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Landlines – Tell me, how does this end?
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Wall Street analysts continue to obsess over landline losses. Stop the madness already! "Tell me, how does this end?" is the real question worth examining.
Voice phone line losses have been on a downward spiral for years, but every quarter the numbers increase, there's more gnashing of teeth, pounding of the chest, more gloom and doom. It's fair to say that for the next five years there still will be more landline losses. Households are economizing by switching to cell phones and cable triple-play bundles with VoIP tucked in, while Millenials aren't even considering traditional voice service.
Ask the hard question: What fraction of wireline's traditional consumer customer base will have home phone lines in five years?
Millenials will say "Zero," but they need to be forgiven for their youth and inexperience. Cellular service is not universal or ubiquitous by any stretch of the imagination and for various safety and comfort reasons, the old POTS RJ-11 still has a good bit of legacy left to it.
Is the real answer fifty percent? Twenty percent? I don't know, but it would be interesting to have AT&T, Qwest and Verizon provide an answer and the logic behind it. Rural carriers (see Embarq/CenturyTel) will have a slightly different answer since cell towers aren't as ubiquitous outside of the Big City.
In other words, tell me how this ends.
At some point, losses will slow, if not level off to a steady pace. Farther down the road, phone companies will provide actual incentives for people to turn off their old POTS lines and switch over to broadband or wireless voice alternatives, because it will be too expensive and too much of a headache to keep the old gear in service.
Free phone service for a year in exchange for turning off your copper? The day may come sooner than anyone thinks.
VoIP has a big role to play in home communication service if femtocells don't squish out SIP handsets with "Lite" web browsers. Casabi has been the leader in innovating SIP home phone services and did a deal with Embarq earlier this year; they were also flirting with AT&T two years ago at CES.
So, tell me, how does this end?
- Doug
Comments
Posted by arclight | October 30, 2008 - 12:22pm
Until we see how the packets for 911 calls get prioritized over the X-box and pornography traffic, I think that standard landlines continue to last a long time. A lot of folks thinking VoIP miss that small detail (!). What's the industry answer on that?
Posted by Telco Engineer | December 23, 2008 - 1:59am
Most people that make comments on Landline loss have no real understanding of telephony connectivity. Without wires - you have no cell towers. Many of them are now being fiber fed, however most still have T1 lines backhaul to the Network. And True- wireless has it advantages in mobility, however, you will never have the reliablity of a direct wire connection as you do with a landline. Whether it be copper or fiber- we will never see an end of a wired connection to a home or business. Yes, we will see an end to the POTS line, but it will merely be replaced by a high-bandwidth IP circuit. This is already evident with Verizon's FIOS and AT&T's U-Verse projects. With circuits capable of upto 80 Mps (that 80% cap ratio) at 2000 ft per Node(Copper) and 100 Mps for Fiber! Try to get that speed to your PC at home on Wireless! It really annoys me to no end with all of the idiots that write articles on this subject, but don't even have a clue about what they are talking about!!!!
Posted by Doug Mohney | December 23, 2008 - 10:29am
Let me describe this as an over/under...
While an individual copper circuit may be able to go up to 80 Mbps, that would be an OVERperform in my book that might not scale. It looks like AT&T and others are looking at pair-bonding DSL circuits (which, hey, also makes use of all that residential copper they lit up back in the '80s and '90s) to squeeze higher speeds out.
Meanwhile, 100 Mbps for fiber is, if anything an UNDER-perform. Verizon's first-generation FiOS gear is capable (with some careful network handling) of 200 Mbps data speeds, and the more recent builds are GPON, if memory serves.
4G wireless speeds are coming up to first generation DSL speeds; you could argue that EVDO rev A is in that ball park as well. For WIDESPEAD deployments AND loading, LTE will likely reach second generation DSL speeds.
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