alt Hacker NewsAn interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.
Meanwhile, cell phone and VOIP services are "best effort."
The phone company put a pretty huge amount of effort into maintaining QoS (Lily Tomlin jokes aside) because there were consequences for not doing so. It makes sense that they would prefer to shed that responsibility.
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It’s really one of the biggest failures on all of our societies that there are not only clear QoS requirements but also clear and strictly enforced consequences, including for politicians and their lies and people having to pay for the things they support.
In some places in Europe, the home internet ADSL technology on the copper wires, the same as used for PSTN phones, delivers higher speed (realistically an order of a few Mbps, stable) compared to congested LTE/4G mobile networks (typical 1-3 Mbps). The mobile network providers don't guarantee minumim speeds in the contracts, and customers (typically older people) that move from ADSL to LTE/4G, are left with a degraded service without a possibility to object.
Our POTS provider here (Kansas) seems to have given up recently.
Over the last 2 years we've had to call in to get repairs done many times, and I don't know if we ever did in the 20 years before that.
And in the last couple months, our phones regularly quit working completely and we have to call in and go through lots of troubleshooting steps before the tech comes out and fixes the line half a mile away for the 10th time, only for it to quit working in another week or three.
> An interesting component of the switching off of POTS is that the quality of service requirements are different. POTS is regulated to require the phone company to maintain a certain legal quality of service with negative consequences for failing to do so.
Yeah we've had a similar thing happen in Australia. Most VoIP services require you to either tick a box or verbally waive one's rights to said requirements in regards to reliability and fault rectification timelines.
However, there hasn't been too much of an issue with transition to VoIP here, apart from the unreliability of some services they're being run on, and keeping emergency contact details up to date. The latter resulting in fines for providers here and there.
Mostly, it's just pushed mobile/cell services to the forefront, along with reliability concerns during major outages. (There have been a couple major outages to cellular/mobile connectivity where access to emergency services have been lost)
Surveyed usage of landlines for calls at home is about 12% here, down from about 54% in 2017.[1]
[1] https://www.acma.gov.au/publications/2026-02/report/communic...
That’s too bad, in California it’s all the same:
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/industries-and-topics/internet-and-p...
The economic incentives are different. AT&T was the monopoly phone company subject to rate-of-return regulation. The more they spent on CAPEX the more they could raise prices. So naturally they spared no expense in maximizing the reliability (99.999% uptime) and quality of their network.
Then cellphones and the Internet happened (as much as they fought it). Why invest in a dying industry? Now phones are used to send picture messages and get addicted to watching one short form video after another.
People value mobility and having one phone bill over toll quality voice. People get much more annoyed at "All circuits are busy. Please try again later." errors or 5 cents per minute than mushy call quality. Making phone calls from a car or walking on the street is always going to be noisier than at home.
The phone company was amazingly reliable, at least in the States.
In all of my decades I recall only one telephone outage one time, at home. A truck (or something) had snagged a line feeding the house. It was repaired less than an hour after reporting it.
And I'm nostalgic for that kind of reliability, but it's gone now.
I was chatting with a tech who was installing a new county 911 system a few weeks ago. There was a time, not so long ago, when 911 had been robust: Fixed circuits to multiple different areas (to walk around network issues). Slow, redundant, robust analog modems on leased lines for caller data and call control. Eventually, things like PRI or T1.
Either way, there were great racks of redundant gear at the 911 PSAP for managing calls.
But now? It's just VOIP over the public Internet. 911 calls get the same not-special class of service that posting this comment does. The huge gear-filled racks are gone. In their place is a router and a switch, and a collection of dispatch PCs.
(There's a backup IP connection, of course. This backup connection uses cellular data.)