Wire and Cable Technology Blog

it may happen for you and me, but you can bet the military and security services will keep their lines.
Del

This is unlikely to happen any time soon. There are still too many devices dependant on land lines. Home security systems need land lines for central station monitoring and there are still many internet providers using this technology. Not to mention many industrial applications. I think we still have time.

Actually, all the modern home security systems are using cellular communication now. They sell it as a system that can not be cut from the outside. Though some other more critical security systems might be hardlined through secured conduits.

Del hit it on the head, its too much of a military importance. when or if a EMP disrupts current airwave, land lines networks are more reliable.

I believe here on CR4 this has been discussed before.

p911

Last time all access went to hell, when the repair technician finally showed up, he said, "Yeah, they call it "wireless"."

Of course I had to go out and buy a 30 dollar cell phone with 300 minutes on it so he could call me to find out if I was home, before he'd come over to fix the connection.

What ever happened to that communications system that was designed to ride on the AC power feeds to most any grid connected home?

The internet over power line idea has hit a bit of a snag, it cannot be made not to radiate and mess up reception of radio signals. Maybe someone will come up with a solution in time.

At this point virtually all modern phones have electronics in them so even if the lines survived an EMP event (no guarantee of that) most user's phones would be fried.

I'm all for change. Bring it on. In all likelihood the elimination of the requirement to support copper lines would hasten the proliferation of fiber to the house.

I know, the future is scary but after the nightmares we've been through lately who cares?

I have Centurytel for my high speed internet provider and telephone provider. They require me to have a landline phone in order to get there internet service. They say you have to have the phone in order to get the internet which is false. The cables do have to run to house but a dial tone does not have to be present on that line in order to get the data service. So, they are making me pay for a phone number that is unnecessary for me to have. Isn't there something against the law about that? I have no other choice for internet where I live unless I went to a satellite set up.

Greetings.

Something that seems to be missing in all this is that all of the cell phone towers around here in the Northwest do not have backup power (generators to come on line with a power failure locally or region wide). We had a major high wind storm that put out the power for over a week and the only communications that worked was the USWEST now Qwest land lines. None of the cell phone towers had any kind of a backup power and had problems coming back up when the power was restored.

Security. I wouldn't just have a cell phone on my security system. I would have a landline and a cell phone. The criminals know how all this works. If they cut your landline then your cell phone could send the message. Buried service requires getting into the cable or the building interface thus exposing the criminals to observation.Cell or wireless can be jammed and thus disabled without even getting close to the house or business. The telephone companies have had backup power from the gitgo. The only power in downtown Olympia and Lacey during the outage were the large generators running the Central Offices that were keeping the landline telephones working like nothing had happened.

Cell technology requires a complicated cell phone to access the network with all of the whoopie ding protocols. Landline technology can be accessed with a regular POTS line (plain old telephone service) via any phone that you can even get at a garage sale and any old or new modem on the market.

AT&T lost its business for doing just as they are now. Jim Olson was the last Telephone Man (one who came up through the Bell System and knew the core business) to run AT&T and he died I believe it was 1987. The CEOs that have run AT&T since have come in through other ways and are trying to get rich quick with new ideas etc instead of relying on the core business. They gave away the key phone business because they didn't want to be bothered. However the customers who had those key phones were also the ones that went to AT&T at first because they had been satisfied and bought large AT&T PBXs. Remember when AT&T stock dropped 77% in one year and it quit being a blue chip? Well I don't expect this to work either.