If power or internet goes out, wired VOIP phones won't work. Both the power and the internet have way worse reliability than the copper wire telephone where I live in a top 1% part of California.
If cell phone service goes out (or if cell phone batteries get exhausted and can't be recharged), then mobile phones won't work.
A landline is a very, very reasonable "emergency line" or even "regular line". The data and power connection to it will not be unexpectedly severed, for the most part.
I can very easily imagine an "extended outage" for whatever reason of power, internet, and/or mobile phone service, take your pick. In any of these cases, I would expect to basically be able to use the landline phone to call a relative, friend or co-worker pretty much anywhere in the world. Ok, maybe some disasters take out copper wire telephones, or maybe sometimes copper wire telephones have issues (rare but possible), but this is still a pretty good backup/emergency/constant connection.
If you really have got your sh* together, you have a landline, IMO.
There is a copper contact running all the way to some box, and to some substation, which has utility-managed diesel backup generators and switching and all that jazz. I don't care if it's digital and so forth behind the scenes. It's managed! It works from their system to mine, end of story.
We have a residential elevator. It has a phone line for emergencies, like if you get stuck in the elevator by yourself. That goes to a copper wire telephone wire. I do NOT want to rely on the unreliable California power utility to not have a scheduled or unscheduled outage, causing the elevator fail, and also shutting off power to a cable box powering some VOIP service. Really?
Sure, I could add backup batteries. Sure, I could add automatic diesel power generators. But, the phone company already has those! Do I need a secondary and/or tertiary ISP as backup as well, and somehow join them together? (Some will say, "yes, of course".)
What are they going to do next, ban standard incandescent light bulbs? Oh, wait, they already did that! Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison must be spinning in their graves!
I get the idea is to cut costs or something, but I think this is a safety issue, no?
If we can't have real light bulbs, and we can't have real telephones lines, is there a name for that? We used to have more or less "additive" technologies. A new one would go add to the list of available technologies, not really fully replacing any. Just adding to the list of what you can readily have/do. But this concept of "removing" solid technologies for arguably "worse" ones--I think it's not merely enshittification. This seems like a whole 'nother branch of weird.
Maybe there's some state that will reverse some of this stuff; one can hope, can't one?
If you use one or more copper lines: what is your plan for the post-telephone-line world, if it comes to it?
That’s nothing inherent to phone lines, though.
Nothing prevents regulators from mandating fiber or cable providers to offer backup batteries as part of their ONTs and CPEs as well as fiber nodes.
Yes, it would be more expensive than not doing it, but maintaining a completely separate last-mile communications medium is not free either.
Maintaining all these generators, batteries etc. is probably at least as expensive, especially given that you can only charge so much for a landline these days, especially if you’re competing against voice over IP or cable that’s effectively free in terms of infrastructure.
If redundancy is a concern, mobile phone networks are probably much more economical except maybe in very sparsely populated areas, and provide coverage for road accidents as well.
> If we can't have real light bulbs, and we can't have real telephones lines, is there a name for that?
I'd call one an actual safety concern (if no alternative is available) and the other nostalgia.
Even in the 1980s and 1990s when I was a kid, having half a dozen 100 watt bulbs on around the house would have been a significant fraction of the overall electricity bill.
The first time I got an LED based bike light, I finally found that I could get oncoming cars to dip their full-beams instead of dazzling me when they went past.
> We used to have more or less "additive" technologies. A new one would go add to the list of available technologies, not really fully replacing any.
Zeppelins.
Gas street lights.
Pony express.
Asbestos.
It doesn't quite contradict what you said, but I live in distinctly non-top-1% part of Vermont where power is not very reliable. One of the line workers I talked to affectionately described the local distribution system as "fence wire on tall posts". It runs through the woods and frequently gets taken out by falling trees. On the plus side, it's easy to repair with one well-trained person on an ATV.
Anyway, our area recently got fiber internet installed. In a recent power outage, I was surprised to learn that the optional VOIP phone service installed along with the internet kept working. There's an on-site battery backup for each ONT (terminal at the house). So while it's true that if internet goes out you lose VOIP phone, the fiber cable is pretty durable and the phone connection is a lot more resilient to short power outages than I would have thought.
When I lived in a rural area, cell service was as reliable as landlines if not more. People frequently crashed into utility poles and brought landline service down. Cell towers have backup power and can work during outages. Personally I have an electric car which could charge my phone thousands of times in a power outage situation; of course even a gasoline powered car can charge a phone too in a pinch. The biggest problem with cell service during an emergency is congestion, but landlines are not immune to this either with the way networks are built today.
In the future, home batteries and solar are going to be much more common. And soon your cell phone will be able to go directly to space, bypassing any local tower problem, using Starlink's direct-to-cell feature. Reliability can be designed into modern systems and we don't need to cling to costly and wasteful outdated technologies like copper landlines simply because they used to be reliable.
Your cellular isn't? Maybe switch providers, T-Mobile doesn't make me go maintain cell towers.
To be fair, how about fixing the actual disease (insane policies in commiefornia) rather than some minor symptom fixes?
Curious, why not advocate for the power company to provide battery backup at the substations? Why should the only part of our infrastructure that's battery backed be the phone system?
> What are they going to do next, ban standard incandescent light bulbs? Oh, wait, they already did that! Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison must be spinning in their graves!
> I get the idea is to cut costs or something, but I think this is a safety issue, no?
> If we can't have real light bulbs, and we can't have real telephones lines, is there a name for that?
I'm really curious to why you view incandescent light-bulbs as being superior to LEDs. Is it solely because they are simpler? They certainly don't last as long and cost more to operate. LED bulbs have the same warm glow and are indistinguishable from incandescent. Perhaps you are using them to heat your room? If so, a resistive heater could accomplish the same job (without lighting up the area).
> If you use one or more copper lines: what is your plan for the post-telephone-line world, if it comes to it?
Batteries everywhere. Ideally every utility would have a mandate to use battery backups covering common outage times.
I've gotten in the habit of writing down the in-service date on all of my LED bulbs, because I don't think I've gotten more than two years out of any of them. Granted, still longer than incandescent bulbs, but I feel like the 10+ year lifespan I've been sold is a lie. Supposedly LED bulbs are a lot more sensitive to fluctuations in power quality (and it's not like I've been buying AliExpress bulbs, either).
In either case, why a federal ban on incandescent bulbs? If LED bulbs are superior, the market will sort itself out. If it's really a market failure (which I don't think it is in this case), put an excise tax on incandescent bulbs to tip the scale in LED's favor. To ban it outright is just rude.
But I'm not sure we have the battery technology to be able to distribute batteries everywhere with enough capacity to stop most power outages. That's quite a different deployment than centralized batteries on the grid. I hope we get there but the energy densities & costs probably are not be good enough - yet.
And if we do manage that, the outages that do happen will only be more severe. Are we going to have power outage drills? If not tons of people will be caught unprepared.
[1]: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/20757/led-li...
There is a difference of several orders of magnitude between a backup power system that is able to keep a telco central office online (one singular building) and a backup power system that is able to keep an entire substation's connected subscribers online (thousands of buildings).
Hurricane Fiona hit my region and all the phones eventually died cellphones, new landline "voip" (I guess?) but not my uncle's phone. It was the old style wired directly to the exchange a few blocks away.
I lost power for nearly two weeks he didn't. My home land line is the newer type not the old style so the modem had no power. My cellphone lasted a few days but the cell towers ran out of fuel for the generators.
I was completely isolated communication-wise for about a week and a half. If I had the old land line type I would have had a phone.
Much easier to provide a generator for the latter.
land lines are the ones that depend on large-scale infrastructure, and go out with any natural disaster. Cellphones should be much more resilient.
Anyway, the current solution for emergency communications is satellite. We have nothing more resilient than throwing things up there above the atmosphere.
The cellular network is much more disperse which makes it resilient in some ways (since if the tower closest to you goes down, you can still probably get signal from another tower), but it's harder to keep them all running, and in many cases they rely on long-distance data lines out of the area to stay in service, so even if the cell tower is up and running, without that long distance data connection, you can't make a call.
You may argue it does, but it's easy to figure out: in my country you can get it in some places, but it's an expensive premium.
Very few people do. Which mean they don't value it as much as they say they do. The ones that do usually are the ones that have the need to be able to call health institutions in emergency.
Turns out humanity survives very well without a phone, and while I get how it can become a big problem for an individual, on average for the whole society, it doesn't balance out.
I don't know what she'd do without a landline. It's already become much less reliable because the NY Telephone company doesn't care about the old copper lines so we switched to sevice over FIOS. If the battery in the main unit fails--and she can't hear the beep that warns that the backup battery needs to be replaced--her phone goes dead.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Opis-Technology-Cellphone-Push-Button...
The irony is that a lead-acid battery, a carbon granule microphone and an electromagnetic earpiece represent the simplest technology which I understood as a 7 year old - enough to build my own telephone so friends could talk from the tree house. Even the electromagnetic routers that use pulse dialling are simple enough for a kid to understand.
This is now third-world tech that we can't keep up with [0].
The death of fundamental expertise permeates the western "post industrial" world now. People who know how basic stuff works and can maintain it are dying out or giving up. They're being replaced by a generation raised on smartphone apps and wishful thinking.
Maybe the demise of Boeing is the template to watch for the next 10 years as more things fall apart under the gross mismanagement by a deluded corporate class.
Of course those of us who dabble in things like "physics and engineering" and do stuff like "resilience and planning" are just Luddites and old men who shout at clouds, right?
