[citation][nom]Fargus[/nom]AT&T only wants this because they bet the farm on their Uverse product. VOIP is not a reliable replacement for copper twisted pair, at least, not as it's currently being implemented. Lose power, lose your VOIP. AT&T supplied battery backups for consumers give only ~4 hours of run time (that's if the power doesn't fail at the cross-over boxes as well). Most customers will never think to check their UPS status and when they reach the end of their batteries lifespan, customers will suddenly lose their phone service and internet access if a power outage occurs.I've been in the red zone of a cat 5 hurricane and several cat 3+. No power for weeks to a month. Cell phone towers leveled and not rebuilt for over 4 months. Only thing that worked through both events was the simple, archaic copper pair landline (even had internet with a dial-up modem). Current VOIP services are just too dicey for emergencies.[/citation]
Remember that big blackout in the Northeaset? At the time I only had a landline, while most of my neighbors had cell phones. They still had service when the landlines gave up (they need power too you know). In fact, the landlines stopped working in UNDER 4 hours.
Landlines are getting to be ancient technology, and DSL is a poor excuse to keep it (and it sucks anyway). Faxes CAN in fact be sent over VOIP lines (I've done it) but PDFs over email work SO much better, and it's more likely people have a printer/scanner than a fax anyway.
Of course, if the landlines had NOT been privatized and stayed a regulated monopoly then loosing money would be less of a problem. But by now we've advanced beyond the need for them, and it really isn't cost-efficient for a private company to maintain them anymore. I challenge ANYONE to identify an area of this country that is uncovered by both Cellular AND broadband. Either one works for 911 now: in fact a cell is better than a landline in that regard (they provide your current GPS location to the call center, all of which are now supposed to be E-911 compliant).
There's two options here, both of which will ultimately doom copper landlines. One: AT&T will have to raise rates so high that it'll drive everyone off, at which point AT&T either drops the landlines or goes out of business (I guarantee it won't be the second one). Two: the Feds decide landlines are a necessary national resource and take them over. They proceed to mismanage them even worse, the prices go up, everyone drops them, and then the landlines go away.
So any way you look at it, the era of landlines is over. It's been over for a while now, we just needed to realize it.
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