Telecom Informer

    

by The Prophet

Hello, and greetings from the Central Office!

Autumn may be approaching, but it's a scorching 106 degrees outside.  Where am I?  Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, en route to Louisiana.  There is an absolutely unholy mess to clean up due to the massive flooding, and all hands are on deck for recovery efforts - not just from the incumbent providers in the affected areas, but from across the country.  Just like fire departments and power companies, phone companies have "mutual aid" contracts whereby we assist one another during emergencies.

All of this brings to mind Superstorm Sandy, and Verizon's creative but ultimately ill-fated efforts to avoid fully restoring service to Fire Island, New York.  The aftermath of Sandy was the first salvo in one of the biggest regulatory wars ever fought.  And it's a war you've probably never heard of.

Phone companies like ours are all trying to figure out what to do with their aging copper outside plant, and disasters like Superstorm Sandy force the issue.  Honestly, many of us are struggling to stay in business.  The competitive landscape has massively shifted in the past 20 years, and continuing the status quo is becoming very difficult for phone companies.  This is particularly true in rural, disaster-prone areas, which have always been expensive to service.

Most existing copper wiring is decades old.  In some areas, it's a century old (sometimes even more).  Over time, outside plant corrodes.  Water leaks into cables and damages them.  In our Central Office, if we printed out all of the outside plant maintenance tickets that have been filed and stacked them on top of each other, they'd probably stretch from the floor to the ceiling.  Realistically, none of these problems are ever going to be fixed.  For the most part, it's not worth tracking down and repairing faults in the copper plant anymore.  If a pair becomes unusably corroded, we simply switch the subscriber to another pair.  There are plenty of extras amidst a sea of disconnections.  If a copper trunk cable becomes unusable, we just let it rot, run a new cable with fiber to the node (typically a wiring cabinet), and cut over.

While traditional telephone infrastructure is aging, becoming less reliable, and is now far more expensive to maintain, fewer and fewer customers are actually subscribing to wireline services.  This leaves less money to maintain them - a lot less.  In the United States, there are now only about 60 million traditional landline subscribers.  Most remaining subscribers are poor, rural, or elderly people, primarily using subsidized services that are not profitable.  The only truly profitable customers remaining are businesses who need landlines for credit card or fax machines.  However, now that businesses have been required to update their credit card machines to new ones with EMV chip capability, they are switching en masse to Wi-Fi and we're seeing a new landslide of disconnections - and these are our most profitable dial tones!  It's not that people and businesses have given up landlines entirely, they have just given up on traditional landlines.  There has been a massive shift to services provided by cable companies (the "triple play" being a formidable competitor to traditional phone service), and this competition has attracted both business and residential customers.  Comcast, in fact, is now one of the largest phone companies in America.

And honestly, who can blame them?  I was truly astonished at the number of disconnections we began to process when the local cable company began offering unlimited local and long distance calling with all calling features for $19.95 per month.  We can't compete with that when a 1FR POTS line (with no calling features) is tariffed at $20 per month (plus surcharges, and there are a lot of surcharges).  We're literally twice as expensive for the same service.

Sure, the quality of a landline phone is better, and landlines work reliably during power outages, but VoIP phones delivered over cable are good enough for most subscribers.  They come with a 48-hour backup battery and work just as reliably during power outages (until the battery dies) as landlines do.  Also, given that almost everyone has a cell phone and a car charger, people just don't worry as much about phones working during power outages as they used to.  If they need to make a call, they can just go out to the car.  What's more, cellular networks have actually proven more reliable during emergencies than landlines, because wireless signals don't get flooded out or knocked down by trees.

All of this brings us to Fire Island, New York, in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.  Fire Island is a 9.6 square mile island (post-Sandy, it's technically two islands) with a year-round population of only 292.  It's a popular getaway spot for New Yorkers during the summer months, when the population grows to several thousand people despite being car-free.

And while disasters often cause major damage, it's relatively rare that an entire community is left completely without phone service.  However, this happened on Fire Island in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

Fire Island took the brunt of the storm surge, which was so severe that it literally washed away much of the existing Verizon copper network and corroded the remainder to the point of being unusable.  This was a big deal: no single incident in recent memory destroyed as many telephone facilities as Superstorm Sandy.  Apart from destroying phone lines in many communities, Sandy flooded a massive Verizon switching center in lower Manhattan at 140 West Street.  While the tandem switches upstairs weren't damaged, the cable vault in the basement was completely submerged.  This scenario was repeated at multiple data centers throughout the city, causing major Internet service disruptions.

Back on Fire Island, the disaster was so severe that the island was split in two, the ocean reaching the bay through a channel newly carved by Mother Nature.  Eighty percent of homes were flooded, and 90 (out of 4,500) homes were completely destroyed.  It's not hard to imagine that given rising sea levels, this isn't the last time that this will happen.  In an era of global warming, Fire Island's days are numbered.  And this left Verizon with a predicament: what should be done to rebuild, and how could it be done fast?  Verizon is the sole provider of communications services on the island, and was under strong pressure to restore service quickly.

Verizon's solution was simple and innovative: convert Fire Island to wireless-only.  In other words, don't rebuild.  From their perspective, it was simply good business.  Why make a massive investment in restoring relatively unpopular infrastructure, and make that investment in a location whose days are, in an age of climate change, numbered?  Verizon announced that they would not rebuild the copper network, filed with the FCC to discontinue it, and introduced a product to Fire Islanders called VoiceLink.  This became one of the biggest telecommunications controversies in American history.

VoiceLink (sold by the landline division of Verizon) and Home Phone Connect (sold by the wireless division of Verizon) are essentially the same product, called a "wireless landline.'  Many phone companies (including AT&T, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular) offer similar products.  While these devices are typically branded by the carrier selling them, the equipment is manufactured by Chinese manufacturers ZTE and Huawei.  The Verizon FT2260VW, for example, is made by Huawei.

What's a wireless landline?  A technician will install the device in an area of your home with a good wireless signal, run a cable to the NID to hook it up to your inside wiring, and your phones will work more or less normally.  However, under the hood, VoiceLink is actually a cellular phone and is treated on the mobile network as such.  The device has an IMEI or MEID, a SIM card (if 4G or GSM-based), either rechargeable or AA batteries (depending on the device involved) for backup power, and is assigned a telephone number.  If your service is converted from landline service, a wireline-to-wireless port is done using ordinary number portability procedures.  To the network, the only difference versus a mobile phone is 911 service: VoiceLink devices are categorized as fixed location devices and are configured with E911 data.  This means that if you dial 911, you're routed directly to the PSAP nearest you with all E911 data provided, which is the same thing that happens with a landline.

Unfortunately, there are some major differences, and this ultimately scuttled the VoiceLink initiative on Fire Island (although Verizon is still pushing it very hard in other locations).  Call quality is generally poorer than a landline because calling depends on the cellular network - often a distant one.  Calls are subject to being dropped and missed, just as with cellular phones.  And most importantly, only voice calling is supported.  Faxes and modems (such as those included in older credit card machines) don't work.  Nor do alarm monitoring services or certain medical devices.  A lobbying organization called Teletruth put together a list of 17 separate services that no longer worked with VoiceLink.

Verizon also underestimated the backlash.  It seemed everyone piled on: constituencies from residents to unions to politicians erupted in protest.  The FCC refused Verizon's application to terminate service, asking pointed questions about the services that would no longer be available.  Ultimately, Verizon compromised: they upgraded Fire Island to Fios fiber-optic service, a regulatory structure that already existed.  While the landline network was discontinued, wireline service was still available and, in fact, Fire Island was better off than before.  Smiles all around.

Except these issues aren't going away.  Phone companies are going to have to retire copper.  Technology has moved on and it's too expensive to maintain.  This has culminated in a series of FCC orders (the most important of which is FCC Order 15-97) which govern how and when copper may be retired, and what notification must be given to customers.  This isn't over: every time a disaster happens, the debate will be ongoing.  Although it has occurred with little press and almost no public debate, the replacement of copper will be one of the most important public policy issues of the 21st century.

And with that, it's time to get on a plane.  Louisiana is under water, and there's a lot of work to do!  Stay warm and dry this fall.

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