sundance-communications.com/forum Forums General Telecom News State Laws Allowing End of Land-Line Service.

In Arlington (the town I live in) the fire department has switched over to a wireless monitoring/reporting system. The old cable-based system is being/has been disconnected.

Here is a link to the system that the town is using:

https://www.sigcom.com/products/details/?id=6

Organizations can convert to the town's new wireless system, go with a private monitoring company or just have their panels go unmonitored.

It's a conspiracy to let the government do it's thing without interference from 'the great unwashed'!

I'll bet that the universal service tax won't be repealed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Around here the FD does not do any monitoring it is all done by private central stations, the rub is the local fire marshal will only allow wireless or cellular as the secondary method. Primary must be POTS unless something has changed since I last looked a few years ago.

All commercial buildings must have monitored systems so going unmonitored is not an option

The fire marshal gave us (the FD) a problem about monitoring our own buildings via our own alarm loop till we proved to them a failure of the monitoring system woud generate an a "trouble" in the dispatch office within 5 seconds.

They wanted us to contract with a central station company so they coud call us by phone when one of our buildings had an alarm.

Now that I think about it, the monitoring is done back at the Community Safety Building as opposed to the fire stations themselves. The reason for the switchover is that it was felt that the cost of keeping the cables & related equipment was getting out of hand. The town has been removing call boxes because so many people have cell phones that the boxes are no longer needed.

Sorry for hijacking my own thread....Returning to the topic @ hand.

It's not hijacking, it's a good discussion about what will happen when POTS goes away.

There are lots of devices that just do not work on VOIP, most cannot handle FAX. My Dish boxes take 4 or 5 trys to report my usage on Vonage.

The days of reliable 24X7 phone service will be over if it happens.

Both of my Cannon all-in-one units can fax, but fax machines are fast becoming a thing of the past. Documents can be scanned and sent as a pdf.

We used to have direct alarm monitoring here in our city. The phone room in the basement of our city hall was COVERED in 66 blocks and wire. 5 years later they were totally empty as they no longer wanted the liability of directly monitoring alarm systems. I still run into the old dry loop wiring in the older office buildings though.

This is Telecom News and we like to keep it very much on the topic of the news article. So let's stick to the news article and if other discussion is need around the other aspects of this let's start a new topic in the appropriate category. Thanks.

It's been worked out that the scrap value of the copper cabling in the UK local loop exceeds the value of British Telecom the dominant operator and owner of most of the local loop.

Only about 20% (retail) internet connections in the UK are cable; the rest are ADSL.

POTS may be losing popularity (13% UK adults live in a home with mobile but no landline phone) but the DSL services need copper to run over, and it's maintaining the copper that costs the money.

I can see some real problems with this. Spotty reception forget it. In this case, a couple died within 20 yards of there house after the phone dropped the 911 call 9 times.

https://ca.mg5.mail.yahoo.com/neo/launch?.rand=03gekselflnu6

I get some really terrible reception in my townhouse even though the cell tower is only 4 blocks away!! with the dipole cell antenna pointing my way! the dropped calls has happened on the last 2-3 phones.