AT&T asks FCC to kill landlines, once and for all

Responding to an inquiry made by the FCC to explore the transition to an IP-based communications network, AT&T has asked that a firm date be set for the total extinction of landlines.

“With each passing day, more and more communications services migrate to broadband and IP-based services, leaving the public switched telephone network (‘PSTN’) and plain-old telephone service (‘POTS’) as relics of a by-gone era,” AT&T wrote.

They continued: “It makes no sense to require service providers to operate and maintain two distinct networks when technology and consumer preferences have made one of them increasingly obsolete.”

Given AT&T’s fundamental inability to address the substandard service and network congestion caused by their iPhone exclusivity deal with Apple, it seems blushingly laughable that the telecom would now be asking for the death of landlines, which can only increase network congestion.

But AT&T has a point: for everything but businesses and emergency services, landlines are already a technology of the dodo. AT&T must spend considerable money every year maintaining an increasingly obsolete network, which means funneling away from the development of the clear and rapidly evolving future of telephone communication.

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There are challenges to surmount in a solely VoIP and wireless telephony future, of course. The biggest is probably the emergency services dilemma: if power goes out, how do you place a 911 call when all of your communications depend on external power? But that’s ultimately what batteries are for, and many VoIP solutions already have emergency backup batteries for just such occasions.

AT&T’s right: in twenty years, no one is going to be using landlines anymore. Few enough people use them now. A firm end date and gradual transition away from maintaining a landline network behooves everyone… especially when we are talking about AT&T, a network which has consistently underestimated the network demand of the iPhone… small potatoes indeed to the congestion that the sudden end of landlines would prompt.

20 comments »

About the author

John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iPhone, News |

Peter Hansen
Yes please. Mobile phones are so dirt cheap today that a lot of the people that still use landlines would actually save money from switching to a cheap Nokia phone. Good one AT&T!
ged
An important documentary shown on the PBS TV network a few years ago detailed US telephony’s “reverse Robin Hood” act of taking the $25, billion (yes that’s a lot of zeros!) subsidy from the US Congress to install 100 MB speed internet country-wide in the USA. Instead of actually doing what they said, they took the money and ran. In the process they went on to prosecute municipalities that actually wanted install real HIGH speed internet independently. The government officials that supported the prosecutions had, guess what, large contributions from telephony for their campaign funds….
Ron Pieket
Does this mean that AT&T will guarantee perfect reception inside every home? Or is it in their design that their customers, when they wish to make a phone call from home, go outside to hunt for a single bar of reception?
firesign3000
nobody will be using landlines, except maybe for people who live in the boonies who don’t have cell service. these are also areas where it doesn’t pay for carriers to build towers. i’m sure the baby bells in these areas will also be very reluctant to front the money needed to convert their entire infrastructure to voip from pots.
Don Pope
Bad idea. Cell phones still sound like crap compared to land lines.
Bonk
I use my iPhone a LOT.
However, as I operate out of a home office I keep a landline around for a reason – it’s hard to conduct professional, business communications when your cellphone sounds like crap. Between AT&T dropping calls (or not ringing them through at all) and how long distance cellphone-to-cellphone sounds worse than a CB radio (remember those?) I disagree emergency services are the only ones left to use landlines.
Right now, when I make an iPhone call to another cell… it’s a roll of the dice whether or not the conversation will sound good. Don’t even get me started on conference calls under that setup. The landline still has professional use.
Even Skype among multiple people sounds better than a conference call where someone invariable insists on putting their Nokia feature phone on speaker – dragging the whole conversation down while two other people are on bluetooth headsets… it’s like two soup cans and a piece of string. Terrible.
The quality and stability also need to be ratcheted up a bit. Then I’ll drop the landline.
Tom
I do not believe we will be free of landlines for a long time. The boonies is one area that it would be cost prohibitive to cover and the vast majority of the US is rural. Even in cities there are areas that do not recieve cable or cell reception to implement VOIP.
sherman
Until we get reliable technology to give TTY/TTD (deaf) customers accessibility on mobile phones, landlines cannot go away. The only reason I maintain a landline is because I require it for a deaf family member who uses a TTY. TTY may be old technology as well for deaf folks, but it’s still in use by many, especially older deaf people, and is necessary to maintain.
cottonm
Great! This must mean we’ll finally get ATT cell coverage & data where I live in western Wisconsin. Yeah rightâ€¦
IF we really want to get rid of landlines altogether the feds need to seriously fund a redundant wireless network for the whole country. High speed everywhere not just on the coasts and population centers.
Matthew
I worked for a provider of voip and pots based telephone service and two things come to mind regarding failure of the voip system:
1. The battery backups are fine if you only have an power outage for 8 hours or less. However, it wasn’t uncommon for the batteries to last for only a few hours or fail entirely in many cases.
2. Power going out is a big problem, but it’s not the only one. Fiber cuts, for one, often took 12 hours to a few days, yes DAYS, and for my company, a week to fix.
The cable company I worked for is located in Pennsylvania. It was affected by a large fiber cut in New York on one occasion, and wind gusts knocking out power from hurricanes hitting southern states on another, that’s not to mention a number of local power outages.
Mike
There’s one easy solution to the whole thing. Get rid of the FCC. If AT&T wants to stop offering landline service, than STOP OFFERING LANDLINE SERVICE! The gov’t agency shouldn’t have anything to do with it. If it’s so cost prohibitive and supposedly no one wants a landline they should be able to stop selling it. Why sell what no one wants to buy? But people do buy. They buy it all the time. If AT&T wants to stop offering it, someone else should be able to create a company and offer a landline service.
Same deal with this digital tv service. The change-over was nothing more than a cash grab for cable/satellite/converter box companies. If my local station felt bogged down by offering an analog signal they had the free market choice to stop offering the signal.
Dean
We still need land lines. My cell phone (service from AT&T I might add) often displays the message “network busy” and I must wait and try my call again later. What if I needed 911?
Also, there are some of us who send faxes. Unless there is some sort of USB device, this cannot be done from a cell phone.
John Stone
I think you are missing the point. AT&T is asking to stop being forced to offer the current technology of landlines and be allowed to move toward a more cost effective VoIP service. 95% of all voice communications are transmitted, at some point, over a wired (copper or fiber) network. There is no conceivable way to transmit all of our data without a tangible network…
Jeff
Sorry, John, but you wrote a bad article. How do I know? When the majority of the comments demonstrate that they completely missed the point of the article then you have a problem.
Listen, everyone. Getting rid of “landlines” does NOT mean using a cell phone. It means using a broadband connection for internet and phone service. I have a copper cable that comes into my house. I pay my cable TV company for digital TV, internet, and phone service on that wire. You know, a nice, normal, plugs-into-the-wall phone with a normal phone number. THIS MEANS I DO NOT HAVE A LANDLINE. That’s what AT&T is talking about too and it has nothing to do with my cell phone.
Anyone talking about iPhones or cell reception or any of that stuff has missed the point.
CleverWire
After a long career in Outside Plant Engineering, I wonder if anyone can understand what will happen to high-speed internet connections if the landline system is shut down. What are carriers going to do to maintain connectivity to the market penetration the home and small business internet computer has made? Fiber optic landlines are still landlines. Administration is not markedly different form copper based landlines. If landlines disappear, the most obvious rearrangement of service is the micro tower, a mini cellular tower for every neighbohood connected by another cell service to a concentrator hub at the end of underground fiber lines. The rollout of high speed internet in 1994 has only just reached the half-way completed settling into place. No one can concievably rollout a conversion to wireless networks in the same amount of time. There aren’t even enough available radio bandwidths.
Ironmkjpcrz
AT&T is killing the landline service more by giving pooooooor service, laying off people in droves and flat out refusing to repair or replace bad lines in their service areas. There are elderly people, small business customers and people that just do not want VOIP. And AT&T is forcing them to an alternative phone source against their will!!!!!!!!!

Faithful89834
Believe me in the near future people will be forced to do alot of things,because of the way our world is changing,poor and middle class will suffer the most.

Ironmkjpcrz
AT&T is killing the landline service more by giving pooooooor service, laying off people in droves and flat out refusing to repair or replace bad lines in their service areas. There are elderly people, small business customers and people that just do not want VOIP. And AT&T is forcing them to an alternative phone source against their will!!!!!!!!!
Ironmkjpcrz
AT&T is killing the landline service more by giving pooooooor service, laying off people in droves and flat out refusing to repair or replace bad lines in their service areas. There are elderly people, small business customers and people that just do not want VOIP. And AT&T is forcing them to an alternative phone source against their will!!!!!!!!!
Ironmkjpcrz
AT&T is killing the landline service more by giving pooooooor service, laying off people in droves and flat out refusing to repair or replace bad lines in their service areas. There are elderly people, small business customers and people that just do not want VOIP. And AT&T is forcing them to an alternative phone source against their will!!!!!!!!!