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For anyone that might happen to still be reading this blog, I just wanted to call your attention to this article at DSLReports:
The FCC Ponders the Death of the PSTN
While the death of the PSTN may seem almost inevitable, I am surprised at the speed at which it has take place. Commercial VoIP as we know it did not exist even a decade ago — in fact I only started seeing the first mentions of Vonage in April of 2002. I know there were a few earlier services going all the way back to about 1996 (including DialPad, which at one point let anyone make free calls from a browser window) but these were all softphone-based and many didn’t work all that well (choppy audio was the rule, not the exception). I knew it was going to happen, and even explained some of the reasons why when I wrote Why landlines are going away a couple of years ago, but if you’d have asked me ten years ago I would have said that landline phone service would still be around well into the 2020′s.
And, in fact, it may hang on for a while in some very rural areas (the very last places that got rotary dial or touch-tone telephone service, for example) but now I wonder if it will still be around at the turn of the decade. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see all rural residents get broadband access, so long as it’s at a reasonable price and doesn’t come with ridiculous usage caps, and actually comes with some quality of service standards so they can’t provide service that’s down every other day and get away with it. And with all the copper thievery going on, it would be best to retire all that old copper and replace it with fiber (I wonder how much the telcos could make from recovered scrap copper?). DSL sucks in many places so eventually we need to go to all-fiber plant anyway, or at the very least “fiber to the curb”. However, I suspect that the transition to all-fiber will take a lot longer than the transition to all-digital.
EDIT: Although maybe we should not wish that happens anytime soon, because until and unless the cost of wiring an area with fiber drops significantly, any reduction in the amount of copper out there will actually reduce competition. See the comment by Paul Timmins in the comments section below.
(EDITED paragraph:) The companies I really fear for are the CLECs. As Paul Timmins points out in the comments section below, the incumbent telcos may be getting behind this in order to get rid of their copper plant, and under current regulations they aren’t required to let the CLECs share fiber. Unless the FCC takes steps to protect the CLECs (which they probably won’t given they way they have kowtowed to Big Telecom), and the incumbents take down their existing copper, many CLECs could be cut off from their customers. It remains to be seen how fast this will actually play out, but it does amaze me that we’ve reached this point in less than a decade.
OH, BY THE WAY, did you know that some landline phone companies might be trying to make you think that there are more landline subscribers than there really are, by NOT removing the listings of cord-cutters from the telephone directory for a few years? In some cases it may be valid to continue the listing, if the subscriber simply ported their number to another company, but the thing is that once the number is ported away, they have no way of knowing if the name on the account has changed, or if the former subscriber never wanted the number listed in the first place but refused to pay a non-published number fee, or possibly even if that account was canceled. So my suspicion is that many phone books give a false impression of how many landline subscribers are actually left.
Paul Timmins said
When the copper plant goes, all competitive service to your home goes with it.
ILECS don’t have to let CLECs use the fiber optic cables they lay, which is REALLY what this is all about. The copper is no more or less hard to maintain now than it was when it was initially deployed, but they actually have to share it. If they can convince the FCC to let them rip it off the pole, they’ll cut it all out tomorrow just to put CLECs out of business.
It’s sort of unfair to say that CLECs don’t see the writing on the wall. The problem is it’s impossible to make the upfront investment and make it work without some guaranteed return on investment. I could see if I could wire an entire town of 30,000 people for fiber for less than a million dollars (ain’t gonna happen by a long shot). Even a million dollars would let me make that back in 1 month if I can get all 30,000 people to sign up for that.
If I can get 10% penetration, which is somewhat optimistic, that’s a 6 month ROI. But I’d have to wire the entire town, because doing small areas isn’t going to give me enough customer base to make it back. But the problem is that doing an entire town like that would probably cost 10-15 million easy, depending on complexity of the neighborhoods, burial requirements, available ducts/poles/etc. Now if it costs that much, and I get my same 10% or so, we’re talking about a 66 month ROI at $50/mo, assuming my company doesn’t have any other costs. And assuming no churn.
People assume here that if fiber is available, everyone, and I mean everyone, will go for it. Many won’t. Lots of people don’t care about fiber. Heck, we take customers off Verizon FiOS every day because people want something cheaper. Believe it or not, people do switch away from FiOS where it’s available.
michigantelephone said
Paul, thanks for that insight. For some reason (and I can only say it was a brain fart) I hadn’t really considered that the telcos might be pushing this as a means to reduce competition. DUH! (Slaps self aside head!). I’ve now edited my article accordingly.
William said
I know this was just reposted from dslreports but I appreciate you being semi-active on this site.
It’s hard to imagine pstn dying so quickly and fiber in every hose or neighbourhood so soon. I’ve had cable internet service since 1999 and its speeds have drastically increased over the years but its mostly fast enough for a lot of people and I can’t see the average youtube watcher wanting to pay fiber costs for the internet; however, I think if fiber were available in my area, I would be inclined to try to just to get away from my cable Internet provider.
Paul Timmins said
Yea, if we can get competitive access to fiber based loops to provide higher bandwidth, innovative services, they can yank every remaining piece of copper out.
Until then, this is a power grab, pure and simple.