telco technology rant

[Western]

I'm thinking it comes down the the all (once) mighty dollar.

Seems it's a good set up to control who gets what long distance dollar and who doesn't. Same applies to the whole system as far as updating is concerned. It's only going to be done if it's "economically feasible", again, the All mighty dollar.

[MikeInEburg]

You're right that this is not a technology issue... In Verizon Maryland you can dial a local call with 10 or 11 digits (with or without the leading 1), but a toll call requires 11 digits.
Mike

[Bedlam]

Just try dealing with Fair point sometime. You'll find that its back to stone age.

[Soundguy]

Yep.. I live on the southern boundry of my county, and the next county is actually just a thin strip .. a couple blocks wide at that point.

I can literally toss a rock out my back door and whatever it hits is a long distance call for me. If I make a good drive with a golf ball out of my pasture I acan actually get it intot he 2nd county over!.. now.. as for north.. I can call something like 60 miles north and it's all local.. go figure!

soundguy

Originally Posted by buckeyefarmer

A Telco Rant, I'm in !!!

It depends on how theTelco builds their routing tables for the switch. most modern switches could be programmed to avoid this annoyance, older switches couldn't.

on my cell phone I don't need to dial 1 for "long distance" because all US numbers are "local". on my landline, I live in an area where you have to dial area code for local numbers, and if you don't dial 1 for a long distance number, you get the famous recording. With the demise of landlines, they should remove the whole long distance thing, and make all calls within the country a "local" call. It's long distance for me to call my kids school just down the road, but I can call 20 miles past it as a local call, makes no sense.

[Soundguy]

Originally Posted by MikeInEburg

You're right that this is not a technology issue... In Verizon Maryland you can dial a local call with 10 or 11 digits (with or without the leading 1), but a toll call requires 11 digits.
Mike

Whether it's cost prohibitive or not.. it's still a technology issue.

sad fact remains the technology is there to make the call go thru as dialed and let the computer sort out who gets what money.

remember back when you had to set dip switche\s on computer hardware to configure it before plugging it in to your computer?

then they moved on to software configuration setup..

then poof... plug and play and it just automatically gets figured out on the fly at bootup.

then fast forward a bit and you have hot swapable stuff.

soundguy

[Soundguy]

IMHO.. with broadband developing as fast as it is.. landline operators need to be getting their act together. I know plenty of areas that have wi-fi.. or get good broadband signal in places that is still on POTS and has no high speed access.. or even high speed dialup due to the 3-4 decades old copper pair and load coils every block...

soundguy

[marimus]

Sometimes those clunky old computers work in our favour.

About 10 years ago we went from 7 digit local phone numbers to 8 digits, and 2 digits for area code. When the change came in they told us we didn't need to use the area code anymore if we were dialling within that area, you could still dial it, you just didn't need to.

Anyway, for about 6 months you could dial anywhere in the state and pay only the local call rate if you left the area code off - NO LONG DISTANCE CHARGES

Those still dialling the area code had to pay long distance, which is why I think it took the telco so long to catch on

[NuBota]

JMHO - but POTS will get eventually get upgraded to fiber (Verizon FiOS, etc) but us more "rural" folks will be on copper probably another 100 years

Fiber will go into the denser areas, but the problem comes in for areas where farmland is sold and carved into 3 + acre lot communities (like mine). A 100acre farm that only had one phone now has to support 30. Still not worth running fiber, so they cobble more stuff together on the antiquated, overloaded, POTS.

When we moved in -newly built house - had horrible phone service. Noisy static and even some party line action. Twelve service calls in two years and they could resolve it. Dial-up was useless (went satellite). Paying $50 month plus long distance.

Surprisingly, a couple years later, cable rolled in - so I switched to VOIP. Not the greatest, but better than the phone company and half as much

So my take is telco and all other broadband companies will essentially become the "phone companies". That's why Verizon has the big fiber push going and everyone is jumping on the VOIP bandwagon

What I am curious to see is how broadband carriers handle VOIP. I have Comcast cable broadband, but use Vonage for phone. Now Comcast offers VOIP and tries to get me to switch. Since they own the network, I am curios to see if they will try to "force" me to switch to theirs.

Should get interesting - could be very competitive, which should be good for all. But the concern will be for folks that don't get the broadband capability for a long time. It will create a serious gap.

Sorry for the ramble - just my uninformed perspective

[Soundguy]

Funny thing.. I have sprint broadband on my work pc ( NO DSL SERVICED from the stinkin telco available here! ).. and I get the same godo 1.5 meg speed as my wired dsl service at home.. voip works fine as well.. mind you this is signal dependent.. pull under a bridge/tunnle or thru thick trees and signal drops a bit and thruput drops..

soundguy

[Western]

Soundguy, what did you say?? There was to much "Static"