Posted on 03/03/2014 10:30:55 AM PST by chessplayer
The Walker County town of Carbon Hill has been selected by AT&T for a national technology trial that will help the telecommunications giant determine the best way to move all of its customers to internet-based phone services and away from traditional copper-wire landlines.
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
Government cant listen on land lines as good as they can on wireless.
/tinfoilhatON/ Don’t fall for it! It’s an NSA information gathering test! /tinfoilhatOFF/
“Landlines still work in power outages in case of emergencies. Cell phones don’t.”
Not necessarily.
In large storms, if power lines go down, phone lines will go down with them, As long as your mobile phone is charges, most cell towers have back-up power and if one tower goes down, there are other towers available to handle to load.
Given the state of telephone systems, I doubt that even landlines will work in the event of large power outages.
They could have done this way back in ‘99 but telecoms got the Fed to kill it.
Now its too late and landlines are going to die like VCR’s.
I seem to recall that it was the cell phones that were functioning and the landlines that weren't in the katrina mess.
This is not necessarily wireless.
Our phone uses the fiber optic cable that runs to our home.
The downside is that if there is a power outage that lasts longer than the UPS that powers the fiber link is able to handle (about 4 hours), the phone becomes unusable.
It has only happened once due a breaker that kicked overnight, but it’s a bit disconcerting to get up in the morning and see that you have no telephone service.
Cell phones were spotty at best after katrina. The phone companies brought in COWS as soon as they could. COWS — Cell On Wheels. Portable cell towers.
Voice was rather spotty after katrina, but for the most part texting worked well.
We don’t have a cell where we live so we need to have a landline. In fact, our cordless phone won’t work when there’s a power outage so we keep a corded phone on hand as well, in case of emergencies. It works when the power is out.
What they cannot hear, they can see.
You Have To SEE This......
Hard to disappear in a crowd….The Feds can see you everywhere….
Pick on a small part of the crowd click a couple of times — wait — click a few more times and see how clear each individual face will become each time. You can also use the Zoom In and Zoom Out on the left of the picture screen.
This picture was taken with a 70,000 x 30,000 pixel camera (2100 Mega Pixels.) These cameras are not sold to the public and are being installed in strategic locations. The camera can identify a face among a multitude of people. Place your computer’s cursor in the mass of people and double-click a couple times. Scary sharp!! George Orwell must be smiling somewhere out there.
http://www.gigapixel.com/image/gigapan-canucks-g7.html
Truthfully, if you can get your hands on old, hand cranked Army field phones that connect with common batteries and ordinary copper wire, they may be worth a lot. Unless the spies put a coil around them, or directly tap them, they are pretty secure. Even more so if they don’t know you have them.
I have Comcast for my landline-phone service; and it is, indeed, Internet-based. But if the animating desire is "to move all...away from traditional copper-wire landlines," I am wondering just how this might affect me.
just the opposite. Landlines are fixed and a piece of cake to monitor as long as there is a court order. Landline is din+asaur technology. This is garden variety modernization not some conspiracy.
The cell towers were all down/non functioning at my parents. For about 2w prior to their area getting a COWS. No cell service including texting for 2w, no landline and no power for 6w.
Maybe. I still seem to remember that the landlines were toast due to so many downed wires. I do know that around here in the ice storm of 2011, there were no cell phone outages (except as the batteries ran down) but a number of lineline outages due to tress knocking down wires. My biggest issue with cell vs landline is that cell phone voice quality seem to be less consistent than land line voice quality. For one thing it is dependent on the handset you have, and some of the cheaper ones just plain suck. For another it depends on the network traffic in your location and at the time you're making tha call. It appears that heavy traffic usage can degrade the signal. Another point I have against cell phones is the constant rapid obsolesence of the handsets.
The new system offers TV/web/phone on one cable...
Careful —
The cell phone network stays up during a power failure.
So does the landline network.
Both, until the batteries run out.
The ‘old’ phone company network is the PSTN - the public switched telephone network. Heavily relying on 1:1 circuits and lots of hardware.
The new network is all “internet Protocol” - no telephony switches at all; and it’s predominantly software-based. It’ll be cheaper and faster to upgrade and change — AND more resilient to damage.
The cell phone networks are all moving to all IP as well. The cool stuff of today - LTE - will become LTE+ and it’ll ALL be internet protocol.
This is nothing more than a test-bed of future architectures.
Not to worry.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.