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
Speaking as someone who used to work in VoIP, this post is bang on. All implementations of VoIP in replacing POTS are absolute garbage. It isn't reliable, it isn't durable, and it is fraught with problems.
Why is VoIP unreliable/durable? It's Voice over Internet Protocol, right? Since it's not Voice over TCP, is there no redundancy like checksums or error correction to make it reliable and low latency (not enough time to retransmit packets w/ errors)?
my initial response to this was that there is no simple answer, because the problem depends on 30 years of internet history. any simple answer will be incomplete. however, there is a broad explanation that works
the problem is that VoIP has more than one point of failure, and it's not inside the telephone company.
a POTS phone line is, in no uncertain terms, and I am speaking completely literally here, take me at my word, this is the factual truth, an extension cord that runs from your house to the phone company. you know the scene in napoleon dynamite where he walks all the way out of the house with the phone handset, trailing 50 feet of spiral cord behind him? that is, literally, what a phone line is.
when you have a phone line, you do not possess the complete piece of equipment. the actual device that makes the calls happen is at the phone company office, a concrete building potentially many thousands of feet away from you. what you have is an interface to that device, with functionality so simple that it's virtually impossible for it to break, and if it does, you can replace it with zero effort because it doesn't do anything. it is, and I am again speaking literally here, a speaker and a mic.
imagine if you had a headset at your house with two 3.5mm jacks, and you hooked up 4500 feet of extension cords to plug it into a computer across town. that's literally how a phone works.
what this means is that there's nothing at your house to go wrong, and nothing to configure. all the intelligence is at the phone company end. all the stuff that can break is in one single location where a single technician can work on all of it at once, monitor it, baby it, and if something breaks, they can be alerted immediately and replace it without needing an expensive site dispatch that they have to negotiate with you for access and scheduling.
also, all of that equipment is kept in a controlled environment, was designed to last 80 years, and has stood the test of time for decades already.
so, the phone line hanging out of your wall is your service, not the device that you lay hands on. with VoIP... none of this is true.
a VoIP phone is an entire computer running a full-stack OS like Linux or vxWorks, so there's plenty of things to go wrong there. it has to connect over the internet, so if that breaks, your phone stops working. if your ISP decides to filter your internet connection to protect themselves from botnets you might have unwittingly installed on your PCs, your phone stops working. if you install a new firewall, your phone stops working. if your VoIP provider changes server IPs, your phone stops working.
then, there's fraud. because VoIP just connects to a server, anyone can tell that server that they're you. if they have your credentials, they can place phone calls and bill them to your account. this happens constantly, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. companies file bankruptcy over this. even if they don't have your creds, they can try to bruteforce them, and if your VoIP provider sucks, they'll succeed.
your voip provider has an entire network of their own they have to maintain. if they upgrade part of it, they might fuck it up, because it's far more complicated than phone company networks, and much, much harder to diagnose. it's made of hundreds or thousands of distinct nodes made by different companies that serve different purposes; automatically testing all of it is simply impossible. more importantly, there are no regulations requiring that companies actually do this, so none of them do.
and then, ultimately, your VoIP provider still has to hand off your phone calls to the real phone system, because most people aren't on VoIP still. that process costs money, so, all voip providers get the worst, cheapest service they can. call failure rates on POTS voice have been nearly 0% since the 80s. on VoIP, they're often worse than conventional telcos in the sixties.
basically, the phone system is a beautiful example of a highly centralized system where, despite corporate malfeasance, it still makes sense for the telcos to invest in their infrastructure, spend a lot of money on developing reliable cost-no-object equipment, and to employ their own in-house expert staff to continuously monitor and quickly repair that equipment.
literally none of that is true of IP infrastructure. I've left out dozens of failure points, but just from the above you can tell that voip is intrinsically unreliable. in practice, it is exactly as bad as it sounds. shit just breaks constantly for no reason.
And we fucked it up because we could I guess.
