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.