transfer switch, which required shutting down utility power and doing a manual transfer for generator loads. Much of my core network equipment is on generator power, as well as a UPS, but the office switches and anything powered by them (desk phones and wireless access points) are not.

-GAWollman

Reply to
Garrett Wollman

Here, the phone systems in the elevator are usually running on batteries, in case of power failure. It would be however be interesting to know if:

- the VoIP routers also run on batteries

- if FTTS, the MicroCAN in the street either have batterie or are tele-powered via old phone lines from a phone central which has a generator or batteries

The devil is always in the details.

Reply to
Marc SCHAEFER

Am 25.01.2023 schrieb Bill Horne snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com:

That is a huge problem. In Germany IIRC they now use cellular mobile network (2G, 4G or 5G) as a backup.

Analog phone lines have some advantages. :-)

Reply to
Marco Moock

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