The traditional landline is already endangered by the rise of mobile devices—fewer people than ever are paying for such a connection in their home. And now the landline is being threatened by the cost of its own infrastructure. that Verizon, citing the high cost of copper-wire landlines, doesn't want to replace those lines in Mantoloking, N.J., which suffered heavy damage from Hurricane Sandy. Instead, it wants customers to use its Voice Link wireless home phone system.
The New York Times reported this week
With a wireless home phone system, we're not talking about the cordless phones that have been around for years, with a cordless handset but a receiver that's connected to a landline. Rather, the kind of system that runs without the use of a landline at all. Michael Dellomo, an associate director of the University of Maryland's masters program in Telecommunications, says that wireless home phones are akin to merging the traditional landline and the cellphone.
"One of the nice things about wireless service is that when there isn't a crisis, its ubiquitous," Dellomo says. "You can be on your phone, and you see your dog is digging a hole in a yard; you can take the phone with you and wrangle the dog... I have one phone number that follows me around. It's very nice. It's very personal. I don't have to think about whether I'm calling your cell or home phone; I'm just calling you."
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Yet there is one major concern about this landline-free future, and that is what happens when disaster strikes. Landlines transmit voice and data signals by copper wire through electric pulses. That wire makes them relatively expensive to maintain or replace, but their nature means that a phone line can work even when the power goes down.
Wireless home phone systems, on the other hand, operate without the cost of copper landlines. The phone taps directly into the wireless network of the service provider, using the existing base stations and towers to patch calls through. As a result, there is less expensive repair work to be done after a disaster. But the system has the same vulnerabilities of cellphones, such as finicky signal quality and the fact that only so many calls can go through at once. One of the major benefits of having a landline is that when the power goes out, the phone still works, ensuring urgent 911 calls reach emergency services. Not so with wireless systems.
"This is a real concern is if you're trying to dial 911," Dellomo says. "You're not gonna have a frequency available for every user in the network. There's not enough spectrum in the world for that. What happens if everybody has a crisis? When Sept. 11 happened, the cellphones crashed because everyone in the city had a crisis."
It could be the coming reality. Although the Federal Communications Commission has rules mandating that carriers put through all 911 calls (part of the reason your smartphone will let you place an emergency call without unlocking it), the FCC has said that requiring the carriers to maintain the old landline systems is unsustainable.
Beyond the spectrum issue, there's the power issue. Many wireless home phones come with backup batteries in the case of power outages. The backup battery on AT&T's wireless home phone, for example, provides up to 3.5 hours of talk time. However, for periods of prolonged blackouts such as the weeks following Sandy, 3.5 hours may not be enough.
And that's only if the service towers aren't damaged. If that happens, even people who have backup power for their wireless phones won't necessarily be able to make a call. "In the case of something like Sandy, you're going to need an emergency response team to come in and set up cellphone towers," Dellomo says. "Then you have to wait until you get power back to get communications."
There are ways around the lack of power or insufficient battery life. For instance, if you're afraid one backup battery won't be enough, get more. "Basically any remedy that you can use for a cellphone during a disaster can be used for a wireless home phone as well," Dellomo says. "You can supposedly keep 10 backup batteries in the house in case of a disaster. That's a level of paranoia that I don't even want to think about."
Understandably, Verizon is feeling some pushback against its plan to forget about the old-fashioned landline. On New York's Fire Island, for example, the carrier also planned to install Voice Link rather than replacing landlines that Sandy destroyed, but abandoned the plan after heavy complaints, and agreed to start re-laying fiber-optic cables. Some Mantoloking residents aren't happy with the plan, either.
Nevertheless, telecommunications professionals such as Dellomo can understand the phone companies' desire to do away with vulnerable landlines, and think it will happen soon. Dellomo estimates that landlines as we know them today will fall by the wayside and be virtually extinct within the next decade. "It's a reasonable idea and I'm sure it's very popular with the under-25 set, the people that grew up with cellphones," Dellomo says. "That's just the way they think. The psychology of needing a wire is going away."
