VoLTE and SIP do indeed retail a lot of the concepts of circuit switched. The challenge is that now you have the complexity of (seemingly invariably) a Telco managing a k8s stack on an OS they don't understand, and which has hundreds of CVEs per month they aren't patching. The failure modes of VoLTE/SIP are also a load more complex than CS domain issues - IMS interop issues and XML parsing delights await!

So I guess it's not only about getting off the internet - there is a real shift in complexity in these more modern stacks too.

I think you just described how the PSTN used to run, except this way has more layers.

That stuff is lead-sheathed, isn't it?

I haven't ever gotten into it myself, but I had a DSL connection that would go wonky on sunny evenings due to an increase in reception of a nearby AM radio transmitter that drowned out the useful signals. (Amusingly, the hardware on my end provided charts that pinned down the frequency perfectly.)

That circuit had lead sheathed cable for part of its path. After one call to retentions, I had an AT&T convention at my house once or twice per week.

They were all in uniforms, driving fancy logo'd trucks. They all failed to make it work correctly.

Until one day, some dude with facial piercings who was dressed like me in jeans and a black tshirt showed up. I don't know what back office they pulled this guy out of, but he insisted that this was his problem now, that he was the most qualified person to correct it, and that he would be working on it until it was identified and fixed, and that he would begin as soon as he went back to get a bucket truck.

I don't know what all he got into. He worked until well after dark. And then he came back to the door and pronounced with great confidence that he had found an issue with some old lead sheathed cable and corrected it, and that this would absolutely resolve my problem.

And it did. 10/10 stability after that.

(Shoulda kept his contact info. He'd have been a good one to hire.)

Only your neighbourhood needs to have an outage for your neighbourhood to have an outage. Nobody's saying it's okay if 911 goes down as long as it's still up for some people in the world.

Perhaps not completely global, but there have been some extremely widespread outages (usually from DNS or BGP misconfiguration).

- 2019: Verizon/BGP routing issue

- 2021: Verizon/FIOS routing issue

- 2021: Fastly CDN outage

- 2021: Comcast: San Francisco backbone outage

- 2021: Akamai: Edge DNS outage

- 2022: Rogers telecom routing issue

- 2023: Cloudflare: DNSSec expired certificates triggered an outage

- 2025: Cloudflare: core proxy outage

It doesn’t give you what POTS used to give you - several days of battery backup that kept the phone system working in the event of power failure. I remember the huge racks of lead-acid batteries in the old exchange buildings

There was that time when .com and .net were corrupted for 4 hours, and the death of Michael Jackson crashed Twitter, AIM, and Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_outage#List

Yes. This switch off doesn't somehow miraculously delete the copper cables, it just switches off a particular service offered on those cables.

However the service you're describing is not ADSL, in which the DSL endpoint is in the exchange where all of an area's copper cables met but instead VDSL where the nearby local cabinet processes the DSL signals and is itself provided with fibre.

With VDSL the copper cable is maybe moving your Internet 100 metres, with ADSL it might be several kilometres, and so ADSL can't do 30 down 8 up, the most it's going to try is something like 12 down 2 up.

Edited to add:

In principle you could imagine a technology which goes "Wait a minute, this is a direct exchange line and the exchange is one block from here, I'll try 100Mbps" but ADSL is not that technology. What we actually do is either put VDSL in the exchange and give these people VDSL or run actual fibre to them if it's perceived that they'd be willing to pay for faster Internet. A friend lives a short distance from our exchange and bleated for years about ADSL being all that was available until (this is years ago now) I got sick of it and made him fill out the precise line diagnostic and of course it says yes he can have VDSL. Beliefs can be sticky, he probably checked the very first time he whined about it, and then five years later he was still running off that no-longer true belief.

It's not that much about WiFi access point, it's about the provider infrastructure congestion (cell towers), and how they prioritize 4G/5G. They appear to prioritize 5G more, and they are happy to sell 5G to people who've just bought a poor speed 4G from them.

In some locations fiber connections are not available, the LTE/4G/5G is the only home internet connection that mobile companies offer. You don't know what speeds you get before you buy the specific provider service. Not many people will experiment with various providers or alternative technologies.

US providers used to have cellular data caps on their mainstream plans to hold down usage and therefore their spending on capacity upgrades. At $10/GB people learn fast to limit their usage, far faster than any ad campaign. Providers now have more capacity and fixed wireless is their way of monetizing idle capacity. They don't allow fixed wireless sign ups in congested areas.

An awareness campaign won't help. The problem is that people get some shitty router/AP provided for free by their ISP which they set up at the far end of the house on the same channel as fifty other shitty ISP-provided routers in range and then complain about their TikTok videos stalling. Once they switch to 4G all their problems go away, so they stay with 4G because that "works" and WiFi "doesn't work".

They're not perfectly good if they can't make emergency calls.

Best efforts sits at the top of the efforts hierarchy in contract law. It asks for more than “reasonable efforts,” which calls for sensible steps, and more than “commercially reasonable efforts,” which measures conduct against industry norms. A party bound by a best efforts clause is expected to exhaust available avenues, not just pursue the obvious ones.

The clause acknowledges that success depends on variables nobody fully controls: market conditions, regulatory approvals, third-party cooperation. So instead of promising a result, the party promises effort of a particular quality. Courts then evaluate that effort after the fact, which is where things get complicated.

From https://fedlaws.org/best-efforts-standard-in-contracts-ucc-r...