The sensible move would be to deregulate, at least as far as requirements that pertain to obsolete technologies.  In the era of mobile telephones, no one cares if the landline is still working in a power outage.  Telephone and cable companies (as if there would be a difference once both fully transition to fiber) want to retire all that copper wire.  The remaining "old" customers will eventually be moved to multitenant fiber terminals that serve a neighborhood or a building, and the big 1000-pair cables can finally come down.  My street has several of those since I live near a central office.  (Thankfully, my house is 250 feet from the street with a lot of trees in between, and my drops are partially underground, so I don't have to look at them.)

The truly sensible move would be to deregulate nearly everything, but governmentals need a reason to exist.  I'd prefer to have them doing things like forcing everyone to deploy IPv6 instead of forcing them to keep self-powered wireline services running.

at least you can rely on copper in most emergencies...

and you can run a small LED light off the line too, so you dont have to sit in the dark.

Sat Mar 11 2023 04:46:25 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Hacking the Motorola or TelLabs ONT to provide hours of battery backup for DATA

 them to keep self-powered wireline services running.

The last time we had an actual copper-backed phone service was our house in Smithsburg, MD (2004-2008).  In 2008 we moved to Converse, TX and every place we've lived since has used a VoIP service for phones.  Converse was the only time we had fiber and it was AWESOME.  Since then, we've only had cable.  Currently, we have this weird 4-wire thing in an RJ-11 connector, somehow it's still AT&T U-verse like the fiber was, it's just not AT&T U-verse Fiber.  Ya, we lose landline phone service when the UPS fails after a long power failure.

We don't really care about losing the landline phone service, we really care about losing internet.  As long as we still have the webternetz during a prolonged power failure, we're good.  Remember the Big Freeze of 2021?  I do, I was there.  4 days of no power and 2 days of no water.  Had webternetz the entire time, so could charge phones and warm up in car.  We saw fuel delivery trucks at most of the nearby cell towers as the power grid was saying "fuck you I quit".

The minor freeze of 2022 was less bad.  Both of the freezes kinda hit my UPS battery hard, it needs a new one.

Really would like the U-verse Fiber we had in that brand-new development we lived at in Converse.

Ya, the connection here is 170Mbit, yet for whatever reason no TCP stream ever goes over 10MB/s (yes, bytes).  At least with Crapcast in Maryland, I could hit some truly spectacular download speeds from Steam - peak was 250MB/s, and Steam only uses a single TCP stream for each game download. :drool:

Tue Mar 14 2023 19:27:12 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Ooooh, you've got the "old" U-Verse, which is fiber to the neighborhood and then VDSL to each home in the neighborhood. It maxes out at a couple of Mbps, right? Eventually they're going to need to expand the fiber network to reach every home. It seems that fiber, specifically PON, has finally "won". Ten years from now, copper will be a thing of the past, and there won't really be any difference between a "phone company" and a "cable company".

I've gotta give some credit to AT&T though -- they do the toxic video feed ("cable") using multicast instead of an RFoG overlay. They did it right.

Really would like the U-verse Fiber we had in that brand-new development we lived at in Converse.

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, you ought to be getting decent service in the not too distant future.

It has become apparent to me lately that the broadband wars have ended, and PON has won.  Every provider has either deployed PON or is getting ready to deploy it.  Even the legacy "cable companies" are finally starting to get on the bandwagon, because coaxial cable has reached its limit.  Maybe they could squeeze more out of it by going above 1 GHz, but that would break so much existing infrastructure that the cost of upgrading it would approach the cost of just moving to fiber.  DSL maxes out at a few hundred Mbps if you use two pairs and are within a stone's throw of the hut.

The trend towards all-fiber networks, like many other trends, was accelerated by the bogeyman that sent everyone home in 2020 and turned our homes into offices and classrooms.  Massive use of two-way video, combined with homes full of bandwidth-hungry devices gobbling down streaming services, created even more demand for bandwidth.

The above graph (Data from OECD; graph by Stephen Shankland/CNET) shows the trend away from copper and towards fiber in 38 developed nations.  (Ironically it begins in 2009, the year I first had it, hehe.)  Fiber is the clear winner and is here to stay.  The beauty of PON is that there is no active equipment in the distribution network, only fiber optic cable and passive fiber splitters.  This makes it future-proof.  Consider the Verizon FiOS plant: they upgraded from BPON to GPON and is now upgrading its entire footprint to NG-PON2 without replacing any equipment in the streets.  Moreover, different generations of PON can coexist on the same glass if they are using different wavelengths.

The equipment is getting so small and so cheap that it's going everywhere.  Even some tiny municipal fiber providers are popping up.  Optical line terminals are now down to the size of a 1U pizza box if you are only serving a few hundred subscribers from a particular point of presence.  Optical network terminals have been compressed into an SFP module!  And the fiber itself is now cheaper than copper, since it's made from the two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust (oxygen and silicon).

So here's what we can expect:  everything will go to PON over the next decade, sub-1Gbps speeds will be considered as outdated as dialup, and eventually there won't be any such thing as a phone company or a cable company because they're all delivering IP over PON.

Until the greenies figure it out..

Fri Mar 31 2023 02:52:53 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

  And the fiber itself is now cheaper than copper, since it's made from the two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust (oxygen and silicon).