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Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

euronews.com

11–20 of 48 posts

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#11

This is an annoying paragraph: "Copper wires, the kind of cabling used in landlines for over a century, can only carry a limited amount of data. They carry phone calls as a continuous electrical signal that mimics the original sound wave, which is what makes them analogue." If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL h…

I think it's alright.

It conveys what needs to be conveyed in an approachable way. It could be more accurate and/or precise, but it shares this quality with a lot of other explanations of technical things that are written for broad audiences. I'm inclined to give some slack to a journalist from Kosovo who probably did not learn English as their first language.

If I were editing it then I'd consider replacing the word "data" with "information," to encompass the entire gamut. But it is not particularly egregious as-presented.

> If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL has been around for many years and has pretty high throughput.

If someone were to reach that conclusion, then it would be a valid conclusion.

Data may come out as 1s and 0s (or digital words or frames or whatevers) after demodulation at either end, but on the copper wire between those endpoints ADSL is absolutely an analog signalling system. That's what it is designed to be.

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past couple of years, my parents have had several multi-day outages with their phone line. Each time, we contacted Sky, who contacted Openreach and they eventually fixed things, but then it would stop working again months later. I guess they're just not maintaining that infrastructure like they used to. Finally my parents succumbed and now their phone is plugged into their router.

Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-t…

[deleted]

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past couple of years, my parents have had several multi-day outages with their phone line. Each time, we contacted Sky, who contacted Openreach and they eventually fixed things, but then it would stop working again months later. I guess they're just not maintaining that infrastructure like they used to. Finally my parents succumbed and now their phone is plugged into their router.

Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-t…

[deleted]

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#14

This is an annoying paragraph: "Copper wires, the kind of cabling used in landlines for over a century, can only carry a limited amount of data. They carry phone calls as a continuous electrical signal that mimics the original sound wave, which is what makes them analogue." If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL h…

I mean, technically it is, just the 'sound waves' are square waves of varying height/width

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#15
post #14

This is an annoying paragraph: "Copper wires, the kind of cabling used in landlines for over a century, can only carry a limited amount of data. They carry phone calls as a continuous electrical signal that mimics the original sound wave, which is what makes them analogue." If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL h…

I mean, technically it is, just the 'sound waves' are square waves of varying height/width

ADSL is designed to use frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#16

Having enjoyed the phreak subculture from the time I was a wee child, and truly learning so much about the way the world (and network optimization) worked through telephony over decades, this just makes me sad and sick. I am not suggesting landline service is the only thing that should exist, but this seems really just depressing (from a nostalgic standpoint) and dangerous (from a 'what was copper good for, anyway?'…

How is copper more reliable than fibre as an emergency communications medium? I guess 1800s technology suffices to transmit something over copper, so there's that.

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#17
post #16

Having enjoyed the phreak subculture from the time I was a wee child, and truly learning so much about the way the world (and network optimization) worked through telephony over decades, this just makes me sad and sick. I am not suggesting landline service is the only thing that should exist, but this seems really just depressing (from a nostalgic standpoint) and dangerous (from a 'what was copper good for, anyway?'…

How is copper more reliable than fibre as an emergency communications medium? I guess 1800s technology suffices to transmit something over copper, so there's that.

For residential users in Finland, the last-mile replacement for POTS is not fibre but cellular, at least where phone calls are concerned.

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#18
post #17
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is copper more reliable than fibre as an emergency communications medium? I guess 1800s technology suffices to transmit something over copper, so there's that.

For residential users in Finland, the last-mile replacement for POTS is not fibre but cellular, at least where phone calls are concerned.

Fibre to the house and calling over wifi is the most typical way. Hasn’t the US moved to wifi calling? It’s such a simple win, as screaming packets to a distant 5g tower eats much more battery than talking to nearby wifi

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#19
post #16

Having enjoyed the phreak subculture from the time I was a wee child, and truly learning so much about the way the world (and network optimization) worked through telephony over decades, this just makes me sad and sick. I am not suggesting landline service is the only thing that should exist, but this seems really just depressing (from a nostalgic standpoint) and dangerous (from a 'what was copper good for, anyway?'…

How is copper more reliable than fibre as an emergency communications medium? I guess 1800s technology suffices to transmit something over copper, so there's that.

Because copper wires could carry enough power to make a landline work when the mains electricity was off due to a power cut

Edit: also domestic routers are buggy and unreliable and need to be restarted regularly

Re: Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years

#20

Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years. It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you ab…

What are the plans for people who can't get fibre to the property?

Cell phone.
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