On Feb 14, 9:33 pm, larry wrote:
mm wrote:
To alt.home.repair:

Did dial-up ever cause a shortage of phone lines? I never heard that,
but I am surprised if the phone companies had the capacity to fulfill
maybe a 50 to 300% increase in demand over the course of 10 years,
from soon after dial-up's startup to its peak. There are people who
spent maybe a half hour a day on the phone before the net, who must
have spent 12 hours a day on the phone/modem after the net. Combined
with all those who only used it for an hour extra, that's an enormous
increase.

When I first got dialup, there weren't that many ways to use the Net,
I didn't have that as many ways as one might have. So I was only on
an hour or two a day. And even when I got more uses, I tried to stay
on no more than maybe 3 hours to not tie up the phone lines. But I'm
sure most people are not that considerate.

A lot of people have gone to cable now, but there was a period were
20, 40, 80? million people had dial-up and they stayed on for hours
and hours, maybe all day. (Now that I know usage has slacked off, and
I've never heard of shortages, I've stayed on for 36 hours once, for
some reason I forget. And other days 12 hours.)

Cnversely, is there now a lot of excess capacity on phone-only lines,
now that many people have switched to cable? Doesn't even
switching to DSL end up using new central station hardware, leaving
old phone-only hardware unused?

dsl "rides" on existing phone cable. and with folks using
dsl and cable, the need for phone LINES for internet have
dropped.

but there still are big problems with phone NUMBERS, there
just weren't enough for all the new uses (cellphones, faxes,
and other data devices). most of the US has gone to
mandatory 10 digit dialing and 10,000 number blocks are no
longer handed out to new phone companies. even so, plans
are in place to go to four digit area codes when the number
combinations available finally run out.

-larry / dallas- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -


Dial up internet never caused a shortage of physical lines. The
increased use of second/additional lines for internet, fax, etc did
cause numbers to be used up to the point that more exchanges and area
codes were needed. And except for the analog line between your house
and the central office, the vast majority of phone traffic has been on
digital fiber backbone for decades. Most people don't realize this
and think that only with VOIP is their phone call handled as digital
data. In fact, whether you use your ordinary land line with Verizon
or VOIP with a cable company, the voice is digitized at your central
office, transmitted digitally to wherever it;s going, then converted
back to analog at the destination CO. The essential difference is
the traditional land line establishes a guaranteed end to end digital
connection with voice sampled at 8khz and each sample guaranteed to
arrive at the other end at exactly that rate and sequence because it
gets assigned its own time slot in the network. With VOIP, the
digital sample is packetized and routed just like data from a
website. Which is why VOIP still has quality issues as compared to a
tradional line.

The main attraction in going to VOIP had nothing really to do with
superior technology or doing something radically different. Instead,
it was a way of avoiding tarrifs and opened up another route to
competition.