Verizon killing copper service and dsl?

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JHZR2

JHZR2

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A Verizon rep solicited to my door today, seemingly trying to sell fios

He asked about my Internet and tv, with the assumption that I used Comcast for tv. After giving my schpiel for boycotting pay tv due to having to pay to watch commercials, he then asked about internet, and how they have plans for $49. I asked how that helps me since I pay $19.99 and feel that is too much. He said that Verizon is going to phase out copper networks and thus dsl, likely over the next year or two.

I said this still doesn't help since Comcast sells cable Internet for $19.99.

Still, is this a scare tactic, or is there some basis to this? It seems that vz and their cronies will do anything to sell fios.
 
Heh. Verizon. I had them when DSL was brand brand new.......

If they do that then it will be the death of the home phone as we know it! Please follow up on this!

Also, Verizon is The Devil.
 
My brother works for VZ. Thay have been moving away from copper for several years, fios being the first change. But now that mobile phones have gotten so fast, they are in the process of splitting off vz mobile from the parent company. The way things look, the 'old' vz will wither and die while the vz mobile flourishes. There are even some work groups' retirees that have had their retirements reduced or eliminated, because 'old' vz is crying poor mouth with reduced revenues, etc - even though they split the business (intentionally to do this, it would seem)
 
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VZ has not made much money on FIOS despite a large investment. They are not putting it into new areas. They are slowing selling off the rural wireline to companies like Fairpoint, but keeping the metropolitan.

In developing countries, there is no copper to the home. If they had to put copper to the home of everyone in India and China the world would probably run out of copper. Thats 2.3B people. And a lot of them don't have electricity.

Wireless is certainly where the excitement is, but don't toss satellite to the boneyard just yet. Satellite has the ability to blast an incredible bandwidth to earth and thus why its still important.

I had a Fairpoint repair guy at my house today to fix my DSL, it often drops. He tested various points with his fancy meter and said everything was fine. Did not know what to replace as nothing appeared bad. As he was getting ready to leave, he decided to put his old trusty handset on the line and it showed very noisy and he said now he had something he could fix. I do not use that phone line for voice as I have Vonage.
 
Originally Posted By: GearheadTool
Heh. Verizon. I had them when DSL was brand brand new.......

If they do that then it will be the death of the home phone as we know it! Please follow up on this!

Also, Verizon is The Devil.


VZ may be, but comcast is no better, nor any of the others.

People wonder why they have no money and are in debt, but yet they spend $100 or more on this garbage each month... Mostly as a luxury.

Im not sure what Ill do if VZ kills copper DSL. Im not paying for fios service when it is $50+ for each service, and even the packages are close to $100. When you throw the taxes and fees on it is a ton of money.

Competition in this segment is a good thing. I wish we had far more competition to keep the prices honest. They do even vary the prices by the level of money in the neighborhood (discriminatory practice).
 
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Ive only had a cell phone and Internet access for over a decade now. Fiber is faster and cheaper to run over long distances due to a lack of attenuation. Coped is going away because you need some type of repeater every 100 meters for it to work. correctly. With fiber it is every f. ew miles. Also since you are dealing with light there is no risk of electric interference which makes life easier.

I can see why copper is going away due to voice over ip and it has much better characteristics for backbone and data connections. It makes more sense to update the tech than to get caught behind the curve.
 
Copper is also in short supply. In the USA, 1/3 of our copper is in landfills, 1/3 in use and 1/3 in copper mines.

At some point the technology will be there and we will start to "mine" landfills for raw materials we thought would never run out.
 
Landlines are dead and not profitable on antique infrastructure with union labor maintaining them. DSL will die off with it. The price set is to save customers on it and you having a home phone line.
 
We had DSL for about two years. In that time, they had to switch wires and tinker with it twice to keep it going. DSL over wires intended for simple voice communication is quite amazing, however it pushes the capabilities of the wiring to the limit. When I was young they had a "Visiphone" on display at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I seem to remember the display included mention that the "Visiphone" could not work over conventional telephone wiring. Well... fast forward to the future, they did figure out a way to push video signals through conventional telephone wiring, cool! But you have to have good wiring.

We have FiOS now and it has been working well. I discussed our installation with others at work. They had earlier installations of FiOS and the hardware was quite bulky and installing it not easy. I thought our installation was smooth, with reasonably trim hardware. They seem to have improved the hardware considerably since it was first introduced.

Old infrastructure can be a problem. When some ancient water main breaks in Philadelphia, they have no choice, people need water, the main must be repaired. Telephone wiring is different, alternative have been developed, fiber optics, cellular radio transmission, even direct-to-satellite communications. (actually all this technology blows me away)

The telephone wiring in existance is often old, probably at the end of its service life. I believe the telephone companies are in quandary, do they fix a system that is already at its maximum capability? Or do they move to a system that has capabilities far exceeding those of its current system. Seems to me they are simply using marketing techniques to make the switch.
 
Whenever I read threads like this one saying landlines are dead and copper is going to go away, I keep wondering what is going to become of the FAX if this happens. I realize that FAX is old tech and not an everyday necessity for residential and cellphone users...but it is still a mission-critical tool everyday in the business world. I know of few businesses today that get by without it. Scanning documents into a computer and sending them off with an email in the hope that they can be printed by the recipient..then signed..then rescanned and returned to the sender simply can't happen with the same speed and security as provided by the FAX. Attorneys-courts-law enforcement-hospitals-realtors-hotels and government at every level simply couldn't function as they do now without FAX. What new tech is coming that will replace the FAX? If the answer is nothing, then businesses will be screaming loud and long when the copper service does get killed.
 
Lets see now,,fiber optic internet and tv is 100.00, cellphone bill vz is 80.00, daughters cricket is 55 and grandsons cell is 80

Life in the fastlane..............lots of retirement money going up in smoke, depending on your mindset.
 
Can you fax over VoIP?

Friends have fios. The service is only as good as the little 12v battery inside the interface box in order to keep phone service.

And it's not like copper shortage is the issue - this is no new neighborhood. The infrastructure has been on the street for 80+ years, nobody needs to pull wire. Plus, the "bell telephone" building where connections are made (I guess, it's a giant 1930s building with bell/Verizon on it, huge building with stuff inside but no trucks or people working there) is just down the street, as each mile square town has one. We live in established real towns, not "developments" or the boonies.
 
I dont trust Verizon at all.They owned the VT/NH/ME region and bailed out a few years ago selling it to FairPoint.VZ didnt want to upgrade all the rural areas that didnt even have any internet service,and were all old cables.FP came in with great promise,went bankrupt,and as of yet still hasnt extended high speed service to the rural outposts.I hear rumor that VZ sold to FP in order to get them to upgrade the infrastructure so they could buy it back a few years later (using FP as a sucker)without having to pay out for all the improvements themselves.Yet another industry of backstabbers and liars....
 
I thought the "deal" was struck some time ago: VZ was easing out of the hard line biz altogether and going after cornering the wireless segment, and Comcast would fill the hard line vacuum and has no interest in wireless . . .
 
Originally Posted By: JHZR2
Can you fax over VoIP?

Friends have fios. The service is only as good as the little 12v battery inside the interface box in order to keep phone service.

And it's not like copper shortage is the issue - this is no new neighborhood. The infrastructure has been on the street for 80+ years, nobody needs to pull wire. Plus, the "bell telephone" building where connections are made (I guess, it's a giant 1930s building with bell/Verizon on it, huge building with stuff inside but no trucks or people working there) is just down the street, as each mile square town has one. We live in established real towns, not "developments" or the boonies.


Yes, you can. We are migrating to fiber at the office and we needed two fax lines that were readily accommodated by the ISP through VoIP.
 
You can only fax over VoIP if it is an uncompressed transmission. That would be rare and more expensive than the compressed version we get for voice. That is why, when digital phones first started appearing in the 90's, voices sounded just a tad "off." We just got used to it.

I have had Fios since 2005 and had DSL for the five years prior to that. Since I was an early adopter of DSL in my area it cost me about $60/month. That is what Fios costs me now because I have internet only, no land line, and Dish Network for TV. I don't want to deal with the trouble of negotiating a new deal every time the introductory bundle price expires and your bill triples. Great marketing strategy, but six months or a year goes by in the blink of an eye.
 
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The thing with copper infrastructure, at least in Canada, was that it was paid for with tax dollars provided to Bell and through CN as a crown corporation to be run. Bell (and now all the small forks of Bell such as NBTel, Sasktel....etc) has no money of their own tied up in the actual infrastructure.

However

The deal was that they would have to maintain that infrastructure. I'm not sure if the government pays them for that as well, but I know it was part of the original deal. The government would pay for the infrastructure (because no private business was going to pony up the money to wire an entire country with copper) if they would maintain it.

So, while the shift to fiber is in the works at Bell ("fibe", which is fiber to the remote) there is still this huge copper infrastructure they are obligated to maintain. And that infrastructure is MASSIVE. Anywhere there was rail in Canada, there was copper. That means the most remote portions of northern Ontario, the North West Territories....etc, if there is rail, there is copper.

I don't see copper going away anytime soon. Bell's current approach is to leverage VDSL2 at close range to provide competitive bandwidth to cable, whilst also feeding VoIP and TV over the same feeds. If fiber to the premisis (like FIOS) was more cost effective, that's certainly what they would be rolling out, but they aren't, which tells me it isn't.
 
I called verizon and talked to them the other day about FiOS, which even as an employee of TWC I would consider switching to because of ridiculously fast internet. They haven't run it in my neighborhood yet, but they are running some on a major road 2 miles away, so it's only a matter of time imo. And I did specifically ask her about that, she said that any house that is upgraded with FIOS have the copper lines cut because it cost
them $5,000 to upgrade the house to be FiOS serviceable and that they are phasing out copper lines.

Also I don't understand thinking that $20 is too much for internet =|

I had asked her about it because if we sell the house, would the next tenants be able to go back to it, she said no. And she was more than aware I wouldn't be signing up for it that day anyway. So I definitely think there is basis in fact on what you heard.
 
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