Landline phone service is becoming obsolete because of VOIP and ever decreasing cell phone charges. In areas covered by cable TV, there's no longer need for landline.

Well, don't get too wrapped around the axle pondering terms like VOIP. Wireline service is still required for a lot of applications -- especially broadband Internet access. I resell a lot of Cisco VOIP to businesses on behalf of the phone company, and billing for wireline access doesn't decrease after you migrate from a traditional premises-based TDM solution like a key system or PBX. LD charges, maybe. Not access.

Residential service does represent a big portion of carrier revenue, but business service is still huge, and is still dependent on wireline (FXO, PRI, T1, T3, OC-n, Metro Ethernet, DWDM). Wireless is only a supplement for most businesses, and the ability to carry 10G on wireless (locally, let alone over long hauls) is a loooooooooong way off.

And there are things like home alarm services that still primarily piggyback on wireline phone service. There's a number of reasons for that, but chief among those reasons is that a phone line typically doesn't lose power in an emergency. You can buy yourself a UPS or generator for supplementary power for your IP phone service, but that's a mere fraction of the backup capacity of most Bell central offices (entire floors of DC power in batteries, diesel backup).

And E911 service over VOIP still has significant limitations. If I was, for example, taking care of an elderly relative, there's no way I'd rely on Vonage or Skype for my home phone service.

Don't be sounding the death knell for the PSTN (public switched tel network). It ain't happening any time soon.

If AT&T cannot break into cable TV business, it'll lose POTS customers entirely. By offering bundled services, AT&T can underprice cable TV companies and give its landline business some reprieve.

I think that one of the components of the AT&T/Bell merger was a requirement to offer unbundled (meaning: without requiring that you have dial tone) DSL Internet access. They didn't offer that before because of parity requirements (i.e. Bell would have to offer unbundled DSL at wholesale rates to competitors using Bell facilities under the UNE-P regime). For what it's worth.

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"Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, rip the Elvis Costello mobile down from the ceiling, throw the "Country Artists (Male) A-K" rack out into the street, go off to work at a Virgin Megastore, and never look back."

We are about 4 miles from SCB by road, about 2.5 as the crow flies.

There are 350-400 homes total in this and the adjoining neighborhood. They laid fiber down our street about a year ago.

I don't get it.

Thanks to government intervention after that whole giant telephony monopoly thing, those who own and maintain copper can't actually control anything about it -- they have to provide access to other companies at a "reasonable" cost.

Uh, not so much. UNE-P was rolled back some time ago. As of a 2003 FCC ruling, "reasonable" cost is now "negotiated" cost.

Unbundled Network Element Platform (UNE-P) Issue – The Commission finds that switching - a key UNE-P element - for business customers served by high-capacity loops such as DS-1 will no longer be unbundled based on a presumptive finding of no impairment. Under this framework, states will have 90 days to rebut the national finding. For mass market customers, the Commission sets out specific criteria that states shall apply to determine, on a granular basis, whether economic and operational impairment exists in a particular market. State Commissions must complete such proceedings within 9 months. Upon a state finding of impairment, the Commission sets forth a 3 year period for carriers to transition off of UNE-P.

UNE-P required ILECs to sell at wholesale rates that were below recovered cost. (Although you can effectively argue that copper that's been in the ground for 20-50 years has been nothing but pure profit since year 3 or 4. Semantics.)

"Equal access" provisions still apply, yes. But Ma Bell still gets paid if you're buying dial-tone from XO. And Cox and Comcast pay Ma Bell too, I'm pretty sure, through fees for SS7 access and for switched call termination.

On the other hand, if the homeowner doesn't object, they have the option of removing any cable they own or even simply letting it decay when a home goes over to a fiberoptic connection.

It's still up to the telco how they choose to roll out the service. AT&T's Uverse will likely be based on an FTTC design. It's much cheaper to deploy, and faster to get to market. And it will come fastest where facilities already exist.

The e911 issue is a problem, but one that is increasingly possible to fix over time.

But it's all based on customer intervention if you have to make an equipment change. That problem hasn't been licked. Let's say your ATA dies, and you replace it. You don't inform your provider. You dial 911. The PS/ALI (private switch/automatic location identifier) information won't get forwarded to the E911 center, because there's no record of your ATA in the VOIP E911 database.

That's a lot of trust to invest in an end user community where many still can't figure out how to reset a VCR clock.

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"Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, rip the Elvis Costello mobile down from the ceiling, throw the "Country Artists (Male) A-K" rack out into the street, go off to work at a Virgin Megastore, and never look back."

We heard you the first seven times.

I don't care what cable did. I dont' think any cable/telco should have statewide franchises that take away local control and revenues, take away local control of rights of way (like your front yard), take away build-out requirements, and take away regulation of customer service standards.

But you are correct that it's a safe bet cable companies will take advantage of this law when it passes. Wonder how long their local contracts are for?

I was under the impression that most U-verse FTTN rollout had already been completed, and that their expansion effort had moved more to FTTP construction. Fiber to the basement has some advantages compared to FTTN, and thanks to today's passive, unpowered filtering devices, the cost difference isn't nearly as large as it used to be.

That may work in Richardson, TX. Maybe not so much in Nashville, TN. Different substrata. I don't know about your house, but I'm about 1' over bedrock. I'd rather not have my lawn and every road in the neighborhood torn up to have service re-provisioned (and remember, one of the biggest cap-ex components in special construction is not glass; it's labor). Aerial fiber is a possibility, but has its drawbacks.

I've seen some technical work done to use the IP addresses rather than any CID/DID information held on the ATA. It's not an elegant solution, but for something that came from the Asterisk community, it's remarkably effective.

Well, right. But if you're using IP, you need to associate the MAC address of the ATA with the emergency responder's outbound PS/ALI info (unless you're allocating static IPs, where most ISPs opt for DHCP or DHCP/PPPoE). I think that's how Comcast Digital Voice works. That's all manual entry, and it goes blank if you put in a device with an unknown MAC. There's all sorts of disclaimers (and implied waivers) about you moving or replacing a device.

I didn't know about the UNE-P change. Strange, because I've been hearing folk complain about having to share copper recently. I suppose anything that reduces the cost of going to a different telco is probably a bad thing for them.

If those "folk" are AT&T-badged, yes, they're still required to share copper (and optical) facilities with CLECs, but AT&T is now paid a negotiated price, rather than a TRA/FCC-mandated one. That will cut into CLEC margins, but then AT&T isn't forced to compete as heavily on price for like service, albeit on sometimes radically unequal pricing terms. (USLEC/Paetec would probably pay a lower per-unit price than a Mom-n-Pop ISP, but term and volume discounts apply, blah blah blah.)

What's probably happening is that you've got, say, a USLEC customer with an expiring ISDN-PRI contract, and that customer is finding that they're not getting the write-down on renewal that they used to. There's not enough margin left. Then, when the customer shops the price around, there's a lot more price parity in the market for that service -- since AT&T was quick to renegotiate rates with every CLEC when the UNE-P rule changed.

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"Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, rip the Elvis Costello mobile down from the ceiling, throw the "Country Artists (Male) A-K" rack out into the street, go off to work at a Virgin Megastore, and never look back."