back
44 comments
Having enjoyed the phreak subculture from the time I was a wee child, and truly learning so much about the way the world (and network optimization) worked through telephony over decades, this just makes me sad and sick. I am not suggesting landline service is the only thing that should exist, but this seems really just depressing (from a nostalgic standpoint) and dangerous (from a 'what was copper good for, anyway?' standpoint). But I guess noone needs reliable emergency communications. At least POTS is not totally gone in the States yet.

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.

Where I live we have long since shut down our copper network. I miss the low latency and not constantly talking over each others sentences.
I certainly do not miss the ability for only one person to speak at a time on a phone call. Wonder how many people remember their last phone call like that (on cellular or on cordless).
What do you mean? Like either you speak or the person in the other end speak? That I don't remember! Was that a restriction on early cellular and cordless phones? Our phones had cords.

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.

Maybe you never called the other side of the world in the 80s, latency was easily 2 seconds! And the price..
I don't recall 2s latency, but do remember 0.25-0.3s latency one way for transatlantic phone calls in the 90s, which happens when the call got related over geostationary satellites rather than over Atlantic cables. It was basically a 0.5-0.6s roundtrip delay enough to cause you to talk over each other.

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.

How is copper more reliable than fibre as an emergency communications medium? I guess 1800s technology suffices to transmit something over copper, so there's that.
Because copper wires could carry enough power to make a landline work when the mains electricity was off due to a power cut

Edit: also domestic routers are buggy and unreliable and need to be restarted regularly

Why is why landlines can easily have a battery. And my cell has one built in
And when the battery is empty, it is empty.
And device companies have gone out of their way to prevent removeable/extra batteries (not talking about power banks).

Having to worry about the CO power, house power, device power, and the power going to towers is a little much for my taste.

For residential users in Finland, the last-mile replacement for POTS is not fibre but cellular, at least where phone calls are concerned.
Fibre to the house and calling over wifi is the most typical way. Hasn’t the US moved to wifi calling? It’s such a simple win, as screaming packets to a distant 5g tower eats much more battery than talking to nearby wifi
Yes, most cellular carriers have wifi calling enabled. However, my in laws have some cellular device that provides a POTS jack they plug a phone into and it’s powered from the wall. That’s is always talking to cellular network.
The UK is currently going through the analogue copper landline shutdown, with a scheduled cutoff of Jan 2027 (already pushed back once). The gov website says:

> ""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...

Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

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.

Over the past couple of years, my parents have had several multi-day outages with their phone line. Each time, we contacted Sky, who contacted Openreach and they eventually fixed things, but then it would stop working again months later.

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.

Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-to-the-exchange.

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.

What are the plans for people who can't get fibre to the property?
IP-only != fibre. Try reading my comment above in its entirety. You can also read this for further enlightenment about SOGEA:

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.

There are multiple options, including internet from mobile phone providers and satellite internet. The affordability and speeds are good enough that it's not a major problem.

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.

Cell phone.
and for old people who cannot use mobile phones?
Then they can't use a wall phone either.
plain not true, my grandmother can use a wall phone but not a mobile phone
Is she using a wheel dial? Otherwise, the user interface is almost the same for wall phones and cell phones for seniors. Except that you have to press the dial button for it to dial.
>We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

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.

Mandating that the analogue system be kept limping along in parallel would not be a cheaper alternative.
I'd rather have USPS or some quasi-government org take over some of these 'obsolete' systems than for them to just disappear altogether. There needs to be a rock bottom, bare bones option to keep prices down. We need to have more competition, not less--there are only a handful of true options for cellular or local internet. This seems to just be a way to cut off legacy infrastructure that was working fine to force people to buy into more modern (i.e. expensive) options.
In Finland many news outlets had the same headline, but needed to correct it. It's the last big operator who closed their network. There are still a couple of smaller local operators that have not yet stopped. Finland traditionally had many local phone companies and a few have obviosly survived.
My biggest complaint as a user of an old analogue touchtone (the classic AT&T wallmount you're thinking of right now, in red) is: fiberoptic VOIP "telephone lines" don't have the wattage to ring a classic brass bellset – which is okay if you're like me and never want your phone to ring – but sometimes you need this feature.

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.

Off topic, but how do you operate without email? Is it not essential for many government services and utilities where you are?

(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.)

>optional for utilities but is an additional $10/month

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.

I think you can get a device to put between the VoIP and the phone which makes the bell ring properly! I think it is called a ring booster.
I looked this up – less than ten dollars, shipped – thanks for the recommendation, but I consider the lack of ringer a perk =D
Pity, copper made everything better.
This is an annoying paragraph:

"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.

I think it's alright.

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.

It's half right (the worst sort of right) digital data is carried over ADSL/VDSL as OFDM analog waveforms, albeit with frequencies well above the audio range.
I mean, technically it is, just the 'sound waves' are square waves of varying height/width
ADSL is designed to use frequencies beyond the range of human hearing.
Similar to wifi et al using light beyond the range of human seeing.
We don't talk about wifi using light waves.
worrying we don't.