i work for a company that sells voice over IP services, and also owns a good chunk of resold copper phone lines, aka "POTS" or "plain old telephone service." it goes without saying that most people do not think much about copper phone lines anymore, and hardly anyone is getting new ones installed, but there are millions of them still installed and they largely work. as "lifeline" services (e.g. a way to reach 911) they're still unparalleled in their reliability. an enormous number of them are being used for elevator rescue phones or fire alarm systems. they should never be replaced. they are the correct technology for those applications. i will not qualify this; if you work in the industry, you know the reasons.
last year i was informed that the FCC had established a drop-dead date for the elimination of all wireline phone services, and that date was August of last year. this is absolutely batshit for a number of reasons. the verbiage was something along the lines of requiring vendors to switch to unspecified "different technology," but the only thing that could possibly mean is VoIP. like, the only other technology it could possibly mean is ISDN, and nobody is going to deploy millions of new ISDN BRIs. it wouldn't even make sense, since those use the same wires. whatever the motive behind this directive is, switching from one wireline service to another would have to be counterproductive.
in any case, the summary i was given came down to this:
the FCC wants all POTS lines gone, and they announced this ten years ago but all the carriers ignored it. there is now a mad, blood-curdling dash to get them all replaced ASAP. we know that this deadline is bullshit, because we know the FCC knows it's bullshit; it is simply impossible to have these all replaced in time, but when the date comes, they're going to begin fining everyone, and the cost to maintain the lines will skyrocket.
it is not practical to replace the majority of POTS lines with VoIP devices. part of this is because VoIP doesn't work, which I won't qualify. anyone who works in the industry knows what I mean. but also, it's an absurd amount of effort to get network and power (since nobody makes a power-over-ethernet analog adapter) to the locations where many of these things are needed.
so what happened is: a number of companies saw this as an opportunity to be Government Mandate Opportunists, and they produced horrible pieces of plastic shit meant to solve this problem. What's happening at this point is that a bunch of companies are replacing their wireline POTS service with full-fat routers with LTE data service, over which they send VoIP phone calls. yes, they're using LTE data service instead of just sending calls as normal cellphone voice calls. it's just... it's all very stupid and counterproductive.
it also never happened.
what actually happened is that the FCC deregulated the cost of certain specialized ILEC>CLEC wireline unbundling services, which - per this article - are exceptionally rare, amounting to perhaps 200,000 lines nationwide, and there was no mandate to switch to VoIP, just a different kind of service relationship.
essentially, this is all completely made up. there was no urgent mandate to switch to voip, and carriers are using a misinterpretation of the situation to push upsells to products that cost them less to maintain. for this reason, i have been watching my employer switch hundreds of customers to massively inferior, clearly unreliable, rushed-to-market, bottom-dollar garbage solutions that will fail and will get people hurt or killed, and nobody will pay for that harm because "we didn't have a choice"
businesses should be illegal
i can't overstate how made up this problem was. per a carrier:
In light of anticipated rate increases due to the FCC deregulation, prices for POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines are expected to skyrocket.
It is important to note that the FCC didn’t mandate the retirement of POTS lines, however with the deregulation of pricing coupled with Incumbents’ plans to retire their copper networks over time, it is expected that traditional copper-based POTS lines will be phased out in favor of next-generation services in the years to come.
EXPECTED to skyrocket. there was literally no actual change other than companies going "other companies that we've worked with for 50 years are about to gain the option of cutting our throats, so they definitely will"
