This assumes that anyone has maintained the 48V infrastructure, which doesn’t seem like something that will be feasible considering the insignificant quantity of customers using true copper landline service.

The other problem with customers preferring not to have landlines is that by the time they need them, it’s too late to convince them to buy a traditional telephone and plug it in. You are likely to be nursing home age if you still prefer having a landline. You can have amazing infrastructure but if nobody uses it, it’s useless.

What we really have now is cellular sites with their own infrastructure aiming to keep them operational during power outages.

Then we’ve also got various satellite services that are growing in capabilities day by day, and are built in to common devices like iPhones as an SOS method.

I’m not in the UK but my house was built relatively recently and it doesn’t have any telephone jacks. The theoretical benefits of a landline are entirely theoretical. The ship has thoroughly sailed.

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gumby a day ago | parent [-]

You put the battery in the RC and have a battery maintenance schedule. They do that today: the CO battery is just for phones within a few miles of the CO, so rural setups use distributed batteries. Ppl forget how much of California is quite remote and (to my pleasure) without mobile coverage.

I have copper service (buried) for the alarm system in my house in Palo Alto, powered by the CO. I will be sorry to lose it.

The cell ppl so have batteries in the bis and ter nodes but not long term power like the phone company has to do.

Satellite bandwidth is quite limited and uses a lot of power. It’s not really a solution, especially with consumer terminals. It’s just a handwave to get away with not dealing with the problems.

Overall this is a step backwards on safety. Telecoms MAHA

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mapontosevenths a day ago | parent | next [-]

My amateur radio friends used to sound paranoid when they talked about how it might be the last form of communication in an emergency. After all, I'd seen how overbuilt and reliable the PSTN was.

Now I wonder if maybe it's time to get licensed.

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Rychard a day ago | parent | next [-]

In a true emergency, I don't know that it matters whether or not you're licensed.

I agree though that getting licensed might be useful for knowing how to use it.

	▲	ale42 a day ago \| parent [-]
		> I agree though that getting licensed might be useful for knowing how to use it. That's the whole point IMHO. You need practice to properly use a radio, especially during an emergency.

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msla a day ago | parent | prev [-]

In an emergency, either actual emergency services will be using all of the bands and amateurs will be well-advised to shut up, or the military (official or bandit) will be and, again, amateurs will be well-advised to not make themselves targets. Some people get the odd ideas that the Big Ones will be more like Northridge in 1994 than Cambodia in 1970.

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Dylan16807 a day ago | parent [-]

Why would emergency services fill up the amateur bands?

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msla a day ago | parent [-]

Keeping everyone else quiet to remove the possibility of interference is just good sense. The Baofeng people alone would be a huge, unnecessary distraction.

	▲	cowlevel 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's a separate frequency band. Their equipment doesn't even support it. That's like saying when there's a plane crash, the airport has to get everyone to turn off WiFi so they can hear the planes better.

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toast0 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> You put the battery in the RC and have a battery maintenance schedule. They do that today: the CO battery is just for phones within a few miles of the CO, so rural setups use distributed batteries.

I don't know for sure about POTS, because the pricing was prohibitive, but my local telco certainly did not use batteries at the remote terminal to keep ADSL online... when utility power dropped, ADSL dropped instantly, even when the outages were under 10 seconds.

My local wireless telcos provide about 4-8 hours of wireless after utility power drops. Not great, but better than what I got from ADSL + voip.

	▲	ssl-3 a day ago \| parent [-]
		My neighborhood (along with most of the city) was without power for a couple of weeks following the 2012 derecho. I had VDSL at that time. The VRADs scattered around the city included a battery that worked for as long as it worked. But I never did discover how long those batteries would last, because AT&T brought portable generators out to supply power to their VRADs. I kept my end alive with the portable generator that I was using intermittently for everything else along with the backup battery that the modem came with. The VDSL circuit never dropped during those two weeks -- and yes, I read the logs afterward with some astonishment. :) (Since the RF environment was extremely quiet, wifi had fantastic range. I opened up an SSID for anyone within earshot to use and some folks actually did use it.) --- Fast forward a dozen or so years. When the power dips in my neighborhood, the cable network drops out with it. So, sure: I've got a small UPS for my little stack of network gear, but fat lot of good that does when there's nobody for it to talk to. And I've got ways to use LTE/5G as a backup, but the performance of the cell network also nosedives at that same time. It's not clear to me if that's due to a service interruption or instead due to everyone's pocket supercomputer switching from wifi to cellular data, but whatever the cause: It turns pretty useless. (I'm on FTTH fiber now but it's only been a week. We'll see how it does the next time there's a power issue.)