Jon Brodkin has a detailed op-ed (“When the Landline Is a
Lifeline” about the landline v. WiFi debate on p A23 of the New York Times
today Thursday, June 5, 2014, p. A23, link
here.
Brodkin offers arguments that in remote areas, conventional
landlines (or fiber-optic) can turn out to be reliable, especially for
contacting emergency services, than cellular services and Internet phone. He talks about prolonged power outages. True, conventional phone lines don’t depend
on the same power source, but physical destruction (and falling trees) can
bring down conventional lines, too. And remember the plot lines of most “noir”
mystery movies predicated on rural murders: cut the phone lines first. Wireless service has the advantage that it
can’t be attacked at the location of a particular residential target. (Along these lines, it’s better if home
security systems are connected to central monitoring by cellular wireless than
land lines.)
He mentions that the FCC, in the tangential but different
issue of net neutrality, still hasn’t come around to reclassifying broadband as
a telecommunications, rather than information service (the latter is what
really matters the most to me in practice).
He also discusses compatibility problems (in connection to fax or to
emergency services) of some VoIP and Voice Link.
When I returned to Virginia in 2003, I found my mother had
gone to ATT for her land service for a better rate. I got cable and high speed Internet quickly,
then on separate lines. In February 2005,
a freak storm caused a neighbor’s tree limb to bring down the landline but not
the cable line. It took three days to
get the landline back up because ATT had to go through cumbersome channels with
Verizon.
Comcast Xfinity usually encourages customers to switch landline
to digital voice, which makes landline service more vulnerable to cable service
outages than they were before, when stand alone.