Finland's last analogue landline phones go silent after 150 years
euronews.com
euronews.com
Still remembering the Hawaiian storm that made Kauai a bastion of cutting edge telephony in the 1990s and the way people let go of landlines in NY after the Hurricane there about a decade ago.
So long, weird quirky Finnish system, though I hardly knew ye.
I remember we had only one line going into our house, but several phones, so if one picked up one of the other phones one were in the same call.
It only happened when there were too many callers at the same time. The solution was often to redial and hoping you ended up with a non-satellite call.
Edit: also domestic routers are buggy and unreliable and need to be restarted regularly
Having to worry about the CO power, house power, device power, and the power going to towers is a little much for my taste.
> ""Analogue networks have been in operation for decades and have reached the end of their serviceable life. The telecoms industry is finding it difficult to source the parts required to maintain or repair connections as suppliers are no longer manufacturing them. Ofcom, the telecommunications regulator, reported that 2023 saw 20% more service incidents on the PSTN compared to 2022, resulting in a 60% increase in the number of service hours lost to customers
...
If you have other devices connected to your phone line, such as alarm systems, telecare devices or fax machines, you should take steps to ensure they will continue to function correctly.
...
The analogue landline carries a low voltage power connection directly from the telephone exchange, which is sufficient to power some basic corded handsets without needing to plug them into the wall. This means that in the event of a local power cut, these corded handsets will continue to function as long as the telephone exchange still has power.
Digital landlines cannot carry a power connection, which means handsets and routers must be powered from your home power supply, and they will not function in a power cut unless you have a backup power system such as a battery or generator. Telecare devices connected to a digital landline network may not work during a power cut.
Communications providers are required by Ofcom to take all necessary measures to ensure uninterrupted access to emergency organisations for their customers, including in the event of a power cut."""
- https://www.gov.uk/guidance/uk-transition-from-analogue-to-d...
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 absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.
This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.
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.
They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.
https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea...
I wish I had a link for the other thing, but it was deep inside some Openreach site that Google don't seem to have access to.
That said, there are devices that depend on the old phone network that need to be replaced, such as alarm systems for vulnerable people, but the risk of vulnerable people that can't switch to VoIP services is fairly low, especially as this switchover has been known about for a long time.
Is it really or is one just more profitable because you can charge more for IP than analog? I came here to ask this because it genuinely feels like a way to remove cheaper alternatives.
You can't even imagine how difficult it is to even source a corded telephone locally (outside of the really expensive fax machines, with attached handset).
----
POTS was a brilliant invention; it saddens me that US Radio Operator licenses recently began requiring emails for renewals (which I legitimately don't/won't use). ...sort of thought the principle of being Hams included lowtech communications technologies (not eternal "to do" lists == email).
It seems like our interconnectedness has been going backwards for at least a few decades.
(Here, it is technically optional for utilities but is an additional $10/month to have your electricity bill posted to you instead of emailed. The tax office requires email as does my bank though - I just checked.)
Our local utility offers a one-time $10 credit for opting-out of paperbilling... most similar signups do/will require in-person verification – which I consider a 'perk' at this point in my life (for identity protection reasons).
>how do you operate without email?
There're a few dozen million of us non-email users; granted most are infirm in some way (whether to age or insanity).
A civil court action several years ago required me to sign attensation to "no phone / email" – which at the time was still true. As I am not an attorney, they cannot refuse my access pro se to the legal system – this case eventually required me to seek representation, so this became moot.
"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 has been around for many years and has pretty high throughput.
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.