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.
It is likely that someone did realize this, did the math on the labor costs to pull all the wire up across the country, and realized it wouldn't actually be profitable. There are guys that track individual ships across the ocean to decide what/when to trade, I doubt everyone missed the value of ATT's physical assets.
I don't think that Tanenbaum was being completely serious. The point is to put the value of that copper (and the cost of replacing it in the event that it is damaged) into perspective.
Right, my extreme understatement was my British sense of humour coming through. I was forgetting that HN has people whose only exposure to Tanenbaum is via the Linus-Tanenbaum debate (or possibly not even that) and for whom his sarcasm and my characterization of it would be less obvious.
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.
Perhaps... but the non-modular software equivalents of aircraft carriers routinely do launch metaphorical nuclear missiles despite not being intended to ever have that functionality.
Furthermore the statement mischaracterizes the ownership rights AT&T actually held over that copper once it was in place. For example, according to federal law, AT&T had to extend service almost everywhere at nearly fixed rates, even if revenue from the installation would never pay for itself.
...because organizing a hostile takeover, paying for the contract terminations, ripping out all the copper, cleaning it and gathering it all up in a form that can be delivered to a copper refiner, and finally shuttering the business and tying all loose ends is actually free, and in fact will somehow magically pay you not only the missing 20% of the price you paid, but an additional 20-60% you need to justify your trouble.
It seems like a lot of commenters don't understand the problem. The issue is not about whether that copper wire can be useful. It's not about whether there exist alternatives to provide in places where the copper is too expensive to maintain.
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.
Here's a completely random section of Texas that I found on Google Maps. Have fun making a mesh network out of the houses there. You might have more fun playing "I Spy", with the aim to find the houses.
Ok, fair point, but you know, some wifi chips have range far larger than advertised. Especially in flat non crowded area where you can have line-of-sight and less noise.
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.
> Especially in flat non crowded area where you can have line-of-sight and less noise.
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.
The latency would be horrible. Fine for email, or downloading something you need in the future. But real time interaction as chat, or browsing the web would be really slow. Streaming would be out of the question as well.
The mesh system could be augmented with the TV broadcast spectrum (UHF, ~650MHz), where supernodes could operate with high ERP. This would require rethinking our allocation of the EM spectrum.
Streaming obviously matters to a great many people. The success of Netflix speak for it self, so ignoring it is dooming the idea from the start. This is something that needs critical mass, otherwise it will not work.
They won’t even blame Trump. They’ll say his hearts in the right place, the political establishment are stitching him up and this was going to happen anyway.
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.
The overriding social policy objective isn't to effect urban-to-rural subsidies per se, but to provide certain types of basic infrastructure universally — and it just so happens that the unit economics point toward a wealth from urban to rural areas as a means of accomplishing that.
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.
Historically, yes, telcos have been obliged to provide service. The post you replied to mentions this:
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.
In the US, the telcos were generally required to provide service. Some of that cost was subsidized. In return they got effective monopolies, easements to put in the infrastructure required to provide service (including in profitable areas), etc.
“I don’t envision AT&T and Verizon tearing down huge amounts of copper in towns immediately.“
That’s not the point. When failures occur, they stop fixing the wires and send you a letter telling YOU what your new mode of service is, or nothing. There is no tearing down. The unsupported wire is left to rot or be salvaged at their convenience.
I'm in an apartment building in NYC. While a new service elevator was being installed, the elevator guys cut my phone line 3 times, and 3 times Verizon came out to fix it, at no cost to me. However after the third time, the building management refused to allow copper wire service to continue in the building. It turns out I was 1 of only 2 apartments which hadn't already moved to a cable/internet/phone package from one of three available providers.
It annoyed me to have to switch, but ultimately it turned out to be cheaper, even after the initial contract expired.
A POTS telephone line, which is what we're talking about here, can handle being cut and reconnected without a fuss. It would appear the elevator guys did not notice what they had done or did not understand its importance.
I agree. But if a field tech knows that a low voltage line is incorrectly in his work space and that someone will fix it if he does cuts it, then the tech may just cut it and let someone else deal with the problem.
Another important goal of this strategy, given relatively short mention in the article,
> 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.
AT&T has basically been bullying customers out of their POTS lines for the last few years. Instead of paying, saying $34.95 for a line they'll increase it to $89 or $135 per line.
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.
Luckily phone companies cannot do this. Because AT&T was granted a monopoly, each state has Public Utility Commission that sets the rate the AT&T "Baby Bell" phone companies can charge:
It was a bit tongue-in-cheek. However, as one of the descendant comments notes, states dominated by a certain party do seem more amicable to these sorts of shenanigans than others...
The point is sometimes copper connections are the only options for voice and data. And now ATT and friends can stop servicing rural / small communities.
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.
I know it's not entirely the town's fault because sometimes people make mistakes, and hindsight is 20/20, but some of that is the fault of the local government. Houses without solid internet access are way less valuable on the market. A lot of local governments are filled with people who have no idea what they're doing and end up really hurting their community. So if this is bothering you, you should get involved.
Some places companies are making point to point microwave links available. As long as there is someplace you can get direct line of sight, you're good.
Personal feeling, copper or fiber can't compete with that on price at all.
The FCC chairman appears to be listening only to corporate lobbyists. I consider this to be a dereliction of duty, but of course Trump thinks otherwise. As long as Trump is in power, the rules are going to keep changing in favor of corporate interests. Those of us who oppose the new regime at the FCC need to start thinking about what economic tools we can use to discourage telecoms from taking advantage of FCC rule changes that we think will harm internet freedom and the common good.
Pardon the possibly ignorant question, but what do the telecom companies have to gain by destroying their own infrastructure? I feel like I'm missing something about the US telecom market here.
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?
Much of this infrastructure is in more rural areas, which were never profitable. All that copper was strung up in an environment where high long-distance charges were used to subsidize service in rural areas.
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.)
There are a great many businesses, even in NYC and even in the high-tech industries here that absolutely depend on copper infrastructure.
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.
Yeah, but as POTS revenue declines in big cities, too, there's a tipping point beneath which it's not worth maintaining that infrastructure, either.
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.
You can put tens of thousands of copper lines communications in just a single optical cable.
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. :-)
Sure you can get tens of thousands of connections, but there aren't tens of thousands of customers along the rural roads where this will really hit. For some of the areas there may not be tens of thousands of people in that entire half of the state.
Yes, the hardware for those services needs to be updated to work through another channel. For example, in my area all the alarms are set up to connect over the cellular network.
It’s not destroying the infrastructure, it’s abandoning it. The article states that prior to this ruling they’re required to maintain or replace with comparable functionality for existing copper customers.
This ruling let’s them abandon them altogether from what I gathered.
I would guess mining the copper would be worth it, unless this causes a huge price drop (and maybe not even then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_theft: ”Some have argued that the "genie is out of the bottle" now and drops in commodity prices will not result in corresponding drops in thefts. In fact, it is possible that thefts may actually increase to compensate for the loss in value.[citation needed]”
Things that are utilities need to widely available. Power, electricty, water, etc. We grant monopoly status to corporations in exchange for fixed profits and guaranteed service even where not profitable. If we didn't do this, they would have block by block pricing and wouldn't serve areas for arbitrary "reasons"
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.
Yet we've been paying into this fund decades, which was supposed to pay for rural access. Now, Relieving the telcos of this obligation despite them not completing universal access amounts to corporate welfare for those poor starving giants. Then there's E911.
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.
The sparsely populated rural western states will lose the ability to call 911, but maybe it won't matter so much - with a big percentage of those small rural hospitals that depend on part on Medicaid money going under, anyone needing emergency medical treatment is probably going to be looking at a minimum time of 2-3 hours anyway so what's an extra hour or two?
> In the U.S. rural telecoms access has always existed because of government mandates supported in part by government subsidies and taxes.
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.
The article says it all. They want to eliminate their rural workforce. When you have a massive area, sparsely populated, you have to over staff because it takes so long for a technician to drive from one job to another.
Maintenance fees are likely to be high, especially considering that the companies are required to keep their copper lines maintained until no customers want copper service anymore. In rural areas, this could mean keeping miles and miles of line maintained for a single customer.
Selling the copper from the wires also could be quite lucrative.
There's a creek on my farm that has several of those thick 25-pair cables running for hundreds of feet, mostly buried below gravel but visible occasionally. None of it is hooked up, since some genius decided that it was bad to run expensive cable through constantly changing environments like creeks. If the copper were that valuable, wouldn't the phone company have pulled these up by now?
It will so not surprise me if in 10 years the TelCos are clamoring for billions in "rural connectivity funding" from the feds to put in fiber runs to rural areas currently adequately covered by the copper they are pulling out.
If that’s what it takes to update it, so be it. I think greater internet connectivity to rural areas would solve a lot of metro-area congestion and be an economic activity multiplier.
I think the parent was implying that they'd take the hand-out without delivering, which is extremely characteristic of what they've done with USF and other regulatory initiatives to shovel money into an open pit^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hincumbent pockets.
When you hear telco execs talk about “the copper plant,” they are referring to all of the underground copper. This wire is laid out in sheathed bundles of excess pairs that can be used to replace a pair that has a short. When they eventually run out of pairs, the only solution is to dig trenches and replace bundles.
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.
> 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.
Now we’re getting into the weeds. Generally, telecom infrastructure is run along poles or conduits, usually owned by the power company, sometimes the telephone company (or jointly).
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.
The premise of deregulation was that it would lead to increased infrastructure spending. And it has: the late 1990's and the 2000's saw massive investment into cable and wireless. People assumed at the time the money would go into fiber, but demand exploded in wireless so investment went there instead.
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.
> The RBOCs promised they would roll out fiber, FCC and PUCs promised they would enforce
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.
Who is "we"? Why does the rest of "the western world" (does that include Korea?) have competitive markets of higher speeds and lower prices than we do? Perhaps because they wisely use structural remedies rather than simply trusting incumbent monopolies to keep their promises?
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—the American government. The rest of the world doesn’t have higher speeds and lower prices than we do. We’re in the top 10 in Akamai’s ranking of highest average connection speed, beating all the big economically diverse European countries (Germany, France, UK, Spain, Italy). We’re very close to Sweden in terms of % of connections above 15 Mbps in the same Akamai ranking. Our broadband—which is deregulated—compares a hell of a lot better to those countries’ than say our government-run transit.
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.
> Maybe we could have afforded a national deployment of fiber.
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
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")
The USF was not intended for building broadband. It was designed to replace implicit cross subsidies for rural phone service with explicit ones. Starting in 2012, the FCC started diverting a relatively small amount of USF money for broadband, but the total amount is less than 1% of the amount of private investment since 1996.
The expensive parts, have specific taxes to pay for specific programs.
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.
That depends on (a) if you're looking at only the supplemental war funding, or if you include a share of the DoD baseline budget as well; and (b) if you're looking at gross expenditures (in which case social security is the highest expense) or net expenditures (in which case social security is currently "self-funding" through its earmarked payroll tax).
While the Australian right wing govt scrapped all the fibre to the home work that was underway and decided that copper from the node to the house was a great upgrade. The internet in Australia is so bad I had significantly better in New Zealand a decade ago.
Which Australian right wing government are you referring to? Australian telecoms ran off the rails in the late 90s, the moment that the Howard government privatised the state-run phone network. They either stuffed it up (thinking charitably), or pulled a dodgy related party transaction to rip off the public and enrich their mates in business who were kind enough to donate back part of the loot (thinking cynically).
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.
Yea Australia have ruined the NBN. In New Zealand (a small island with 5 million people) I have 1Gbps. Had Fibre at 100Mbps+ for 4+ years now. It makes a massive difference when compared to ~10-20Mbps DSL2/VDSL.
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).
20Mb speeds are on the low end, and has no future upgrade path (speedwise). My cable modem allows up to 200-300 Mb service, and DOCSIS is improving with every new version.
you're right: one advantage to PEX is price of PEX itself. Other advantages: easier to install, no sweated joints, easy to color code, of no value to meth addicts. No sweating lowers the fire risk (which tbh is very low, but non zero).
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.
I'm not so sure about pex though. Seems like a cheap replacement to copper pipe.
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.
The article brings up DSL, but I thought DSL was a short haul technology (you have to be pretty close to a branch office or something)? Would it really affect rural customers anyway?
I'm also curious if the newer faster fiber technologies are sort of "subsidizing" the carrier's copper business.
It was originally a short-haul technology, but quickly extended by way of remote DSLAMs. Copper from the neighbourhood into the DSLAM, fiber out the back.
I have DSL and I'm 10 miles away from the nearest ... building with lots of switches. However, the copper line used for my DSL is less than a mile long. I live inside the town limits, but out at the edge of town, there's a roadside hub. And there's fiber into that hub.
Its silly to think that copper itself is going away simply because the phone system won't be using much of it anymore, almost all electricity from AC to DC wires run over copper and various alloys.
Power lines for the grid are generally aluminum. You'll generally only find copper in consumer goods and the walls of your house. You can get aluminum wiring in your house but there are details that require more installation expertise to do it safely so copper is used instead.
By AC to DC wires, are you referring to your typical laptop power cord? IE, copper from the wall to the transformer/DC converter, then copper to the power supply of the laptop?
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.
This is exactly what Verizon did to parts of the NE after Hurricane Sandy. They provided CDMA/LTE based pots services in areas in which they didn't feel it was economical to rewire with fiber.
The point is that they won't have to do that. They won't have to do anything. They will be allowed to simply leave such people without an alternative if they want.
Shortly after I moved into my current place, I wanted to switch to the most basic copper-based landline service available, and I had to work through a series of six service reps and managers before someone would even acknowledge that such a plan was available. Since then, I get monthly mailings and quarterly phone calls from them strongly encouraging me to sign up for some fiber-based service. So far, I've resisted, but I fear this ruling may signal the beginning of the end of my inexpensive, reliable, phone line.
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.
Republic Wireless will automatically place and receive calls over your home (or any connected) WiFi. Works great for me as I get barely 1 bar of cell signal at home.
Certainly an opportunity for VOIP services and a router with a PSTN connection so you can plug in your existing phone will work out as a perfect solution. Such routers been around for ages, some even have DECT built in.
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.
TA96 rules mandate number portability. But you can't port a number outside of a rate centre. To put it simply, to port a number to a new carrier, the carrier has to be able to pick the call up somewhere, by way of the appropriate connections to the incumbent's "tandem" offices (think of it as a kind of hub for the spokes that are Bell central offices).
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.
So they end up locking you into a call forwarding service, which entails you end up paying for them to do very little, with any maintenance liability already covered by existing liabilities.
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?"
Many people opt for mobile data, this has been happening in many countries for a long time. When 3G data came, people started to switching to mobile data from physical connections. Many people seem to think that having physical networking infrastructure is great waste of resources.
This is also one of the reasons why some countries got mobile data average traffic over 15 gigabytes / month. That's because people watch Netflix and YouTube all day using mobile data.
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.
Many of the owners of copper lines have gotten huge subsidies on their switching centers. Those switching centers which often take up an entire city block are now free for land development. Hundreds of billions in land value just got "given" to the largest telcos.
Does ATT have an alternate asset? As far as I know they dont run a cable network or a significant fttp network so I dont see why they would remove any broadband customers. Dial up and landline only customers I can see being moved to LTE.
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.
AT&T has been very picky about where and when they deploy the DSLAMs to make UVerse happen.
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's are normally highly profitable for the telco.
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.
I consider that 'the option' for when a building owner refuses to re-wire with something that can be serviced by metro-Ethernet.
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).
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.
g.fast is good for more densely populated areas, which is why it'll work quite well in the UK if BT ever get around to rolling it out properly - 90% of consumer premises are within 500m of a street side cabinet.
True, but it sounds like rural homes are the ones at risk of losing copper. They are the same homes that done have reliable cell service. I don't have reliable cell service at home. It is ok some days, but I bet there is only one tower and some days it just disappears.
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