First post, by keenmaster486
- Rank
- l33t
I was reading this thread: a little retrospective
It reminded me of something I found out the other day:
The FCC recently stopped requiring telecom companies to maintain their POTS lines, or Plain Old Telephone Service.
This sent me into a rabbit hole reading stories from technicians online. Basically, they're not fixing those old copper lines when they go down any more. Whatever's there right now is all that's left. Some are taking steps to actively remove those lines.
The replacement service for businesses and home users is VoIP.
It will be a long time before those copper lines themselves are gone altogether, given the existence of DSL service over them, but the industry is inexorably moving towards total landline death, like a stumbling zombie chanting "must digitize".
When I was a kid, I used to dial wrong numbers on purpose to get the "this number is not in service" message. I tried doing that on my parents' landline recently: nothing. It gives you the busy signal. Sometimes it will make a different beeping noise, one I haven't heard before, if you dial enough 0's. I cannot get the system to react in the ways that it used to react. It's like it's been reduced to a barebones shell of its former self. The whole thing is run by digital switchboards, anyway, and chances are somewhere along the way my voice is converted into a stream of bits before being sent over the internet. If I make a local call to another landline, is the connection even purely analog any more? I doubt it.
The relevancy to this forum is this: the old analog telephone network was a fixture in the early days of computing and home computing, all the way up to the late dial-up era in the 2000s. People made calls for internet service, BBS connections, peer to peer modems, whatever you wanted to do... your telephone number was what your IP address is today, and it was all done with modems over a purely analog system that was a marvel of electromechanical engineering. This system is on its last legs, where it does still exist, and is no longer the marvel that it once was, given how dwarfed it has been in scope and bandwidth by the fiber-based global internet network, which is vastly more complex on a micro scale, if not on a macro scale, and more standardized. However, when it was actively maintained as the world's primary communications system, it was dead reliable.
I recommend this YouTube channel for a wealth of information on the old telephone network: https://www.youtube.com/@evandoorbell4278
Someday POTS will be gone in the form we know it today.
What are some ways that we can keep alive the types of fun experiences people had using it back in the day without the corporate and government sponsored network to ride on?
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.
