Re: The end of copper landlines?
By: Diamond Dave to All on Thu Feb 15 2024 06:31 pm
Just wondering what are people's thoughts are on the end of copper landlines?
In short, an understandable tragedy.
The redundancy, let alone the overall quality of calls through, traditional copper was in effect a safety net for our communications capabilities -- the fact it all was effectively isolated from the rest of the power grid and logical infrastructure allowed coms to be available during emergencies where general power is gone. That's always to me the ultimate benefit of the traditional copper line. Even with SLC and other digital conversion systems, for the most part the phone line would stay functional, at least for a few days.
...but it's expensive to maintain, and with the modern logistics simplifying beast that is the internet proper, well, chaning telephony over to just another element of it was inevitable. Why run single copper lines here and there and dedicate all these resources to phone calls which are just going to become digital streams anyway? Why not, for home use, just use the internet as the phone line and be done with it?
Sure, we lose redundancy, but it's current year, power is stable, it will be fine! Besides, everyone has a cell phone now, fewer people have home service even through internet gateways so yeah, let's just end the old way of doing things!
...it's just the nature of progress, sadly. I don't like it, but I'm also not someone who has a landline in any traditional form to try to defend... so even I don't find it necessary in my daily life. I've taken to VoIP solutions for that element of communications, but really, just like the vast majority, I just use a cell phone for all my calls...
I can't truly complain about this since I'm part of the problem, in a sense...
...still, we will lose something in this. When the last copper line dies, that will be the end of a communications era, and it sucks.
/rant
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