The beginning of the end for copper wire
potsandpansbyccg.com
potsandpansbyccg.com
At one time, 80% of AT&T's capital value was the copper in the local loops. AT&T was then, in effect, the world's largest copper mine. Fortunately, this fact was not widely known in the investment community. Had it been known, some corporate raider might have bought AT&T, terminated all telephone service in the United States, ripped out all the wire, and sole the wire to a copper refiner to get a quick payback.
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks
My favourite Tanenbaumism, while I'm on the topic: Aircraft carriers are modular. If a toilet gets clogged, it doesn't start launching nuclear missiles.
The point is that regulations previously required the telco provide an alternative service that works just as well as the existing copper before they are allowed to stop maintaining the copper. But that is no longer the case as of this vote.
Now when the telco doesn't want to pay to maintain the copper they can simply do nothing at all, which absolutely will leave people without any form of telecommunication in some areas.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Texas/@32.4826637,-98.4527...
Some youtube video show packets traveling a few miles on a stupid esp8266 chip. I don't know how sparse texas is, but I'm sure you can find a nice % of houses whose distance to each others is lower than 1mile.
I had about a decade of wireless ISP in a neighborhood. It was ok, but speeds suffered as the number of users increased. BTW, this city of 30,000 doesn't have cable and it didn't really get started until 1999. Cable companies didn't want to build it out.
Now I'm in the middle of nowhere and there isn't a WISP to be found. Houses are to far apart and there are too many trees. Noise? I don't have any of that, but line of sight doesn't exist.
I think getting a workable mesh going anywhere would be tough, there is always something.
detroit diy wifi community network
Telstra in Australia is bound by the Universal Service Obligation, for instance: https://www.acma.gov.au/Industry/Telco/Carriers-and-service-...
This is an area where it's critically important to regulate the market to make it actually work for the people, not just profit margins. If the service providers were not obliged to provide service to people in remote areas at the same price as everyone else, no service provider would.
What's the rationale for forcing people who live in densely populated areas to subsidize those who live in remote areas this way?
Why don't we subsidize them for, say, gasoline as well, for their longer travel distances?
To the best of my understanding, the consensus around this formed out of the Depression and was bolstered subsequently by post-war thinking. The idea was that we as a society should be able to make certain social guarantees of living standard and access to services.
Lots of things gave rise to that strain of thinking across the Western world, some of which were in response to specifically American conditions, others not. To the extent that it was influenced by the same kinds of currents that gave rise to the Western European welfare states, there was a pattern of concern over the ways in which savage inequalities between country and society perpetuated intergenerational poverty, which was in turn exploitable by demagogues and populists. There was a time in American history when the society was moving in the same general political direction as Europe as far as universal social benefits, and while the trend was unquestionably weaker here, it give rise to Medicare and Medicaid and other LBJ War on Poverty-era initiatives. Another, less acknowledged motivation was to defeat the allure of the Soviet model; revolutionary Bolshevism was big on redressing the historical gap between the sophistication and modernity of the city vs. the backward depression of the country, and universal literacy, universal electrification, universal medical infrastructure, etc. were widely touted goals. And of course, this factor was even more pronounced among the European social democracies.
The more locally American consideration was most likely that telephone service should be folded, together with farm price supports, into the overall package of stabilising subsidies to the critical agricultural sector. This was thought necessary to cushion them against a repeat of the acute economic devastation of the Depression, the Dust Bowl, etc. Telephone access was essential to economic development and automation in the twentieth century in the same way that Internet access is regarded to be now, and was practically important for farmers as a means of getting their products to market.
Last but not least, participation in the social bargain of universal service was generally a condition of being granted some sort of natural monopoly status, as for example with electrical utilities. The same general thinking was extended to the telephone, since AT&T did, after all, monopolise the local loop in most of the country for much of the twentieth century.
The point is that regulations previously required the telco provide an alternative service that works just as well as the existing copper before they are allowed to stop maintaining the copper. But that is no longer the case as of this vote.
It annoyed me to have to switch, but ultimately it turned out to be cheaper, even after the initial contract expired.
I would be a little concerned about the safety of that elevator.
> allows the telcos to eliminate old copper wholesale services like resale.
is to cut CLECs out of the circuit game, to the extent they still sell T-circuits and (more likely) Ethernet transport over telco copper through the UNE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbundled_network_element) facility).
Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (TA96), UNE rules have required incumbents to lease portions of their physical plant to CLECs at regulated rates. These do not apply to fiber. Making it impossible for CLECs to ride portions of their network to compete with them has been a major goal of pulling out copper, and has often led to it being pulled out more aggressively than it otherwise would be.
Then they'll sell you a 'bundle' with a cellular phone or tablet with data plan at a lower price than your old rate for just the old analog line alone. Not sure how the math works out.
Since the contract is up after a year, then you have start a new bundle or pay up. They're selling WebEx, Office 365...everything.
- 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.
I live in a small community an hours drive from San Francisco. There is only ATT DSL. (no cable, only a couple cell services and none at all for some - including myself - due to the hills and valleys)
I am lucky and have DSL (5Mbps, and most of the time really 2Mbps, barely any upstream and it slows the downstream to a crawl when using it - example: watching youtube on 240p setting freezes when checking your email).
Many in my town have been without home internet for years. And even if you have cell coverage, the 10G of tethered data per month (that is what Verizon "unlimited" is) - can be eaten away in a day by a person not realizing their computer is updating or watching netflix on 720p.
There was once a healthy ecosystem of local ISPs. the big players killed them and now those healthy ecosystems will need to grow back. But it will be painful for those who have to go through networking withdraw.
Personal feeling, copper or fiber can't compete with that on price at all.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-people-call-res...
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?
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 storm, etc. Verizon basically makes no profit on its wireline division despite $31 billion in revenue: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/annual_rep... (page 22). At this point, POTS service is probably losing money even in urban and suburban areas. (You need to maintain the copper in an entire neighborhood even if only a few people subscribe to copper phone service.)
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.
While the unit economics are better because of the density, there are also more subscribers to serve, breeding its own infrastructural complexity. It may be more efficient to do it in cities per wire distance or unit of infrastructure, but there's also just more infrastructure.
For POTS to be economical anywhere, a sizable chunk of the population has to buy it.
I don't know what those tipping points are, but you can be 370% sure the ILECs have calculated this out meticulously.
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 the space to access the problematic cable.
It also means that what used to take a dedicated culvert now could be done with a single cable. So infrastructure prices go extremely low as you only need to bury a small pipe and you gain a lot of space in old infrastructure.
Copper actually rust if exposed to elements. For it not rusting you need to use things that actually degrade or pollute the environment a lot.
An optical line is as inert as it could be, does not degrade over time, does not have EM interference.
You already have all the necessary optical line infrastructure under roads or in powerlines. The only thing you have to update are the optoelectronics terminals and repeaters.
- While infrastructure does vary, "tens of thousands" of pairs hasn't been a common scenario in a long time thanks to multiplexing. Drag the pairs from each household back to a box with a few SLC96s, send it out the back on a few T1s running over a few pairs, or just one — framed over HDSL. Or multiplexed onto a DS1 signal that is in turn a channel on some much larger TDM aggregate over fibre, like an OC-3 or 12.
- EM interference is still occasionally an issue with copper, but only on the lastest of the last mile. Otherwise, overall local loop transmission has been digital for a long time.
Nothing goes back to the central office as an analog signal, at least not in environments that the telecom industry considers "metro" (90% of the country).
There is some truth to what you say, but there's a lot of 80s-type telephone folklore mixed in as well. :-)
This ruling let’s them abandon them altogether from what I gathered.
Yet they still continue to shake the people down. I don't think corporations should run anything last mile. The temptation is just too great.
Of a bigger concern in rural areas will be losing access to 911. A lot
of homes still keep landlines just for the 911 capabilities. Under the
old rules the carriers had to demonstrate that customers would still
have access to reliable 911, but it seems the carriers can now walk
away without worrying about this.
But you can count on one thing: "Thanks, Obama!"
It would definitely be more profitable to drop support for large parts (land mass, not population) of the U.S. entirely.
Indeed, and the same is true of other places where wireline telephone service is universal or substantially universal.
Wireline telephone service is something that should be thought of as akin to electrification or public transportation. It is unlikely to have happened guided solely by private sector profit imperatives.
Selling the copper from the wires also could be quite lucrative.
It is filthy, expensive work for a feature that no longer generates the revenue that funded the deployment of the national telco network.
The wires will die. It is going to require a different model than those that are on the table to maintain this type of transport. If we hadn’t wasted the trillions of dollars on the last 16 years of war, Maybe we could have afforded a national deployment of fiber.
Verizon and other telcos already learned they can get billions in subsidies for building fiber networks, and never follow through with it with no consequences.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...
At this point I think municipal run ISP utilities are the future we should be shooting for.
It's possible that it's worth more than a 5% cut--in which case it's still a subsidy.
In New York City, a Verizon subsidiary called ECS operates a conduit network under an 1891 franchise. It pays the city a fee based on the assessed value of real estate, about $20 million per year. Verizon pays ECS standardized rates to use the conduit, but the city alleges that ECS sets rates too low, and the shortfall is about $260 million over six years. https://comptroller.nyc.gov/wp-content/uploads/documents/FP0.... Of that, 80% is allocable to Verizon, or about $42 million per year owed to the city.
The franchise fee is 5% of gross. Assuming about one million FIOS households in NYC in the steady state (consistent with Verizon’s uptake rate of about 40% and 2-3 million households passed), plus the average revenue per subscriber of $110 per month, that’s $65 million per year paid to the city.
On top of that, you’ve got to consider the value of build-out requirements. The city forces Verizon to build in neighborhoods that aren’t otherwise sufficiently profitable to justify building in. That’s a concsssion extracted by the city that also must be accounted for, because each house passed that doesn’t subscribe costs Verizon hundreds of dollars. (Going back further in history, this was the quid pro quo between AT&T and governments. My FIOS is run on a pole jointly owned by Verizon and BGE. Is this a subsidy to Verizon? On one hand, the easement is valuable. On the other hand, the pole was inherited from AT&T, who got the easement in return for running a phone line it otherwise would not have, into what used to be farmland.)
New York is also a bit of an odd situation because of ECS. In most places, the power company owns the conduit of the poles, and unlike ECS has no incentive to undercharge for attachments.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/the-book-of-br...
The RBOCs promised they would roll out fiber, FCC and PUCs promised they would enforce that, and we assumed any of them had any integrity. Whoops! Then, with the 1996 act, RBOCs traded lots of competitive requirements for the right to reconsolidate into Ma Bell (which at this time they have mostly completed, only now with substantial monopoly of the wireless market in addition to that of the wired one). Again we assumed integrity on the part of any of them. More importantly, lots of wealthy investors assumed that. The two decades since then have been a clinic on how a monopolist who owns the regulators can steal billions from the rest of us. "Too bad about all that money you spent setting up that CLEC... You can forget about us obeying (or the regulators enforcing) any of those leasing or interconnection rules... We'll give you ten cents on the dollar for your now-worthless network and customer base."
Is it any wonder that ATT, SBC, VZN monopolized the wireless market? At the very moment that the market was expanding and big infrastructure investments needed to be made, we had just given them hundreds of billions of dollars! Their abuse of the landline market financed their capture of the wireless market. How could anyone else compete with that? More to the point, who would be stupid enough to try, after getting their asses kicked on the wired side, in direct violation of the 1996 Act? The problem with treating changed circumstances as some sort of extenuation for all the broken promises and unenforced laws, is that the changed circumstances were intentionally engineered by Ma Bell, regardless of the lies they told.
Fool us a dozen times, shame on us.
There was never a quid pro quo: deregulation in return for fiber. We deregulated for the same reason everyone else in the western world did: to attract private investment. And we got that in spades—about $1.5 trillion since the 1996 Act. The Internet—the wires and fiber and switches—as we know it was built almost entirely with private money since 1996.
Saying we “gave” ISPs money because we stopped controlling the prices they could charge is extremely disingenuous.
You have read Kushnick. He has whole chapters that are little more than quotes from PUC testimony, RBOC press releases, annual shareholder reports, etc. The quid was most definitely pro the quo. Now who is "disingenuous"?
The stated objective of the 1996 Act was to foster competition. We had about five years during which the first hints of actual competition started to appear, which have steadily disappeared since then. Much of the investment you laud was misinvestment: witness the perennially low returns to building out long-distance fiber throughout the 2000s. Witness the steady consumption of investor-financed firms by the Daughters Bell. In what other industry would it be judged a success that lots of people spent lots of money, but they were eventually driven out of business by the monopoly anyway?
We’re also pretty comparable in price, at least in many places. In the nation’s capital, gigabit fiber is about $80/month, roughly what it costs in London and cheaper than what it costs in Stockholm. Apparently Amsterdam doesn’t have FTTH except in small pockets: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amsterdam/comments/6pv96m/gigabit_i.... The recommended ISP there, for people who can get it, is about the same for 500/500 as gigabit in DC. Where European countries tend to do better is price points for lower service tiers. In London Virgin offers 50/3 for $43/month. If I couldn’t get 50/50 for $40 via fiber, my closest option would be $75 for 75/10 with TV and HBO. These are not categorical differences.
Broadband deployment is largely managed at the local level, so it varies from city to city. Cities that make it cheap and easy to build (Austin, DC, Houston, Atlanta), have options pretty comparable to London, Munich, Paris, etc. Cities that put up roadblocks to development suffer for it.
If anything, having thousands of small ISPs would make it harder for the feds to spy on everyone.
Here's the fun part - you've already been paying for it. The 1996 Telecommunications Act set up a fund that every telecom user in the USA pays into which was supposed to build high-speed services in rural and disadvantaged areas.
> (3) ACCESS IN RURAL AND HIGH COST AREAS- Consumers in all regions of the Nation, including low-income consumers and those in rural, insular, and high cost areas, should have access to telecommunications and information services, including interexchange services and advanced telecommunications and information services, that are reasonably comparable to those services provided in urban areas and that are available at rates that are reasonably comparable to rates charged for similar services in urban areas
(PDF warning) https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.pdf
What actually happened was the telcos used that money to buy their competitors and consolidate the market to where only a few large firms remain (no more "Baby Bells")
War is actually one of the cheaper parts of the budget.
War on the other hand, it's just kinda, let's spend a bunch of money and worry about it later. That makes a lot of sense when you're averting genocide or actively under attack. it makes less sense when you're already funding a powerful influential state department that can impose sanctions with strong international support.
You can afford a whole lot of diplomacy for a few billion dollars, but that won't really buy you a lot of war. Also, not so many people die. Which i think is a bonus.
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.
https://www.increasebroadbandspeed.co.uk/2013/chart-bt-fttc-...
Which is both slower than the fibre that had already been planned, and slower than the then incoming government's "25mbps for everyone by end of 2016" promise (which they missed).
It also doesn't have a good cheap upgrade path and assumes that the copper is good and doesn't need to be replaced (it isn't, and it does in many places).
Some of the more extreme claims that we all need GB speed links don't make sense its like saying every house/flat needs a 56Kv 3 phase power supply.
The most commonly purchased NBN service in 2016 is 25mbps Down 5mbps up. (51%) and 14% of customers buy 100/40: So yes to both questions.
And that’s 2016. Why skate to where the puck is rather than where it’s going?
In Canada we stopped minting pennies because copper was too expensive.
Also those pex pipes they install in houses are probably popular because copper is expensive.
What's next, the return of aluminum wiring?
We had a week long blackout here a few years ago, my wall phone running off copper twisted pair was the only electrical thing working in the house.
I was glad, because I had better things to do than line up at starbucks to charge my cellphone like everyone else was doing.
Remember that ancient looking phone Adama was always shouting into on Batllestar Galactica? Maybe they were onto something.
That ship survived because it was the oldest ship in the fleet.
I suspect even if PEX cost 5x copper tubing, the TCO for PEX would still be lower over the lifetime of the plumbing. Shipping and moving around a spool of PEX is much easier than monkeying with a load of copper tubing.
I wish the US would join Canada in dropping the penny.
There have been defects causing lots of water damage. Plus I'm not sure i want my drinking water sitting in plastic all day picking up whatever chemicals they used to make the pipe.
Copper is naturally antibacterial, and just seems safer to me, given that we've been using it for decades.
I'm also curious if the newer faster fiber technologies are sort of "subsidizing" the carrier's copper business.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/business/282222/cheaper-copper...
I remember having an labouring job installing power supply cable underground. It was all aluminium, and you rolled it off a giant spool because you could barely bend it.
Aren't most OPLs aluminium these days?
1. I needed a separate box at home tied to my wifi to even get a signal on my phone. Thankfully after switching to Google Fi and a Pixel phone I no longer need the box.
2. If I'm making a business call and making the sale depends on a clear connection that will not drop the landline phone still wins out.
One avenue that could be taken by the companies to mitigate any loss of voice service. Customer would be just changing the point they plug the phone in, socket wise and that would be that.
I had a Draytek 2910vg 10 years ago doing exactly that, so very very doable. But then, that was always a solution under the existing criteria and with that, this change just allows companies to not offer that solution. Which does raise one question - will customers be able to keep their existing number and port it to a VOIP provider of their choice? That is one aspect that could of been covered in these changes. That would certainly open up the markets and in a good way.
The underlying PSTN origination supply chain for the VoIP industry consists of a small oligopoly of CLECs at this point (e.g. Level3, Bandwidth.com, Verizon Business, Onvoy and all the companies they bought, etc.) and they don't necessarily have the interconnections and footprint in these same markets — most especially not the "Tier 3" plus rural markets.
Starting to see why they wanted the change now.
For a CLEC, interconnecting in any given LATA[1] is a complex and costly endeavour—I mean the actual interconnecting, not opting into an interconnection agreement (ICA) for one purpose or another. CLECs are not beholden to any universal service obligations or similar social policy objectives, and will only connect in higher-density metro-type markets in which there is profit in doing so. The business case has to be there, and that generally comes in the form of downstream VoIP service providers having customer demand in that area.
So, hyper-rural folks are deeply out of luck. We deal with this scenario all the time in my line of work: "hey, anyone know someone who can port a number in this $LOCAL_YOKEL territory out in $NEVER_HEARD_OF_IT?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_access_and_transport_are...
Number of people who actually need high speed networking is quite low. Yet this naturally means, that the high speed option might not be available at all, with reasonable cost. 4G and 5G means that there will be less and less wired (copper or fiber) connections.
I dont see anything about the USF going away so I dont see why anyone would be left behind, USF's are normally highly profitable for the telco. For the edge cases that cant receive a mobile signal with a roof mounted antenna, I guess a subsidized satellite phone will be the solution.
https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR/financial-r...
They had as many people on Uverse video (which I guess is fiber) in 2014 as they had on copper phone lines in 2016.
In a lot of cases, they run into headwinds with local municipalities regarding contracts they already have with Comcast, RCN, etc when it comes to providing television service (AT&T has argued to varying degrees of success that UVerse has nothing to do with TV). DSLAMs are also ugly boxes that have to sit in very visible and inconvenient places.
For some reason in my neighborhood, UVerse exists up until about 3 blocks from my home and it goes no further. Nobody can explain why.
USF is paid for by a tax on telecom service which, in effect, redistributes money from telcos with more urban/suburban customers to telcos with more rural customers (and imposes a deadweight loss on the industry as a whole from the tax). AT&T probably falls into the bucket of telcos that lose rather than profit from the USF scheme.
National fiber network and land.
Ethernet is, of course, ~90-100 meters (not 500) but most MDUs need to have utility closets/areas within 100 meters for other reasons anyway; so you often there can either be copper or fiber back-haul links past that first switch.
The major pain point is probably neighborhoods where the exposure to outside conditions means increased likelihood of some idiot trenching incorrectly and/or disasters where high voltage might come across the line (making fiber to at least the side of the building preferable for safety reasons).
"...for local loops shorter than 500 m"
A large part of the infrastructure you need to replace when upgrading is inside buildings. With a 500m radius, you can avoid rewiring buildings and have loops terminate in the street.
Once again, I am putting my decision to vacate the US back on the table.
This rollback effectively means telcos can "upgrade" to no longer be telcos.
Of course, in a crisis, I may not get a response to the alarm.