namelessWrench

The Only Rotten Dollhart Webring

A hideous fruit, disgracing itself.

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

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


Cariad
@Cariad

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.


cr1901
@cr1901

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)?


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

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.



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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

This has been a massive pain for industrial controls companies (so many sewage pumping stations in the middle of nowhere used a copper phone line to provide remote access and send out alarms) and it doesn't help that the old hardware is discontinued and the new hardware has a 3-6 month lead time.

Here is pain: https://www.moneris.com/help/vx810/configuration/communications/comms_setup_dial.htm

WARNING: Due to data security issues, terminals using dial communications must use a true analog phone line connecting to a public switched telephone network. Analog telephone adaptors ( ATAs) and digital phone service over IP communications (e.g. VoIP) must NOT be used as an alternative to dial communications.

Fortunately these terminals can be used over TCP but still. If you know how to set up these terminals to use an ATA, you also know that you shouldn't nor document how.

at my work we have probably hundreds or even thousands of POTS lines across the city that are used for building emergency phones and over the last few months quite a number of them have gotten unreliable and now we're apparently in a mad dash to remove them all because "everyone has cell phones anyway"

and when I say "unreliable", our lines end up in some bizarre purgatory where if you pick up a phone it's dead air and no dial tone but you get echo back (???)

it certainly doesn't help that our POTS service keeps losing account reps and no one knows who to talk to and apparently out account zip code isn't even a real zip code and no one knows what it is

that is wild. i've never heard of behavior like this. congratulations for having the weirdest goddamn lec behavior i've ever heard of

what you're experiencing is the presence of talk battery (the 48V DC current that exists on all active phone lines) without the presence of dialtone. i have no idea why that would happen unless your CO switch is unable to seize a channel when you go offhook, but that's... not likely

it would also be explained if you were, in fact, attached to VoIP lines that were losing registration. but, in short, i doubt that as well. have you gotten anything back from the provider on what's behind this, or do they just shrug? i assume the account rep situation has prevented any fruit from growing on that tree

we eventually got through with support - by calling our VP escalation thing because we're special enough to have that

god knows why someone just made up a zip code, i googled it and it's Literally Not A Zip Code

all they'll ever tell us is that they had to reset equipment in the CO

could be they have line cards that are slowly failing due to thermals, and they refuse to replace them either because they're no longer made or they Just Don't Want To. but from the provider side: oh boy lordy they could be concealing some wild internal malfeasance

the other big theory we've had is that the security staff going around checking phones aren't putting them back on the hook all the way and that it stays off-hook long enough it times out the line or something

but we're losing at least 8-10 lines at a time per building in the area usually so it'd have to be some really unlucky security guards going around

i dunno, all the telecom stuff i do is computers, not phones

in reply to @cr1901's post:

POTS powers the handset from the telephone line, regardless of whether you otherwise have power at your house. VoIP requires a battery backup to withstand short outages, which will die during a longer one.

and secondly, it's digital. it can be transmitted on lower quality wire, very appealing for cost reasons, but once a certain amount of noise gets introduced the signal can no longer be reconstructed. analog signals have no resiliency to noise, the signal starts to degrade immediately, but it never drops entirely, and human brains are surprisingly great at getting info out of a garbled analog signal, at a level that digital signals may have given up on transmitting anything.

heavily oversimplifying, as gravis noted, there's other problems, there's mitigations to these problems, etc etc etc, as with anything where people have spent entire careers optimizing and cost cutting and so on, it will not come across very well in a few short paragraphs, but the above are definitely two of the bigger reoccurring issues.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

American infrastructure in all forms has become the living embodiment of a stick in our collective bike spokes.

Decades of engineering marvels undone or left in the dirt to rot simply because some fucker somewhere decided on their own, (or under a woefully uninformed committee,) that these systems are "just simply too old" or "in need of modernization" etc; all subtle guides, usually, to someone somewhere wanting their pockets lined.

great post -- and also bears mention here the fact (which is kind of obvious, and you implied it a couple times, but never explicitly stated it) that the reason the telcos wanted to switch to voip in the first place was as straightforward as "it lets them increase occupancy on the phone lines, thereby allowing them to own and operate less equipment to serve the same number of people"

circuit switching requires so much equipment that you have to have made special, and all these fussy "service guarantees" are such a pain. much easier to simply use commodity garbage you can buy used if you want, and which is intrinsically incapable of making any kind of guarantees

as someone who has the misfortune of having to deal with voip phones at work, i can tell you that they're horrible to deal with and will sometimes just straight up refuse to download the configuration needed for no reason

i have supported voip from the provider end for over ten years and can concur: with exceptions for polycom, every single other brand of voip phone will inexplicably refuse to download configs for hours or days for absolutely no fucking reason, and no amount of expertise makes it better. they're just garbage, made by companies who don't care in the least.

Oh hey I didn't realize this website has post comments that are actually, like, nice

Anyways my family got force switched from copper wire internet over to fibre recently because our telecom provider who owns all the infrastructure here is looking to rip out all the copper wire infra, and when they did the switch for us we got forced over to VoIP too (which they did not inform us about, I only found this out the hard way. My family still doesn't know neither, because I'm not quite sure how to explain the difference between POTS and VoIP in a way they'll understand, since I just barely understand what VoIP has going on myself)

The fibre was bad enough on its own, actually being many times less reliable than the old internet, experiencing even more drops in service and, if you can damn well believe it, worse speeds too even though "woa!!! big and fast intornet!!" is supposed to be one of its selling points. I live in a big Canadian city too fwiw so it's not like this is just "standard rural internet" problems or something neither

We once had our internet shit itself for a good chunk of time that Telus, our telecom provider, could somehow just like fix without sending a tech out. But what they couldn't fix were the phones, which dropped out and were broken for a good few days afterwards and did in fact require a tech to come to our house to fix

I know most people just use cellphones for all their calls now with their landline just being a backup but my family still has some important things go to the home phone, like medical-related calls. You know, shit from doctor's offices and whatnot. So we just had like a good few days worth of time where we didn't have any of that get to us at all.