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Filling in the gaps left by your old phone

Imagine standing in your kitchen. Or your garage. Or the front hallway of your house.

Now imagine calling someone on their cell phone and trying to talk from that location, for a whole year. Practical limitations on your part aside, how would the technology hold up for such an experience? Would your cellular connection work so reliably that, in the entire year, you would not lose service for more than five minutes and 15 seconds?

If so, then congratulations. Assuming you’re correct, your national cell service has achieved “five 9s,” meaning it works as expected 99.999 percent of the time.

Does that sound like a ridiculously high standard? Maybe. But it’s the standard that older landline phone systems have been expected to meet for decades.

Now ask yourself the same question about your home Internet connection. Do you experience the reliability of five nines there? I don’t. I doubt many of my American friends and neighbors do.

That leaves us, at least temporarily, at the heart of a complicated technological problem that will likely come to a head sooner rather than later. Our old landlines are going away. Plain Old Telephone Service, or POTS as it’s called within the telecommunications industry, works great for its intended purpose, but it doesn’t do many of the things we want our modern communications systems to do, such as transmit high-speed video. definition. efficiently to all the screens in our new digital homes. It’s also expensive to maintain all that ultra-reliable but outdated equipment, not to mention countless thousands of miles of indoor and outdoor wiring, almost all of it made of copper.

Therefore, phone carriers are trying to get out of the business of providing POTS as quickly as possible. Businesses usually can’t just go offline, even if they wanted to; in most cases, state legislatures must revise or remove mandates that make landline service the “carrier of last resort,” available to almost anyone who wants it. Companies like AT&T and Verizon are pushing states to make such changes, setting the stage for removing POTS from their line of services.

Meanwhile, most consumers have already moved away from POTS. Internet-based phone service is rapidly gaining market share over fixed lines, especially when companies offer it in combination with discounted broadband and cable. Many households (especially those headed by millennials) don’t have any home phones as such, relying solely on cell service. Only about 10 percent of American homes have POTS service today. It’s safe to assume that many are headed by people like my mother and father-in-law, who are in their 80s and 90s. POTS is literally a business that will die of old age.

However, our digital future is not entirely bright and shiny. In most situations, we’re prepared to live with communications services that are faster, cheaper, and more sophisticated than their predecessors, even if it means our service is somewhat less reliable than the phones we’ve seen teens use in “Bye Bye Birdie.”

But this is a trade we don’t want to make if someone breaks into our house, or if there’s a fire, or if life-support medical equipment fails in the middle of the night. Most alarm systems and medical devices have been designed to use communications services that have POTS level reliability. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service may not be enough.

Home security company ADT only guarantees that their conventional equipment will work on POTS or Managed Facility Voice Network (MFVN) systems. On its website, ADT advises customers switching from POTS to VoIP service to call first to make sure the service they want will work with their existing security system. Vonage users do not need to apply, although services from many cable companies qualify because the companies maintain their own networks and provide professional installation. Some newer alarm and medical equipment can use cellular networks, but millions of older installations would require upgrades or replacement.

Many factors contribute to the reliability of POTS and the relatively incomplete performance of newer technology. One important distinction is that your old phone drew power directly from the phone company, not from the wall outlet. If your house suffered a blackout, your phone was usually still working. Most Internet-based systems shut down when the lights go out, because the phones and cable modems they connect to rely on your home’s electricity. Even if you have battery backup for your modem and router, your Wi-Fi is only as good as the cable that connects it. If your VoIP provider is dependent on the power company, as most of them are, you’ll be out of business when your neighborhood goes dark, even if you’ve taken steps to prepare.

However, cell phones continue to work as long as nearby cell towers are on, which is the case most of the time. There have been exceptions during major disasters, notably Hurricane Sandy, but those are situations where even POTS service could fail. Cell towers also make it easier and faster to restore service over a wide area.

Of course, when those towers are fewer and farther away, they may be less useful. Outside of metropolitan areas, cell phone towers are becoming scarcer and 3G and 4G capacity is limited. Internet connections fast enough to support VoIP service can also be difficult to come by in the same areas, as federal regulations currently do not guarantee Internet access in the same way that POTS have traditionally guaranteed. Rural communities can get into trouble if they are forced to cut the wire, or copper wire, without such regulations keeping up with the state of modern technology.

POTS also had its own vulnerabilities. A burglar only needed to cut a low-voltage cable to disable an alarm system. Falling trees can bring down phone lines just as easily as power lines. A central office breaker failure, though extremely rare, could put an entire city or neighborhood in a large city out of service.

While the end of POTS is inevitable, there are still some hurdles. There will be some bureaucratic resistance to the POTS change. Expect commercial resistance, too: Alarm system providers who made their money from monthly monitoring fees don’t universally applaud the move to VoIP, which exposes their customers to competing marketing. But it’s going to happen, and it probably will happen relatively soon.

When it does, I imagine we’ll see hybrid systems emerge to handle the gaps left in our infrastructure. For example, a secure home will likely have its own backup power source, either from a generator or battery bank that can keep VoIP going for up to 24 hours, plus a secondary connection to a cellular network that can be used for communication if cable or fiber internet fails.

Such redundancy can lead us back to five nines in practice, even if our immature new technologies are as prone to swooning as the teenagers who fawned over Conrad Birdie.