On 5/10/20 6:24 PM, Mark Delany wrote:
wasnt there a hige shit stom in australia for their new national
broadband network making internet ptrimary and phone secondary, a lot
of aussies on forums I frequent bitch about its reliability, where
even their aged copper services worked fine, not to mention prolonged
outages due to storms and the bushfires they had recently, lets hope
the world learns from australias mistakes and not go down that path.
There are still a few complaints every now and again but fixed line
numbers are continuing to drop off a cliff and those residential
services which remain have almost all been converted to VOIP via home
gateway with an FXS port.
Mobile/Cell is where most people ended up. Especially since you can
get unlimited calls/txt with some data for about ten bucks a month.
It also helps that a number of the mobile providers include
wifi-calling so mobile is a viable alternative even in weak cell
coverage areas if you have internet.
Yes, everyone knows about the reliability/power-failure arguments but
in the latest set of bushfires whole exchanges, backhaul services and
power distribution cables were destroyed so 8 hours of battery backed
up POTS in a local exchange didn't help much.
California exposed one big weakness last year though: purposeful
shutdowns of the grid. These lasted on average about 3 days which is
probably longer than any battery backup your home voip solution can stay
up with. The other gaping problem is that even if I have a generator at
home (which I do because... PG&E), there is no guarantee that my IP bits
will land on something that has power. Cable and Cellular were
apparently especially useless. I pleasantly found out that my POTS/DSL
provider kept the lights on during the shutdown. Lots of people were in
for a rude awakening, and since this is destined to be our new normal
there are going to be a lot of unhappy campers every fall.
We need to keep battery backup requirements, and expand them to all last
mile IP bits. The need to call 911 has not gone away.
Mike
