Signal to Noise

Like many of us, including contemporary Tom Evslin, the lust for fast fiber and quick wireless technologies has tech pundits dreaming of a day when copper lines won’t dominate the last mile of access.  Tom boldly proclaims, in the first paragraph of his post, “By the end of President Obama’s first term, there won’t be any more landlines left in the country.”

That’s quite a prediction considering how entrenched the US is in copper infrastructure, and how pokey the telcos have been about delivering fiber to the last mile. That said, I can easily counterpredict that there will be plenty of landlines left in the country by the end of Obama’s term, and if he goes eight years, there will still be plenty of good old copper dial tone.

There are several more reasons why.  First, reliable and abundant FAX-over-IP is still a dream that hasn’t been standardized to the point where consumers have a consistent manner in which to use it.  So those pesky FAX lines will be with us for some time.  Second, digital last mile services like PRI are still too expensive for the majority of subscribers, even medium-sized business with 6 – 8 phone lines, in many cases. Third, lots of monitoring equipment, like that used by fire and security systems, still requires the use of copper dial-tone because its modems are too sensitive to the use of jittery VoIP. Even managed network providers like Qwest require the use of a POTS line to monitor frame relay and MPLS equipment, and no, they don’t support monitoring this equipment digitally.

Notwithstanding an overhaul to the universal service fund (USF), the shrink in landline abundance is likely to cause a few headaches for the telcos still playing the copper game four years from now, but it’s pie in the sky to think that those lines are going to be gone.