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Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

The companies that used to make phone switches (Nortel, Lucent) went out of business over 2 decades ago and they are unmaintainable. Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive, and the market of Luddite little old ladies like Pereira who cling to landlines is just not large enough to make it financially viable, unlike the market for broadband.

What Verizon did was sell the business to Frontier, a company everyone knows is going to go bust, but Verizon is rid of the liability. It’s long pas time regulators stopped the quixotic quest to preserve and outdated technology there is simply not enough demand to keep alive.

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Holding people to obligations they themselves have taken on seems like a reasonable thing to do, but what do I know.

TFA even illustrates why it is necessary. Pereira got her landline cut without a suitable replacement in place:

>Pereira has relied on her landline for 58 years. She got a cell phone for the first time last year when her landline got disconnected, but she lives in a dead zone for cell phones. CBS13 had a hard time getting in touch with her because the call kept dropping.

Stop defending telcos weaseling out of their obligations when they have taken public funding for decades in order to provide a utility.

I wonder if it'd be cheaper for AT&T to just partner with Starlink and pass through a part of the subsidy?

The more people who use Starlink, the worse it performs and the higher their profits.

Why couldn't they just add more satellites like we do cell towers?

Maybe they can see what is happening in the UK? They are planning to switch off the analogue part of copper phone lines next year, and people who still want a "phone line" (most people just use mobile phones) will be switched to VOIP service.

Almost everyone has internet and phone provided by the same company. For the last few years it's been a standard feature in all "modems" to have a analogue POTS interface. It just needs to be switched on in software.

Exactly, you need to have Internet service, and the phone is an add-on to that. What you won't get is a standalone emulation of Alexander Graham Bell's Plain Old Telephone Service without also having to pay for the broadband.

> Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive

About $35 / connection[0], but usually basically free because it's part of the customer's router[1]. Comcast seems to offer unlimited wired telephony for $20 / month, so it's definitely doable.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Grandstream-HT801-Single-Port-Telepho...

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/ARRIS-Surfboard-Telephone-Certified-S...

Frontier, Windstream, and Lumen are all really odd companies that are holding the bag on providing POTS and DSL to rural areas. From what I've heard from people in those companies, the universal service fund is the lifeblood of the companies. Much like Google, they're trying to find new revenue sources, and unlike Google, are having some success in their diversification efforts, but that universal service fund money really would be difficult to do without. With Starlink maturing and competing services in at least the planning stages, I wonder how much longer the government will keep the basis for rural copper going.

> Building modernized VoIP-based landlines that still offer the 48V analog POTS interface would be phenomenally expensive

Not sure about that, this was done for the whole German phone network a couple of years ago. People can still have their analog phone directly connected to the socket in their house but now their call will be a VoIP call. Not sure where the transition from the analog signal to VoIP happens, but I guess it's a the end of the customers copper line.

> People can still have their analog phone directly connected to the socket in their house but now their call will be a VoIP call. Not sure where the transition from the analog signal to VoIP happens, but I guess it's a the end of the customers copper line.

The transition happens at the telephone exchange, or possibly occasionally in a FTTN/FTTC outdoor cabinet. And it only works that way if you're really only using a plain phone line without internet access. Otherwise, the transition needs to happen in your router.

>> Frontier, a company everyone knows is going to go bust

Does everyone know that.. what make you say that? They seem to be doing pretty good with the hand they were delt

Frontier has an aggressive push for their fiber services.

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