On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:59:58 GMT, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:

Too_Many_Tools wrote:

And it precludes anyone who wants to buy your home in the future from
having a hardwired line....very bad...I won't be buying your house.

Who cares if you want, or don't want to buy a particular house?
Sooner or later the copper is coming out of all high density residential
areas. It was in the planning stages in the early '80s, and as the ROI
has improved, it is now being implemented. If FIOS is available in your
area, it will be the only service available at some time in the future.

What house will you buy then, or do you plan on living in a cardboard
box?

Thanks for the warning - if they ever try this on us, I get it in
writing that they leave us one line coming in on good old Copper, and
going straight back to the C.O. with no pair gain in the middle that
doesn't have permanently installed generator backup.

I don't care how high-tech they want to be, you NEED at least one
Copper POTS pair to your residence to get the 99.999% reliability
needed for the burglar alarm dialer, and for emergency calls.

There's no way in hell that they can match the 99.999% reliability
with any sort of pair-gain or FiOS schemes - too many remote equipment
points that only have batteries good for a few hours.

The local phone companies don't own enough portable generators to
power up all the affected boxes in any widespread emergency - they'll
be lucky to keep the Central Offices and larger Remote Switching Units
up, anything that affects less than a few hundred customers simply
won't rank high enough.

The generators they have will take days to deploy - some of them
they'll have to park generator equipped trucks there instead. And
then they won't have the personnel to run around refueling them
daily...

-- Bruce --