Customers suffer withdrawal as phone companies drop land lines
Pockets of country most affected suffer from poor cell coverage
MANTOLOKING, N.J. — Robert Post misses his phone line.
Post, 85, has a pacemaker that needs to be checked once a month by phone. But the copper wiring that once connected his home to the rest of the world is gone, and the phone company refuses to restore it.
In October 2012, superstorm Sandy pushed the sea over Post’s neighbourhood in Mantoloking, N.J., leaving hundreds of homes wrecked. The homes are being rebuilt, but Verizon doesn’t want to replace washed-away lines and waterlogged underground cables. Phone lines are outdated, the company says.
Mantoloking is one of the first places in the U.S. where the traditional phone line is going dead. For now, Verizon, the country’s second-largest landline phone company, is taking the lead by replacing phone lines with wireless alternatives. But competitors including AT&T have made it clear they want to follow.
The number of U.S. phone lines peaked at 186 million in 2000. Since then, more than 100 million copper lines have been disconnected, according to trade group US Telecom. The lines have been supplanted by cellphones and Internet-based phone service offered by way of cable television and fibre optic wiring. Just one in four U.S. households will have a copper phone line at the end of this year, according to estimates from US Telecom. AT&T would like to turn off its network of copper land lines by the end of the decade.
For most, the phone line’s demise will have little impact. But there are pockets of the country where copper lines are still critical for residents. As a result, state regulators and consumer advocates are increasingly concerned about how the transition will unfold.
“The real question is not: Are we going to keep copper forever? The real question is: How are we going to handle this transition?” says Harold Feld, senior vicepresident of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based group that advocates for public access to the Internet and other communications technologies.
The elderly and people in rural areas, where cell coverage may be poor or nonexistent, will be most affected by disappearing phone lines, Feld says.
New York state regulators have given Verizon provisional permission to consider its wireless Voice Link boxes as stand-ins for regular phone service. Verizon technicians install the boxes with antennas and connect them to the home phone wiring. The home is then linked to Verizon’s wireless network. But the box doesn’t work with remote medical monitoring devices, home alarm systems or faxes. It can’t accept collect calls or connect callers with an operator when they dial 0. It also can’t be used with dial-up modems, creditcard machines or international calling cards. Now, to get his pacemaker checked, Post heads once a month to a friend’s home in the next town.
In Washington, the Federal Communications Commission is looking at an application from the country’s largest land line phone company, AT&T Inc. AT&T isn’t dealing with storm damage, so it has the leisure of taking a longer view. It wants to explore what a future without phone lines will look like by starting trials in yet-to-bedecided areas. AT&T would like to have all its land-line phone equipment turned off by 2020.