This isn’t about internet. This is about landline telephone service and being able to call 911. For those that don’t remember, landline phones work even when the power is out. No big deal if you have a cell phone and service. Very big deal if you live in a mountainous region where you rely on WiFi at home due to bad phone signal and would have to get in a car to drive somewhere with service to get emergency help or, say, report a forest fire caused by power lines snapping.
In the landline era, AT&T agreed to be the provider of last resort and they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They got something in return. And even if “superior” technology exists, it’s not superior for “last resort” situations. One day, maybe we’ll all have satellite internet as a fallback on our mobile devices and landlines really will be obsolete. But that day isn’t today.
Excellent write up. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
This.
You’d be surprised how much of a place’s physical infrastructure depends on a physical line. Automated fire alerts for high rises, security alarms, remote access for gates and doors, backup phone connections. A lot of this still uses old physical lines because it is easy to fix and highly reliable.
Now consider the infrastructure needed for specialized services like EMS, police, secure and classified buildings, federal agencies, embassies, smart traffic signals. Shutting down a network like that has massive implications for anything in society that relies on it, which is well beyond your cell phone plan.
Meanwhile in Germany: Houses still getting copper internet cables this year (and probably the next 10 too).
Thanks, Kohl.
Literally. For those who don’t know it was Helmut Kohl (chancellor during the reunification) who stopped a 30-year project to lay fiber throughout Germany to instead favour copper wires to help his old pal Leo Kirch build up a private TV network to rival the mostly left leaning public broadcast. And I thought one of his family members owned a copper plant or so but I wasn’t able to find an article about that.
Same in Australia. The libnats (right-leaning) broke the fibre-optic rollout by claiming it would be too expensive, and replaced it in non-metro areas with wireless, claiming 25Mbps was adequate. They didn’t mention that slow internet would benefit the Murdoch -owned Foxtel satellite services. And here we are now with internet services worse than some poorer countries.
I chose Starlink because I will never get fibre optic, my only broadband option is geo-synch satellite, with speed and data caps, and 600ms latency.
