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Evslin: No more landlines under Obama
VoIP guru Tom Evslin is predicting the death of copper landlines by the end of Barak Obama's first term. We aren't sure if he's a little too bearish on the subject.
Evslin recites the current trends that young people are all cell phone all the time, while the middle aged people are going with cable triple-play bundles and canceling their telco copper services. Meanwhile, Verizon has simply sold all of its legacy copper infrastructure in three northern New England states to FairPoint. Meanwhile, FairPoint, like Verizon and AT&T, continues to lose access lines. And to top it all off, Verizon is busy replacing copper with fiber, starting with its most lucrative markets.
Loss of copper is going to provoke a number of public policy problems; Evslin is predicting an implosion with medium-sized phone operators who have copper that sounds a lot like Detroit and car manufacturing (i.e. Declining revenue base, bankruptcy, implosion, doom). There's also the whole "What do we do with the Universal Service Fund?" issue to support broadband.
The solution to all this is cheap cell phone and broadband access, maybe through the same device. USF needs to go to subsidizing connectivity, not voice service.
For more:
- Seeking Alpha seeks controversy over the death of wireline. Article.
Related articles
Documenting the death of landlines - FierceTelecom
Landlines - Tell me, how does this end?
Comments
Posted by Any Mouse (Anonymous) | November 21, 2008 - 5:15pm
I have worked in telecommunications for nearly a decade. During that time, I have seen a trend to transition from primarily analog voice service to a more data centric approach. With the exception of FTTH deployments (IE Verizon Fios) there has been almost no reduction in the copper plant (at least in regards to the last mile), upstream connections have, however, moved away from traditional copper in favor of fiber. This is not because the copper was bad or unusable, just that to carry hundreds and thousands of simultaneous calls, would take a similarly large bundle of copper, but a single fiber can carry all of that traffic. So for copper to the premesis going away anytime soon would be a stretch at best. In the business market, almost all services are delivered on copper, just not analog copper. The primary service delivery method in the business world is via T1 (copper). There are also some alternate delivery methods (still copper) for voice or data, such as HDSL, IDSL, BRI, PRI, SDSL, ADSL, VDSL, ADSL2, or even HSDSL. Now, for why there are so many DSL variants, and there's only one, to leverage the existing copper plant for higher speeds and additional services.
Posted by Anonymous | November 18, 2008 - 3:26pm
Bits - Video, Data, Voice. Transport is the means to the end. I suspect there will be a lot of copper loop out there for years to come but it may be a shorter distance to a node, but I agree that fiber and wireless is starting to replace copper. The ironic thing is that a lot of wireless towers are fed by...copper.
Posted by Anonymous | November 18, 2008 - 11:31am
With Katrina and Ike in recent experience, a good number of people still care about guaranteed dial-tone.
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