Does anyone under 80 still have a land line? Or, maybe a better way to say it, is anyone intentionally keeping a land line in the modern era? Im 43 and wife is 40, we have never had one as adults, except the one assigned as part of DSL, but even then, no actual house phine.
Around here, there was no plan B until Starlink came along. Nobody bid on our general area for providing rural broadband, so in the future, if Starlink goes down, we are either driving to somewhere in cellular range or using signal fires or smoke signals.
Most of my neighbors are not only under 80 but have land lines. We've experienced outages that took all sorts of utilities off line. A few probably fall into the heavily prepared category.
Just got another letter today urging migration… saying discontinuance awaiting regulatory approval…
Just because they are pushing doesn't mean it will happen. The comments during the PUC hearing were not only negative, but very negative. I wrote a pretty stiff letter detailing not only their lack of responses to issues, but their active avoidance of investing in any sort of upgrades, as shared by many of their employees over the years.
If the PUC doesn't approve it, have you consider writing a letter on how underserved your specific neighborhood is?
My view is that they can drop copper after they pull fiber and get it working, and all the customers transitioned, but not a moment before.
Zero sympathy from me for our telco. They were even refusing to do short production runs on replacement DSL boards, and instead sending container loads of old boards to Canada for rework, leaving them without stock to do repairs in the central office or in the terminal boxes.
I wonder what Alexander Graham Bell would think of all of this.
All the best, Peter
