I’m thinking of companies like Frontier that spent all the revenue servicing the debt they took on to buy rural areas from Verizon and AT&T, and so their maintenance budget was $0. And when they ran out of working spare pairs, rather than replace a mile of cable down a road with 3 customers, they would just tell those customers they could no longer get POTS service much less DSL. After years of humming and buzzing or no dialtone for a day every time it rained. COLR is enforced at state level, and states are either lazy or subject to regulatory capture by telcos or both.
The key will be whether the BEAD winners have accurately accounted for ARPU, take rate, and costs to operate and maintain the infrastructure. It’s easy to say take rate is 100% and maintenance cost is $0. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Trey Scarborough Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2025 10:45 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: Oh No! No more modem sounds! Not as likely to happen to fiber well not unless a new technology or different kind of glass that significantly changes the economics is developed. Your not wrong about the reason copper networks were left to rot was due to money that is true. Sometime around 2008 or so is when it was more costly to repair copper than to replace with fiber. I would disagree however with regulators not enforcing carrier of last resort. Even today I have a customer that provides phone service in an area that they are going to have to overbuild the copper and replace all the lines at a loss to support a handfull of POTS services. All because they are in an area with next to no cell coverage. The big change in that regards is many of the services that required a copper line the LECs where able to drop from the services that were required. The first one that comes to my mind is alarm lines I used to love ordering those why pay $1500 a month for a t1 when you could do sdsl over a $30 a month alarm line. Those and services like tty lines etc were dropped from required services because no one was using them. Its now pretty much limited to POTS and TTY lines that are easy to implement over wireless so no need for a land line. On 8/12/25 1:44 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote: I hope people realize the same thing could happen to fiber in 10 or 20 years. The reason the copper network was left to rot wasn’t technology, it was about money. Either the service wasn’t generating enough revenue & profit to justify maintaining the infrastructure, or the companies just got greedy. And regulators didn’t enforce things like carrier of last resort and let them get away with poor service metrics. All BEAD cares about is speed and cost. But it’s like buying your kids a puppy. They have to feed it and walk it. From: AF <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Bill Prince Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2025 1:27 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: Oh No! No more modem sounds! Around here, it was common to see the phone lines draped between bushes on the side of the road. That and instead of trenching, they ran the phone line through culverts. bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com> On 8/12/2025 11:22 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote: Here when GTE lines became Verizon and then Frontier, the techs would tell customers there was “water in the lines” and “mice in the boxes”. That happens when your repair for a busted pedestal is to put an orange trash bag over it. From: AF <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Jan-GAMs Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2025 1:02 PM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: Oh No! No more modem sounds! After Verizon bought GTE the phone became un-usable and their technicians couldn't fix-it. We had to move to wireless and cable because the noise interference on the twisted-pair copper was too excessive for dial-up. On 8/12/25 10:13, Bill Prince wrote: Before we started our broadband company, we had 3 landlines. One for personal use, one for business use, and one for internet access. None of the 3 lines were capable of more than 28 Kbps on a clear sunny day. More often, about 20 Kbps. We had a modem that was directly connected to our router. The main reason for the slow speeds was because we are ~~ 75,000 feet (over 14 miles) from the CO. When you picked up a phone, it took at least a second or two before you got a dial tone. It was a miracle it worked at all. At some point after we established our broadband company, the 3rd line became a backup phone line. There was even a point where none of the 3 lines actually worked. That became the writing on the wall; especially when VoIP became a reality. bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com> On 8/12/2025 8:00 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote: If it’s from self-reported census data, I’m still skeptical. Most people today don’t know what a landline is, they think their cellphone is a landline. They also don’t know what dialup is. Ask someone with DSL and they may call it dialup because it goes over the phoneline. They say WiFi when they mean Internet, and modem when they mean router. I felt dialup became totally useless for most use cases over 10 years ago when it was no longer possible to do Windows Update or update antivirus software over a 56 kbps connection. People would have to take their computer somewhere else every few months to get updates. And for anything other than a computer they probably need WiFi which is technically possible over dialup but nobody buys that equipment any more (I forget what it was called or who made it). Anybody using a dialup modem connection today is probably using a FAX machine or something like a POS credit card terminal. We got out of dialup in 2009, I might still have some Ascend remote access servers somewhere if they didn’t go to the recycler, I think it was something like a MAX4096? Let me know if you actually want them and I’ll look. Most of them were on Chicago metro area numbers but we had one in DeKalb for our wireless customers to use for free in case of an outage. Nobody used them, even in 2009, they would rather drive to town and use the WiFi at a coffee shop than use dialup, it was considered that useless. People these days will say their Internet is so slow it’s at “dialup speed” when they’re downloading at 1 Mbps. People don’t know what 56 kbps feels like. I mean, in today’s terms, that’s 0.000056 gigabits. Asking Google AI how long it would take to download a game at that speed, it answered: “Therefore, it would theoretically take approximately 168 days (almost half a year) to download Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on a 56 Kbps dial-up connection”. From: AF <mailto:[email protected]> <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Bill Prince Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2025 9:37 AM To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT: Oh No! No more modem sounds! The 1/4 million I heard yesterday had to be an estimate. In today's paper they had this. It's still an estimate, and it is 2 years old. Still, a handful of consumers have continued to rely on internet services connected over telephone lines. In the U.S., according to Census Bureau data, an estimated 163,401 households were using dial-up alone to get online in 2023, representing just over 0.13% of all homes with internet subscriptions nationwide. bp <part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com> On 8/11/2025 9:16 PM, Trey Scarborough wrote: I don't see how they have lasted this long or how there could be a 250k people that would be able to get an actual land line to be able to use 56k dialup. This makes me have so many questions. Like where are all these PRIs and dailup units to run these. I remember removing many of the old Lucent max TNTs that AOL used for dialup in our COs in the mid 2000s. I tried to reconfigure a couple of them to use as VOIP gateways, but they had a custom firmware on them that it wouldn't go back to regular defaults. How are they still running all of these local numbers? I'm in ATT/VZ/CL main COs on a regular basis and think I would notice dial up equipment running in the colo spaces and cant say that I have noticed any. I have seen a few portmaster PM3s that do not look like they are functioning anymore. All the ports have alarms and the companies they are labeled as being have been bankrupt for years. For certain the oddity that they are still somewhat functioning today completely astonishes me. On 8/11/2025 2:36 PM, Bill Prince wrote: For those of you who think nostalgically about those warm modem dial-up tones, AOL is discontinuing its dial-up service. Music to the ears of all ISPs that there will now be about a quarter million new internet customers. https://pcper.com/2025/08/aol-discontinues-dial-up-wait-what/
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