In order to maintain her home telephone service, my home-style conscious mom was forced to go from a from a single copper pair through the wall to three massive black boxes mounted in a very conspicuous location in the dining room.
AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
71–80 of 217 posts
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid, or if it's just not as population dense as other countries with faster speeds? According to this statistic, it's not very dense, meaning it's super expensive to build broadband. Because it's pretty much a question of physical area covered, not number of people serviced. This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.…
> I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid The USA is a continent made up of 50 countries [states]. Think European Union. Most people don't grasp or understand the sheer size.
So.. the USA failed 50 times instead of 1? Not sure how that's supposed to be an excuse for anything.
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#73And there are internet providers there https://go.silverrapid.com/internet/
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#74My wife keeps a land line because of superior voice quality for calls to her family. I find it handy because I can give a number to businesses when they demand one. We never answer that phone (it has been silenced from ringing). AT&T has no broadband service in my area - they offer only DSL and I live in a fairly rich area of silicon valley. The problem is that my utilities were put underground when the house was bui…
If you need to give out a number that you'll never pick up, why not just use any random non-working number?
it's often useful to have that line dump to a voicemail in the off chance that someone important did happen to call.
it's also useful to own the line you claim to own in the off chance of a verification of some sort.
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#75Related, I am not sure how to teach a toddler to call 911. My cell is locked and I'm not giving them the pin or face. Without a land line I am considering an exterior alarm wired to an inside panic button. In the evert I collapse from choking on a banana slug what does my toddler do? So far the I instructions are to ring the trusted neighbors.
On iphone you can call emergency by just holding both side buttons at the same time.
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#76I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household. US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.
At least every home that has copper should get fiber. The excuse that the US is too big or we can't do it is bull. You did it before for electricity and telephone. It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit. Don't get me wrong, the services provided on the infrastructure can definitely be for profit but not the glass itself.
>>>You did it before for electricity
I huge part of Rural America Electricity is run by Coop's today, often non-profit anyway. Various attempts have been tried for these Coop's to also provide internet services including using Internet Over Power Lines technology, they all fail for some reason.
Also with Telephone and electric build out we did not have the levels of regulatory capture we do today. The US Tax Payer has spent BILLIONS on "broadband" roll out programs to pay for the infrastructure that should have bought fiber to every home including rural areas, the money was wasted on "Fixed Wireless broadband" and other schemes where by the ISP's more or less just pocket the money and there was no accountability by the federal agencies in charge of these programs, largely because they knew they had fat executive jobs at that ISP coming to them
Your implication that government is the solution to this problem by paying for the infrastructure is not based in reality, as government is the problem. Government and government corruption is what stopped fiber from already being a reality.
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#77I'm fine with AT&T no longer supporting landlines if they start supporting fiber to every household. US broadband is a joke compared to many other parts of the world.
At least every home that has copper should get fiber. The excuse that the US is too big or we can't do it is bull. You did it before for electricity and telephone. It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit. Don't get me wrong, the services provided on the infrastructure can definitely be for profit but not the glass itself.
You did it before for electricity and telephone.
Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes.
Every six months or so there's an article in the Navajo Times about the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority managing to hook up another couple of dozen homes to electricity, but there are still many thousands to go.
There was a photo published during the pandemic of children gathered on top of a hill sitting in the dust and sun with their laptops because it was the only place they could get a cell signal to do their schoolwork.
Tens of thousands of American homes have no running water. I've visited many in Texas, West Virginia, New Mexico, and even California.
Time to get out of the Silicon Valley bubble.
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least every home that has copper should get fiber. The excuse that the US is too big or we can't do it is bull. You did it before for electricity and telephone. It just requires competency, money and an infrastructure that isn't for profit. Don't get me wrong, the services provided on the infrastructure can definitely be for profit but not the glass itself.
You did it before for electricity and telephone. Not completely. There are still tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands of Americans who never got electric, telephone, or even water service available in their homes. Every six months or so there's an article in the Navajo Times about the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority managing to hook up another couple of dozen homes to electricity, but there are still many thousands to…
[deleted]
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if that's because the USA is that stupid, or if it's just not as population dense as other countries with faster speeds? According to this statistic, it's not very dense, meaning it's super expensive to build broadband. Because it's pretty much a question of physical area covered, not number of people serviced. This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.…
> This stat says the USA is on the lower end of density Yes, but America's population isn't evenly distributed across the entire dry surface area. The population is clustered tightly in cities like it is in many other countries, it's just that the cities are further apart from each other. [1] The better metric, IMO, is the percentage of people who live in urban vs rural areas. [2] The US is 85.8% urban, which is righ…
but connectivity is also not a problem in the denser areas. I live in a medium sized city in the midwest, I have access to 3 Wired Broadband Providers, including 1 Fiber, with a 2nd fiber provider rolling out in the area and could be accessible to me in the next 18-24 mos...
hell even my former home, in a town of 1500 people, I had access to 1 wired Broadband, and 1 Fixed Wireless, and I just learned that a fiber provider has plans to complete wire most of the rural areas of the county by 2025...
Deregulation is not the problem, government corruption is.
Re: AT&T applies to end obligation to service landlines in California
#80The 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 broadban…
>> 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.