sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information Is technology taking us "back in time"?

The common battery system for telephones was invented in 1896. This put the battery to power all the phones coming out of one exchange in the exchange...one common power source as opposed to each telephone being powered on site. You didn't even need to have electricity at your home or place of business to have a working phone. Fantastic!

Now with FIOS, Magic Jack, Voice Manager lines, all voip by the way, we are back to needing a power source for the service itself and our own on site battery. No power no phone.

I like my analog wall phone connected to a plain ole copper pair. Irene killed all my power for days. My cordless phones went down, my internet and if I were using any sip or voip service, that would go down as well. Just something to think about.

Irene hit the Cable company up here as well. All those clients that had "modernized" to their lines eventually lost their phone service as well.

Was funnier than hell watching their techs climb poles with small generators and gas cans to try and get some clients back "On Line" once their "battery backups" ran out.

Derrick, you are 100% correct. We will never again have a telecommunication system as reliable as The Bell System was back in the last century. Here are just some of the reasons:

• More complex equipment = more points of failure
• More semiconductor devices easily damaged by EMP, static, and lightning
• Equipment built to be disposable [read: cheap plastic crap]
• Less emphasis on outside plant maintenance [labor costs money]
• A reliance on hardware built with ASIC chips designed in the Middle East and made in China [this keeps me up at night]
• a whole bunch more reasons, too numerous to list...

However, there is one little nit I would like to pick about your post. FiOS is based on a passive optical system, which means the only powered equipment outside the CO is at the customer location [the ONT]. This is really no different than POTS served by an SLC, the key difference being that you [the end customer] have control of the ONT power source and can provide back up if you wish. An SLC cabinet at the end of your block may have enough power backup, or it may have none at all. FiOs could be seen as an improvement, in that it puts control of the ONT power in your hands [I like control].

BTW, the FiOS provided phone numbers are not VoIP. There is a 64 kbps two-way channel split from the ATM streams between the CO and your ONT for each phone number you pay for. This is contained in the ATM stream and therefore not truly real-time like a SDH DS0, but it is not packetized and sent as VoIP. What happens at the CO end is somewhat blurry, numerous sources claim that it is interfaced with an existing ESS like any other DS0 assigned to a phone number.

With all that said, FiOS still may not be as reliable as a copper provided POTS number. I heard two different accounts form folks after the last hurricane who said that they received slow or no dial tone, and then an intercept when attempting to dial out on a FiOS provided line. In one case the person also had a copper POTS line, which continued to provide dial tone the moment it went off-hook, and no intercepts.

Jim
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Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

I knew that FiOS isn't voip, its tdm, just as my Cox line isn't voip. I shouldn't have lumped them all together. After Irene my Cox line stayed up for awhile then went down until Cox put generators around the area at each substation. My copper Verizon line went up and down when a car drove over the line laying on the road from a downed pole.

On the other hand, if a limb or whole tree takes down a telephone pole and/or wires, both FiOS & POTs service will come down with it.

During tropical storm Irene, we lost power for about 30 minutes when a fallen tree limb caused some pole-mounted fuses to pop (those fuses make a terribly loud bang when they blow). The battery in the ONT held up perfectly. I do have a good sized, fully-charged Tripp Lite UPS ready to go should the ONT cell start to run out.

If power were to stay out beyond the capabilities of the ONT & UPS....other issues would kind of push having a working lane line down on the "worry list".

Is technology taking us back in time? Let's see..
In my youth I was trained in tube and solid state electronics. We even touched on logic based technology. Tubed equipment required constant attention adjusting this tweeking that all to compensate for that failing tube and they always failed! Solid state equipment on the other hand once adjusted stayed there. It either worked or didn't and it was just that simple! We had a piece of equipment that took eight hours minimum to repair with depot level assistance if a certain component failed. Repair time with the next generation about four and no depot level. The newest version of that same equipment about one minute! Do I miss the tactile, auditory and visual feedback that older generations of equipment provide? You bet! You may recall the Star Trek movie where engineer Scott was sitting at an Apple computer and spoke at the machine, then picked up and spoke into the mouse ultimately having to use the keyboard speaking the line "how quaint"! That's where technology will take us by a new generation of engineers and technicians!

I guess my question is a conundrum. Reliabiliy is not the same....you can use cell phones as an example. I can surf the web, get email, play Angry Birds, but an actual voice call? No improvement over the 2 watt bag phone, quite the opposite actually. Now people text like crazy....and they use code, is that a modern version of the telegraph?

[controversial post warning - apologies in advance]

JW - you raise an excellent point. The amount of hard work required to keep mechanical switching systems and analog multiplexing and transmission systems running was intense. These days, a switch tech only needs to swap out a card [most of the time].

But there is still hard work involved, we just don't do it here. The dirt-cheap semiconductor devices that make all of this stuff possible come from places where labor is cheap and people are willing to be worked to the point that they commit suicide from the stress. [Not a joke - there was a piece in the news recently about a plant in China that assembles iphones. They have nets under the windows on the higher floors to discourage people from hurling themselves out.] The labor gets even less expensive when they use slaves, prisoners, and children.

And then there is the whole issue of our dependence on equipment built using ASICs designed and manufactured in countries that may have an agenda that goes way beyond supplying cheap electronics. These chips [which are in the equipment that routes our telecom/internet traffic, controls our electric grid, lands our planes, etc.] contain billions of transistors and millions of lines of firmware code. I sure as hell don't have the ability to check it all for back doors [hence the lack of sleep].

Derrick - when you said "Now people text like crazy....and they use code, is that a modern version of the telegraph?" you touched on one of my favorite soapbox rants. Radioteletype has been around for close to a hundred years, but the masses think it is "new" because it has a new name. The equipment is smaller now, and the usage more accessible to the average person, but those things can hardly make the technology itself new. Maybe it is "new" because folks are willing to pay about 3,000 percent more per word than they would have fifty years ago, even after correcting for inflation.

Here is where my rant always grows to include the news media's obsession with things like facebook and twitter. Seriously, if I hear one more tech-pundit on NPR refer to facebook as an "amazing new digital technology," I am going to go freaking postal. Facebook is not a technology, it is just another f#&*ing website with user-generated content.

Okay, I'm done now. Need more coffee...

Jim
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Ranting from a secure undisclosed location.

Facebook and twitter will go the way of Myspace when the next flavor of the week shows up. I think google is cooking up some new ice cream as we speak. And what are Facebook and other social networking sites? They are high tech party lines that's what. A place where people can "listen in" to other people's lives and affairs. And like a party line...these sites have their good attributes and not so good.

Right on. Remember about five years ago, when myspace was huge? One of the big mega-corps [think it was Time-Warner] wanted to buy it from the owner for over four billion [with a "b"] dollars. He turned them down.

What a dumbass...

Jim
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Next time, take the money and run.