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AT&T to FCC, Landlines Must Die
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Author:  Lenas [ Fri Jan 01, 2010 6:48 pm ]
Post subject:  AT&T to FCC, Landlines Must Die
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/200 ... s-when.ars

Spoiler:
AT&T tells the FCC that, with consumers embracing VoIP and wireless, it's time for the agency to schedule a sunset date for landline telephony. But the move could force the Commission to resolve many long-delayed questions about unbundling and the Universal Service Fund...

..."In other words, a huge proportion of the capital resources available to some of the largest telecommunications providers in the country is being directed, not towards improving broadband speeds or bringing broadband to more customers," AT&T contends, "but rather towards maintaining an increasingly obsolete network that is no longer capable of providing the services and features that American consumers and policymakers demand."


Emphasis mine. Discuss.
Author:  Micheal [ Fri Jan 01, 2010 6:55 pm ]
Post subject: 
A matter of time. AT&T is right in stating that to remain competitive, they must drop plain old telephone service and reinvest in bigger and better broadband, put all telephone service on mobile or internet protocols.
Author:  Müs [ Fri Jan 01, 2010 8:00 pm ]
Post subject: 
Oh please let POTS go away.

PLEASE!
Author:  darksiege [ Fri Jan 01, 2010 10:59 pm ]
Post subject:  Re:
Müs wrote:
Oh please let POTS go away.

PLEASE!


You realize at our current employer how much this would blow? Think of all the **** up fax issues we have now. Think if VoIP is the only way to go.... there will be no end to fax problems.
Author:  Midgen [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 1:29 am ]
Post subject: 
There isn't enough Wireless spectrum for this to happen.

Which is probably why AT&T is motivated to put this out there. What they really want is the FCC to move wireless spectrum around and free up more for for Wireless...

While humans prefer wireless, I doubt you will be able to 'Sunset' wired phone lines any time soom. Wireless isn't cost effective for things like fax's and dial up services, which are still prevalent in many corporate infrastructures.

Heck I work for a wireless company, and we still use fixed lines for faxes and remote access to equipment, etc...

I can see shifting resources towards wireless, but setting a sunset date is probably not realistic.
Author:  shuyung [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 1:59 am ]
Post subject: 
According to the article, the proposal would be the scrapping of the current circuit switched phone network with a packet switched one. It does not address any questions of wired vs. wireless. Merely that 5Es and DMSes would go the way of the dodo.
Author:  Kaffis Mark V [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 2:45 am ]
Post subject: 
Shuyung, am I correct in my assumption/understanding that converting circuit switched infrastructure to packet switched would allow it to co-exist, tie into, inter-operate with, and bolster the existing (predominantly IP) packet switched communications infrastructure?
Author:  Müs [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 4:36 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Re:
darksiege wrote:
Müs wrote:
Oh please let POTS go away.

PLEASE!


You realize at our current employer how much this would blow? Think of all the **** up fax issues we have now. Think if VoIP is the only way to go.... there will be no end to fax problems.


**** faxes. **** them right in their RJ11 port.

The telecoms industry needs to evolve. VoIP is the wave of the future. There's no room anymore for copper. Time to usher in the age of Glass!
Author:  shuyung [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 11:12 am ]
Post subject:  Re:
Kaffis Mark V wrote:
Shuyung, am I correct in my assumption/understanding that converting circuit switched infrastructure to packet switched would allow it to co-exist, tie into, inter-operate with, and bolster the existing (predominantly IP) packet switched communications infrastructure?

You're assuming they don't co-exist and interoperate today?

This is just your basic landgrab. AT&T in particular, and probably the ILECs in general, are miffed that they're required to allow other carriers access to their physical plant. They want their monopoly back.
Author:  Kairtane [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 11:13 am ]
Post subject:  Re: AT&T to FCC, Landlines Must Die
As long as customers demand lower speed circuits, out-of-band management, and POTS for backup lines there will be wired circuits. I think Midgen is right, AT&T is trying to force the FCC into opening more of the wireless spectrum.
Author:  Kaffis Mark V [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 12:03 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Re:
shuyung wrote:
Kaffis Mark V wrote:
Shuyung, am I correct in my assumption/understanding that converting circuit switched infrastructure to packet switched would allow it to co-exist, tie into, inter-operate with, and bolster the existing (predominantly IP) packet switched communications infrastructure?

You're assuming they don't co-exist and interoperate today?

This is just your basic landgrab. AT&T in particular, and probably the ILECs in general, are miffed that they're required to allow other carriers access to their physical plant. They want their monopoly back.

Gotcha. So, converting wouldn't really affect internetable bandwidth in any significant way?
Author:  shuyung [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 4:27 pm ]
Post subject: 
Ah, that's what you were asking.

To an individual consumer, no. The bandwidth requirements of a voice call aren't that large, although latency requirements are tight. What amount of bandwidth would the sum total of all voice calls at peak time require? I couldn't say, but upgrades are constant on the disparate backbones, so I would suspect it could be eaten as a matter of course.
Author:  Corolinth [ Sat Jan 02, 2010 4:53 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Re:
Müs wrote:
The telecoms industry needs to evolve. VoIP is the wave of the future. There's no room anymore for copper. Time to usher in the age of Glass!
Unfortunately, you can't get rid of copper. We are capable of many nifty tricks, and are expanding our tricksiness with advances in technology, but on a fundamental level there must be electricity flowing through a physical medium somewhere.

Also, somewhere else you have to have a wheel turning. You may also require something very very hot making water boil or gas burn.
Author:  Sasandra [ Sun Jan 03, 2010 9:40 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Re:
darksiege wrote:
You realize at our current employer how much this would blow? Think of all the **** up fax issues we have now. Think if VoIP is the only way to go.... there will be no end to fax problems.


Simple solution to that, faxing also needs to go the way the dodo bird, it's such an obsolete technology that even worse was horible to begin with seeing as the faxes are bairly legible most of the time anyways.

And yes, i'm totally with AT&T on that, landlines have had their day just like analog TV, but time for them to exit stage right, it's a waste of money maintaining them.
Author:  Lenas [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 4:48 am ]
Post subject: 
Uh.. eFax? Duh.
Author:  Corolinth [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 10:26 am ]
Post subject:  Re: AT&T to FCC, Landlines Must Die
Actually, the fax is a particular piece of technology that still saves a lot of time and effort. A fax preserves manual signatures and stamps, which are required by numerous federal safety regulations. One may argue that it's all a bunch of procedural bullshit that we'd rather do away with, but the fact remains that there is a reason why things are still faxed today. People with an interest in technology are usually very quick to claim that certain old technology obsolete, without really thinking about what exactly that old technology does and what use it has.

As my rebuttal, I offer up this peculiar piece of technology that mankind has spent the past hundred years aggressively trying to make obsolete with typewriters and computers:
Image
Author:  Sasandra [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 10:38 am ]
Post subject: 
If by preserve manual signatures you mean reproduce and horibly pixelated bairly reconizable blob that once was a signature, then yes, they do preserve them. There are far better means for for doing the same thing as a fax that produce a significantly better copy and aren't dependant on antiquated landlines, simply scan to a pdf and email, it's a significantly better copy and you know for certain it went to your recipient unlike faxes, did it get to that person? is it sitting in a basket somewhere? did someone else at the company accidently take it with their fax and forget to return it?
Author:  Müs [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:03 am ]
Post subject:  Re:
Sasandra wrote:
If by preserve manual signatures you mean reproduce and horibly pixelated bairly reconizable blob that once was a signature, then yes, they do preserve them. There are far better means for for doing the same thing as a fax that produce a significantly better copy and aren't dependant on antiquated landlines, simply scan to a pdf and email, it's a significantly better copy and you know for certain it went to your recipient unlike faxes, did it get to that person? is it sitting in a basket somewhere? did someone else at the company accidently take it with their fax and forget to return it?


This.

Faxes are dead. Scanners and email are a far better solution.
Author:  Corolinth [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:26 am ]
Post subject: 
The problem you are dealing with is related to the quality of the individual machine, and not an inherent flaw in the technology. So your employer has a shitty fax machine. That isn't the technology's fault that your employer is a tightwad who can't buy a new machine that works right. Regarding the antiquated landlines, once copper is wrapped in rubbed and buried in the ground it remains very well preserved for a long period of time. Also, don't forget, your computer relies on similar "antiquated landlines" to receive the electricity it needs to run.

Frankly, there's no reason why a fax machine can't send over a DSL or cable line, or even a fiber-optic signal. For that matter, there's no reason why a fax machine couldn't have a 17"x11" scanner bed. What does a fax machine do? It makes a copy of a document, sends it elsewhere, and has it printed at the destination. That's, like, useful.

As for the rest of your post, scanning the document into a pdf and emailing it may not, depending on federal laws involved, be an acceptable solution. Emailing a pdf back and forth is certainly fine for the design phase, but once people need to be signing off on it, federal law may not allow for a scanned pdf to be sent back and forth. Doing so allows the text to be edited rather easily and inconspicuously, and that might invalidate the signature. This is going to depend heavily on which industry we're talking about, as regulations are not constant across various industries.

And yes, the fax does get to the appropriate person in this case. We're not talking about something that sits in a basket somewhere, like a temp worker faxing their time sheet back to the temp agency. This is a document that someone is waiting for, assuming it's not going to a dedicated fax machine to begin with.
Author:  Kaffis Mark V [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 11:46 am ]
Post subject: 
Using phone numbers for faxes is silly at this point, though. It ties things to a POTS system, for which there's really no reason. Configuring a fax to use an email-style text address, for instance, would be fine.
Author:  Sasandra [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 12:39 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: AT&T to FCC, Landlines Must Die
Well i've yet to see a single fax that even came close to the quality of a scanned doccument and most were so bad as to be virtually useless because they were so illegible. And electrical landlines aren't antiquated because unlike data they is still no viable superior technology to transmit power thus far.

Well I know at my company we don't have issues with those alternate methods of signing being viable as we do everything electronic, there are no physical signature and we do lots of government contracts with the TSA. And a fax is no harder to alter than a pdf.
Author:  LadyKate [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 12:56 pm ]
Post subject:  Re:
Corolinth wrote:
As for the rest of your post, scanning the document into a pdf and emailing it may not, depending on federal laws involved, be an acceptable solution. Emailing a pdf back and forth is certainly fine for the design phase, but once people need to be signing off on it, federal law may not allow for a scanned pdf to be sent back and forth. Doing so allows the text to be edited rather easily and inconspicuously, and that might invalidate the signature. This is going to depend heavily on which industry we're talking about, as regulations are not constant across various industries.


Good point.
Author:  Müs [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 1:14 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Re:
LadyKate wrote:
Corolinth wrote:
As for the rest of your post, scanning the document into a pdf and emailing it may not, depending on federal laws involved, be an acceptable solution. Emailing a pdf back and forth is certainly fine for the design phase, but once people need to be signing off on it, federal law may not allow for a scanned pdf to be sent back and forth. Doing so allows the text to be edited rather easily and inconspicuously, and that might invalidate the signature. This is going to depend heavily on which industry we're talking about, as regulations are not constant across various industries.


Good point.


Not like faxes can't be altered as well. Or signatures can't be cut out and pasted in with just as much ease. :p
Author:  LadyKate [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 1:20 pm ]
Post subject: 
Not with "just as much ease." Lines from paper shadows would show up, and you would have to retype an entire document to make changes and then add the cut-out signature to it.
Author:  Müs [ Mon Jan 04, 2010 1:32 pm ]
Post subject:  Re:
LadyKate wrote:
Not with "just as much ease." Lines from paper shadows would show up, and you would have to retype an entire document to make changes and then add the cut-out signature to it.


You'd be surprised.

A lot can be done with scissors, tape, whiteout, and a copy machine.
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