Let's not forget alarm service, which is why I keep my copper loop.
The beginning of the end for copper wire
101–110 of 193 posts
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#102While the Australian right wing govt scrapped all the fibre to the home work that was underway and decided that copper from the node to the house was a great upgrade. The internet in Australia is so bad I had significantly better in New Zealand a decade ago.
Which Australian right wing government are you referring to? Australian telecoms ran off the rails in the late 90s, the moment that the Howard government privatised the state-run phone network. They either stuffed it up (thinking charitably), or pulled a dodgy related party transaction to rip off the public and enrich their mates in business who were kind enough to donate back part of the loot (thinking cynically).
There were no good options after that. In hindsight, the least bad choice was to nationalise the network again, think a lot harder about competition and monopoly issues, and maybe have another go at privatisation some years down the track. But no one had the guts to do that.
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#103The FCC chairman appears to be listening only to corporate lobbyists. I consider this to be a dereliction of duty, but of course Trump thinks otherwise. As long as Trump is in power, the rules are going to keep changing in favor of corporate interests. Those of us who oppose the new regime at the FCC need to start thinking about what economic tools we can use to discourage telecoms from taking advantage of FCC rule changes that we think will harm internet freedom and the common good.
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#104Pardon the possibly ignorant question, but what do the telecom companies have to gain by destroying their own infrastructure? I feel like I'm missing something about the US telecom market here. Aren't these companies making a profit on this infrastructure? Are they selling more profitable services and they want users to switch over? Are the maintenance fees that high?
It will so not surprise me if in 10 years the TelCos are clamoring for billions in "rural connectivity funding" from the feds to put in fiber runs to rural areas currently adequately covered by the copper they are pulling out.
If that’s what it takes to update it, so be it. I think greater internet connectivity to rural areas would solve a lot of metro-area congestion and be an economic activity multiplier.
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we hadn’t wasted the trillions of dollars on the last 16 years of war War is actually one of the cheaper parts of the budget.
And the least productive.
It’s extremely productive if you include the resources we are able to patriate into the private sector after the wars.
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of times, the process looks more like: - AT&T declares the rate it will charge in its [Red State] PSC tariff filing; - [Red State] PSC stamps it. But yes, it is certainly true that they cannot just charge capricious and whimsical rates that change daily at their pleasure, or anything like that.
You can remove the red state. It applies to blue states as well for telecom and energy
It was a bit tongue-in-cheek. However, as one of the descendant comments notes, states dominated by a certain party do seem more amicable to these sorts of shenanigans than others...
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#107Pardon the possibly ignorant question, but what do the telecom companies have to gain by destroying their own infrastructure? I feel like I'm missing something about the US telecom market here. Aren't these companies making a profit on this infrastructure? Are they selling more profitable services and they want users to switch over? Are the maintenance fees that high?
Much of this infrastructure is in more rural areas, which were never profitable. All that copper was strung up in an environment where high long-distance charges were used to subsidize service in rural areas. Wireline is costly (and copper is more costly than fiber on an on-going basis). Your business is sitting in the ground depreciating and requires expensive unionized workers to make repairs every time there is a…
There are a great many businesses, even in NYC and even in the high-tech industries here that absolutely depend on copper infrastructure.
The world-renowned midtown hedge fund that I used to work for had a DS1 off a copper trunk that had the payroll system (a circa-2001 Dell Optiplex running Windows 2000) on it as recently as 2008. I assume they aren't now (god, I hope so, but that system hadn't been touched in years when I got there out of extreme fear of breaking it), but that industry was ahead of the technological curve.
A great many restaurants (not everyone is on Seamless...) still rely on copper phone lines for payment processing. I've seen a lot of the pinpads absolutely shit themselves trying to operate on EMTAs/telephony cable modems.
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#108Pardon the possibly ignorant question, but what do the telecom companies have to gain by destroying their own infrastructure? I feel like I'm missing something about the US telecom market here. Aren't these companies making a profit on this infrastructure? Are they selling more profitable services and they want users to switch over? Are the maintenance fees that high?
You can put tens of thousands of copper lines communications in just a single optical cable. An optical cable is extremely small, in fact, most of the cable is just mechanical reinforcement. Tens of thousands of copper fibers does not only means lots of cables with lots of devices that could fail, with lots of interference. It means that if something goes wrong, it it very hard to identify the problem or even to have…
Yes, there's some advantages however some services don't work(alarms, etc) on fiber.
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will so not surprise me if in 10 years the TelCos are clamoring for billions in "rural connectivity funding" from the feds to put in fiber runs to rural areas currently adequately covered by the copper they are pulling out.
If that’s what it takes to update it, so be it. I think greater internet connectivity to rural areas would solve a lot of metro-area congestion and be an economic activity multiplier.
I think the parent was implying that they'd take the hand-out without delivering, which is extremely characteristic of what they've done with USF and other regulatory initiatives to shovel money into an open pit^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hincumbent pockets.
Re: The beginning of the end for copper wire
#110Its silly to think that copper itself is going away simply because the phone system won't be using much of it anymore, almost all electricity from AC to DC wires run over copper and various alloys.
This isn't about all copper wire. It's using copper to refer to the old copper wire based POTS.
He didn't read the article, as is usual for hacker news "experts."