The Good Old Phone Service

One thing you can usually count on with high degree is picking up the telephone at home and getting a dial tone - right?  In the past 40 plus years I can only think of about 5 times our phone service was down.  Is the new VoIP that reliable?  Do we have the same expectations?  I know I do......

VoIP phone services keep growing. The cable companies, for example Charter, are competing very effectively against the traditional legacy carriers for voice services. Pay phones keep disappearing. Mobile voice call volume keeps growing.  How reliable is your cable TV or cable modem?  I know mine is not reliable - has been down 9 times in the past 10 months - and not weather related.  So why would I move my phone service to this unreliable provider?

We will eventually see the PSTN retire and POTS disappear. Wireless and broadband connections proliferate while the old copper pair connections offered by the Telcos are turned off, as many as 700,000 lines per month. The trend is all downhill for the PSTN and its legacy operation. This however does not mean the PSTN will close soon or without any challenges.  Not everyone is going to live with this poor performance - or will they?  Nevertheless, when all else fails, POTS is what we turn to as a back-up.

Is there a National Security concern here?  Federal, state and local governments depend on the PSTN. The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will be very interested in any degradation, loss of coverage or closure of PSTN services. Since the PSTN has been and continues to be part of the plans of these agencies, I expect they will have to evaluate the ramifications posed by the PSTN closure. I also expect that there will be long drawn out process of evaluation before any decisions are made.  Are wireless or broadband services as secure as the good old phone service?

The replacement of the PSTN with broadband access will affect many of the DoD and DHS systems as well as the government communications contracts that are in place. These contracts assume there is a PSTN. Can the government agencies cancel the contracts in favor of the broadband solution? At what cost? How will the migration occur? What about the networks used by these agencies that are beyond the US border? Will there have to be two distinctly different networks, broadband in the US and international PSTN for the rest of the world? These are complicated issues that will make to closure of the PSTN for these agencies a primary problem that most do not want to face soon.
 
I propose to you that we will continue to see a decrease in new demand for wired phone services.  As fewer customers are now required to cover the fixed costs to maintain the wired network, that is less profit for the carrier.  If they raise the rates to make up for fewer customers, they will push more customers away.  I know I don't want more bills or higher bills.  The other side of the coin, where are the customers pushing these broadband providers to provide a reliable service?  I can live without cable tv, and I can live without internet or email - but it is a safety concern to have no working phone service in the home.  VoIP services need to have the same reliable, redundant and simple services as what we have become to expect from the good old phone system.  I don't see that today, I refuse to push my phone service over to a broadband provider and have on going outages monthly - and most of the outages are in the middle of the day.  Nothing like doing router upgrades, network changes or maintenance in the middle of the day.  These providers need to understand these services have to be available 24/7 365.  Till they can provide that - they won't win over all the customers from the good old phone service. 

I can still take your call on my good old phone service!

Keep engaged and positive!

Scott Arnett
scott.arnett@charter.net