America Gave Up on the Best Home Technology There Is
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
As far as the old Bell System went: if you look, the old CO buildings have big parking lots around them (sometimes on all sides, and fenced off; other times actual parking lots on one or two sides. Those used to have huge diesel tanks in them (dunno if they still do this). The basements of those buildings we full of -48V batteries (dealing with H2 outgassing was an engineering issue). IIRC they were supposed to have a week's capacity, though that seems implausible to me.
Our current system is more capable but much less resilient.
I used to regularly lose landline service after storms (further north on the East Coast). For a while, I had both a landline and a cell phone, and found myself with the oddity of calling the phone company on my cell phone to tell them that my phone didn't work.
(I still technically have a land line. It comes free with the fiber optic data line. But there are no phones connected to it. At one point I discovered that it had been down for months, and didn't care.)
Landlines aren’t missed.
And iPads can make phone calls via Wi-Fi, FaceTime and emergency calls.
I have yet to use a landline phone, even from the thrift store, even though the phone service is bundled with DSL internet at a lower cost than DSL internet alone.
The blazing fast internet revolution has not reached the woods, though I have never worried about making an emergency call via iPhone or iPad. CB talkies are on hand, though I keep batteries out of them to avoid corrosion from disuse over time (in years)
Starlink hasn't changed this?
We have areas we provide DSL and phone service to which were underwater for months during the [0] 2019 Midwest US Floods. There are places where the buried lines are still fine for phone, but don't have nearly the signal resolution to handle even 5/1 DSL speeds. In those cases we switch customers to wireless supplied internet.
We have further areas where telephone pedestals are filled with 60 year old wires, which means the buried lines are likewise that old and can't offer much for speeds...it will be interesting to see what the true lifespan of fiber is because if you can build your plant out with fiber now, you won't need to bury anything new later on down the line. You just upgrade the boxes on the end of the fibers to something newer, hotter, with whatever technology replaces the distribution PON your current boxes run.
I also wonder how much value is left in abandoned, buried phone lines and if it would ever make sense to reclaim it at scale.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Midwestern_U.S._floods
We're never getting back the phone systems of yore, but for me, it's more about replicating the ergonomics of 'the phone call' rather than stubbornly preserving antiquated technology.
YMMV -- some handsets can be finicky, most work great though, and since it's functionally no different than connecting a BT headset, you get some weird added stuff by default (access to contact lists, siri, whatever your software already provides (incoming call blocking, spam filtering, etc))
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Xtreme-Technolgoies-XLink-Bluetooth-G...
For what it's worth, my mobile service has stayed up during the last three power outages here.
And while there are alternative OS options out there, most of them are “fat” operating systems that haven’t received the scrutiny of the two elephants in the room, leaving them to be even more questionable than a known variable.
I wish the author had expounded on their setup. I too pay ~$1/mo for VOIP DIDs, but from what I've seen of consumer-facing prices I realize that's a facet of getting nitty and gritty with SIP (which doesn't necessarily mean self-hosting, eg voip.ms).
Real circuit-switched lines are wildly expensive if you can even get one. Verizon and AT&T are doing their best to make that impossible.
Of course it stops working if anything happens to our internet access, but we do have the cell phones well, and the answering machine lives in the cloud (and emails an MP3 if someone leaves a message) so the house number is never truly offline.