

Are U.S. phone landlines in danger of being disconnected? - pwg
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/11/28/are-u-s-phone-landlines-in-danger-of-being-disconnected/

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Aloha
In response to: [http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/11/20/fcc-announces-
plans-t...](http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/11/20/fcc-announces-plans-to-
upgrade-century-old-phone-system/?intcmp=obnetwork)
[http://www.fcc.gov/blog/ip-transition-starting-
now](http://www.fcc.gov/blog/ip-transition-starting-now)

It's all conjecture on my part, but I'll take a stab.

Deploying a next-generation telecom infrastructure is an interesting challenge
- but one that is underway as we speak.

Verizon chose Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) (FiOS). AT&T chose fiber to the
node (FTTN) (U-verse) and is rolling out VDSL. CenturyLink (Qwest) has also
picked FTTN and is rolling out VDSL as well.

These rollouts are slow moving - but will continue to use copper for the
foreseeable future - FTTP is the long term future still I think - but we keep
being able cram more and more data over a pair - and with pair bonding that
number keeps rising. For now at least, most voice will still be served over
fairly long loops from the CO - AT&T is rolling out VoIP over U-verse -
Verizon is doing the same over FiOS, CenturyLink has not yet marketed VoIP to
residences - but I suspect it will come in a while (when more of their
footprint is covered). Fiber to the Node has the advantage of having fiber
near the customer when the cost of repairing the legacy copper exceeds the
cost of putting fiber in to each house.

Largely, based on my research - the new VoIP circuits are often being served
off TDM offices that have upgraded been to packet switching. Both Lucent and
Genband offer a way to upgrade their TDM switches to a packet based core
(Lucent 7ESS or 7 R/E and Genband C15 Session Controller).

In short - the article was full of hyperbole - If you look at the underlying
blog post - it doesn't mention the removal of copper, copper will play a big
part in last mile service delivery for likely another 20-30 years - in the end
is about replacing the TDM based network core with packet switching - a
process that has been going on for almost 20 years at this point. With proper
engineering a packet based system is every bit as (if not more) reliable as
TDM based one.

That said, it raises some real questions - what of universal service? How
about the CLEC market - will they be granted access to the new networks which
are replacing the old?

Only time will tell.

