The Sun is Setting on Copper Telecom Lines

By: John Shepler

It has been rumored for a long time and now it’s really underway. The end of over a century of copper wire based phone and network lines is here, with a key event on June 30. That’s the start of AT&T’s first major wave of wire center decommissioning. Over 277 of these facilities will go dark when completed, with more waves of decommissioning to follow. In the end, we’ll have completely moved on from Alexander Graham Bell’s original network.

What The Loss of Wire Centers Really Means
In simple terms, a wire center is where all the wires connect. It’s the building that connects the central office switching with all the local loops. That’s often thousands and thousands of individual twisted copper pairs that are bundled into larger cables. Your analog phone line, the “landline” or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line, is one of these loops. You can trace the wire pair directly from the phone jack on your wall all the way to the line card at the central office that provides power and signaling to run the phone handset.

Those twisted pairs can carry a lot more than individual phone calls. They can be set up with digital termination equipment to provide DSL and T1 broadband or PRI digital multi-line phone service. They may also be used in special applications such as fire alarms, elevator phones, gate entry systems, security systems, and fax machines.

Decommissioning means taking these lines out of service. No more wire center. No more copper line service.

In actuality, the phone companies that own these lines have already been discouraging their use through higher service prices and refusal to add more customers. Another group, copper wire thieves, have been doing their own decommissioning by cutting and stealing cables and then burning off the plastic insulation so they can sell the copper at recyclers. Copper prices are way up due to the expansion of data centers, electric vehicles, and solar power, to name a few.

What Replaces Copper Telecom Lines?
Like the incandescent light bulb, it’s time to move on from 19th century technologies. The new options are primarily fiber optic and wireless.

Fiber voice and broadband started with phone company Optical Carrier standards but has migrated to Carrier Ethernet standards to be compatible with the vast majority of company networks. Ethernet over Fiber service ranges from 10 Mbps up to 100 Gbps, with Gigabit Ethernet and 10 GigE becoming popular standards.

You need what is called an Ethernet Port at your end. That connects via fiber to your service provider, often an Independent network operator but perhaps a traditional telco. The speed of the Ethernet port limits the amount of bandwidth you can have. A Gigabit port lets you order up to 1,000 Mbps. A 10 Gigabit port supports anything up to 10,000 Mbps.

There are different flavors of fiber optic service. Your Internet access can be on a fiber line that is shared among many businesses and residential users to save cost. You may prefer to order Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) so that your connection to the Internet itself in essentially on a private line.

Direct Cloud Access is a similar service without the Internet being involved at all. You have a private fiber service from your facility to your cloud service provider. This gives you the best low latency and low congestion for higher productivity and smoother voice calls and video conferences.

You might also want to consider dedicated point to point fiber to interconnect your facilities across town or around the world. These private lines offer high performance and better security than what you could hope for on the Internet.

Wireless Options
Of course you have mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers that connect to the Internet using 5G cellular broadband. Another flavor of that services is Fixed Wireless Access. It comes in a box with higher gain antennas and Ethernet connection. It’s the 5G broadband without the phone features. There are also options to add outside antennae for better coverage and some controllers offer multiple providers for service continuity if one company goes offline temporarily. FWA can be as speedy as fiber, but without having to run the fiber line itself.

Some Wireless Internet Service Providers do not use cellular networks. Instead, they have their own towers and beam and point to point signal to a small dish antenna on your roof. These are very private lines and can have Gigabit or higher speeds.

Satellite broadband and satellite phone have been around for years. The broadband using geostationary satellites can be very reliable and speeds have been improving with newer generations of satellites. The half second or more of latency due to the distance to geosynchronous orbit is one sticking point. LEO or Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations, primarily SpaceX Starlink, reduces the latency to something similar to terrestrial broadband. Bandwidths are also competitive for many applications. Just stating now is direct to handset service that turns satellites into alternative cell towers. Soon there will be no dead spots, even in the most remote areas.

What to Do About Specialty Services?
Those fire alarms, fax machines and elevator phones that were designed for twisted pair copper and nothing else still have hope. AT&T, among others, is offering a “POTS Replacement” service that consists of 4G LTE cellular wired to support these services along with built-in battery backup. Why 4G LTE? This standard can mimic the old phone lines and is still readily available.

The One Remaining Copper Service
There is still one very popular copper broadband service, but it is not from any phone company. This is Cable Broadband that is brought in on coaxial copper wiring. In reality, the cable companies have converted to fiber optic transmission, but the latest DOCSIS standards let them keep their existing copper coax into your building and still achieve speeds of 1,000 Mbps or even 10 Gbps… competitive with fiber.

Is your company experiencing an upcoming loss of service due to copper decommissioning? No time to wait. Find out what copper replacement services are available for your business needs. You may be surprised to find you can actually get more capability at a lower cost.

When Only T1 Will Do

By: John Shepler

In the age of gigabit fiber connections, the venerable T1 line might be thought of as a relic of the past. Not at all. T1 service is alive and well. It might even be exactly what you need right now in the way of bandwidth and affordability.

Why Would Anyone Want a T1 Line?
T1 is the most mature, most deployed and most available of the telecom line services. You might think that Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) would be the leader in that category. It was. POTS is giving way in many organizations to newer premises VoIP and telephony in the cloud. That still leaves what used to be the POTS lines connected. What are they good for? Think: T1

T1 lines are amazingly versatile. They make perfect telephone trunks for channelized T1 phone, ISDN PRI and even high quality VoIP. They are almost certainly available at your location, wherever you may happen to be. Plus, T1 is readily affordable by just about any size business.

The T1 Telephone Line
Did you know that T1 actually started out as a telephone trunking technology? If the telco companies didn’t have a burning desire to consolidate the mass of wiring that interconnected their switching centers, T1 might never have come about. In the beginning, it was one telephone conversation per pair of wires. Then the phone companies found a way to send multiple conversations down the same pair simultaneously using a method called carrier telephony. It works like the radio band. Each conversation had its own assigned carrier frequency separated from the others so they wouldn’t interfere. This is the analog way to get the job done.

The breakthrough that was T1 involved the conceptual change from analog to digital. By digitizing the phone conversations, you could send 24 of them down the same pair of wires and they wouldn’t interfere. What’s more, digital technology got rid of all that noise and crosstalk that analog long distance lines were famous for in the first part of the last century.

A channelized T1 telephone line consists of 24 time division multiplexed segments or channels that are synchronized at the transmitting and receiving end. Each analog phone signal is digitized into 8 bits by 64 Kbps, which preserves the call quality. What grade of wiring do you need to transmit these calls? Ordinary twisted pair telephone cable will do just fine. With signal regenerators every mile or so, a T1 line can be stretched as far as you like.

ISDN PRI Telephone Trunks
T1 telephone lines are used by in-house PBX business phone systems. In recent decades, that technology has been upgraded to something called ISDN PRI or Primary Rate Interface. It’s the same T1 line, but with a slightly different format. ISDN PRI provides 23 separate phone lines plus a control and signaling channel that runs the system. This is the preferred option for call centers because of its fast connection times and high voice quality. Multiple T1 lines can be installed to most PBX systems to match the number of outside lines needed.

T1 for VoIP
VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is a different method of achieving the same phone service. VoIP was designed to be compatible with computer networks rather than a unique telephone standard. Even so, VoIP trunks, called SIP trunks are needed to get the phone calls to the telephone service provider in the cloud. Unchannelized T1 lines work great for this because they are highly reliable and offer enough bandwidth to carry two dozen or more simultaneous telephone conversations.

T1 Internet Lines
T1 for Internet access, with its paltry 1.5 Mbps bandwidth might be considered laughable in this age of gigabit broadband. It’s not so funny when your business is on a farm or so far out in the wilderness that you are lucky to have a landline phone. Those landline phone wires can also carry T1. That means if you can get phone service, you can get at least T1 broadband where there is no fiber or even cell towers for miles.

Is 1.5 Mbps truly a problem? It likely is if you want to transfer HD video production. Not really, though, if you have a small business and need the line for credit card verification, a connection back to a franchise office, or just email and casual web browsing. You can increase this bandwidth by combining, called bonding, multiple T1 lines together. This will give you anywhere from 3 to 12 Mbps, depending on the number of lines you bond.

How About The Cost?
People who think T1 is expensive remember back a decade or two, when a single T1 line would set you back at least a grand a month. Today, that figure is more like $200 to $300 in most cases. It still depends on how much competing service is in your area and how far you are from the telco office. Is this expensive? Business grade cable broadband is also priced in that range, but with “up to” higher advertised bandwidth… if you happen to be next to where the cable line runs. Even then, cable is shared bandwidth while T1 is dedicated to your particular company.

If your need is for highly reliable PBX telephone lines, point to point private lines, dedicated Internet access or rural broadband applications, T1 might still be the optimum service for your company. Check out T1 and bonded T1 pricing and availability and compare with your alternative service options.



Note: Products with the humorous theme "Wan Man" shown on this page are available through the Gigapacket Zazzle Store.

Technologies That Should Stay in 2012

Technology is said to be evolutionary, but it is often cumulative. We wind up buying the latest and greatest devices only to find that we still need to hang onto the last generation hardware and software in order to maintain compatibility with existing systems. Over time, the old fades and the new becomes dominant. Then the new, new comes along and it starts all over again. Let’s take a look at some technologies who’s time has come to fade into the background.

Analog phone systems with their dated feature set, lack of compatibility with mobile devices and proprietary wiring are about on the edge of extinction. Analog still makes sense for very small operations that have only a single phone per line and unreliable broadband. The voice quality is clear and the cost of one line is attractive. It was thought that VoIP would kill the old POTS (plain old telephone service) line. What does it in now is mobility.

Being tethered to a landline is a considerable inconvenience for a generation that is on the go most of the time. Who wants one phone number for the office, one for home and another for cellular, each with their own voicemail boxes? Some people do everything on their smartphone with the knowledge that they are always reachable. The smartphone also doubles as a small computer, making even the ubiquitous business laptop a relic.

Most companies really need and want desk phones and desktop computers, but they want them to work seamlessly with their mobile phone, their tablet, their laptop or notebook and perhaps M2M devices (machine to machine). This is where VoIP shines. The technology makes the telephone set just another network device. Gone is all that phone wiring and those old clunker phones that just make calls. The newer IP phones have displays and are easily integrated with computers.

What’s better than VoIP? It’s hosted VoIP. This is a cloud based service that replaces all your in-house PBX equipment. You keep your VoIP telephone sets and install a SIP trunk to the provider. That provider takes care of all the switching and connection to outside lines for the public phone system. In addition to simplicity of operation and maintenance and the avoidance of capital investments, hosted VoIP systems can often integrate mobile devices as well as fixed handsets. An advanced approach is called unified communications. That means one phone number for each person, not device. It also means that other types of communication, like email, text and FAX are available on whatever device you are using. No more need to haul around all that claptrap just to make sure that you aren’t missing some important message.

I should interject that one of the big motivators for enterprise VoIP systems is cost savings. This is even more so with hosted VoIP. You not only avoid the huge cost of upgrading and replacing PBX switching equipment, but the actual calling charges are also reduced. Most providers include all in-house and local calls in a fixed “seat” price per month. Some include nationwide calling as well. Features that cost extra with analog landline pricing, such as caller ID, call forwarding, conferencing and so on are built-into the VoIP service. You have the flexibility to scale the service up and down to match actual employee requirements rather that come up short on phones or be stuck with equipment and lines that you don’t use.

T1 bandwidth may be in its twilight time. This reliable technology has served us well for decades, but has become an increasing bottleneck with only 1.5 Mbps. That doesn’t cut it with todays demanding apps. Entry level for business connectivity is now 3 Mbps, with more and more companies asking for 10 or 20 Mbps connections. These are easily achieved with a replacement technology called Ethernet over Copper or EoC. The price for 3 Mbps EoC is about the same as one T1 line. The cost of 10 Mbps is only 2 or 3 times that. Even fiber bandwidth has become more affordable. A 100 Mbps Fast Ethernet or 1 Gbps GigE service is now well within the budgets for many medium size companies.

No need to dwell on pagers, Frame Relay Networks, 2G wireless, dial up modems, CRTs, bulletin boards, and 16 bit processors. They have been goners for years. How long before computer virus software, in-house server racks, proprietary wide area networks, and local disk storage join them? Their replacements are already available and being adopted by businesses who want to stay at the forefront of technology as a competitive advantage.

600,000 Inquiries, No Waiting

Don't you hate the amount of time and frustration it takes to buy anything significant? How about telecommunications services? The worst, right? If you're not totally confused by who to call, you're stuck with music on hold. Or they ask you to fill out a form and wait a couple of weeks for an answer. Like I said, the worst.

Well, forget all that nonsense. How would you like to find out how much a T1 line is going to cost or if there is Metro Ethernet service nearby in less than a minute? How would you like to be able to do that any time, day or night? Well, you can. The service is available all the time, it's online and it's automatic. That means no waiting for someone to "get around to you."

The service is referring to is called GeoQuote (tm), the patented telecom pricing application that's revolutionized how business people buy voice and data telecom services. Let's give it a try right now. Don't worry, its take less time to generate a T1 line quote than to read the rest of this article. Start by visiting our T1 Rex site hosting the GeoQuote engine. Click and it will open in a new page or tab.

Select your service type from the drop down menu in the Shop For T1 box. "Data" is already selected, but you can change that to "Voice" for digital telephone line services such as ISDN PRI for your PBX system. Or select "Integrated Service" if you'd like to have both telephone and Internet service brought in on a single line. That often saves money for smaller businesses.

Fill-in the other blanks, which should only take a few seconds. Be sure to list your business landline number for the main phone. This is used by the system to determine service availability and price, so don't put in a cell number unless you've got a new location that doesn't have landline phone service yet. When done click on the "Step 2" button.

On the next page you have an opportunity to refine the type of service you are looking for. T1 is selected, but you can change that if you want Frame Relay, Server Colocation, DS3, ISDN Service, or even Fixed Wireless Broadband. There's a comment box available. It's not needed for automatic quotes on services such as T1, ISDN PRI or DS3. But it does provide helpful detail to the Shop For T1 consultants to help you get the best pricing, even on services you didn't know were available.

Fill in the box showing the installation address (business location, as these services aren't generally suitable for home users), select if you'd like quotes to include a router or not, specify new or existing service, and number of locations. You can also specify if you'd like someone to call you immediately, contact by email or if you are just window shopping. When done, click on the "continue" button.

Within a matter of seconds, you'll get a page displaying line prices for your particular location. These are highly accurate and represent prices you'll actually pay for 1, 2 or 3 year leases. The consultant who calls may know of special offers that run for a limited time, so you could actually pay less than what the screen says.

That's it for the general GeoQuote inquiry. There's another version that's targeted specifically for finding Metro Ethernet service. All you need to input is an address and you'll get a map showing the nearest locations with fiber optic connections. The closer they are, the more chance you have of getting Ethernet, Fast Ethernet or Gigabit Ethernet service at very reasonable prices. Try the Ethernet Buildings search now and see for yourself. It's also fully automated and available 24/7.

Now wasn't that a much more pleasant experience that what you usually go through to get pricing on business voice and data services? Over 600,000 other users feel the same way. Be sure to bookmark those GeoQuote search engine pages. You may want to come back and price another service later.

Try VoIP Phone Service For Under $10 a Month

Have you ever wished you could try one of the new VoIP telephone services to see if you'd like it better than your old landline? You've seen the ads. Sound pretty good, don't they. The bundled local and long distance service is on one bill. You get lots of features without getting nickle and dimed. International rates are just a few pennies a minute to many countries. You know what your bill is going to be and it's a lot less than you're paying now.

So why don't you just go ahead and make the switch? Well, you may not be all that sure if you're really going to like the service or if it will even work properly with your broadband connection. Perhaps you're just averse to signing long term contracts, especially when the vendor wants $40 or $50 a month for their phone service package. Isn't there a way to put a toe in the water and give VoIP a try without getting into the whole commitment thing?

You bet there is. What you are looking for is no contract VoIP service from Phone Power. There are plans for both business addresses and residential addresses. Please note that the under $10 promotional offer available when this article was first posted has expired. However, you can still get excellent plan pricing from Phone Power

These aren't stripped down calling plans, either. You get all the great features such as Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, 3-Way Conference Calling, Voicemail and Find Me Follow Me, among others. You may be paying extra fees each month to use these features on your current service. With PhonePower they are all included with your service package.

So, how do you hookup this VoIP service? The idea behind VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol is that it uses your broadband Internet connection in place of traditional telephone wires to connect you to your phone service provider. Actually, you'll be sharing your broadband between your computer and your telephone. The way that's done is with an ATA or Analog Telephone Adapter, a box that converts your regular telephone into the digital format needed to connect to the Internet. PhonePower leases one of those boxes to you at no cost as long as you maintain your service.

Note that this type of VoIP Service does not require your computer to be on to receive or make phone calls. It doesn't hook into your computer at all, it just shares the Internet connection. As long as your broadband service is running, you'll have phone service.

One thing you do need is the right Internet connection. For VoIP that is DSL or Cable Broadband for most residential users. You can also use fiber optic Internet service if you happen to have that. In business offices you may have a T1 dedicated connection or higher speed service. All of these are suitable. Dial-Up access is too slow to work at all. Satellite Internet results in choppy and delayed conversations. Wireless Internet services may either prohibit VoIP service or have other limitations.

So, are you more interested in giving VoIP phone service a try? If your curiosity is piqued, then get all the details on features and terms of service and sign up if you wish for PhonePower VoIP digital telephone service.

You may also be interested in comparing a wide variety of VoIP service plans at Affordable VoIP.

VoIP Land Lines Complement Wireless

The name often given to traditional analog phone lines is "land lines". You may also hear this term associated with digital services, such as T1 lines. Both analog and digital telephony have been provisioned on pairs of copper wires often buried in the ground since the inception of telephone service two centuries ago. But the term land line is also used to distinguish telecom services over copper wire from satellite and cellular wireless services.

You might think that land lines and wireless are completely different technologies that don't really intersect. But now there's a mix of the two that gives users important advantages. In this case, landlines and wireless complement rather than compete with each other.

What makes this work is a new form of land lines you can call VoIP land lines. A VoIP land line is a wireline service that carries packetized voice rather than analog or TDM telephone service. For consumers that's almost always DSL or Cable Internet service. Business users might also have T1 dedicated Internet service or SIP trunking for IP telephony transport.

VoIP land lines support broadband phone service. But that's often a secondary use of the land lines. Broadband lines are usually installed to get broadband Internet service as a replacement for slow dial-up. But once you have broadband Internet, you can use it for both your computers and an adapter that makes your telephone act something like a computer. What the ATA or analog telephone adapter is really doing is converting the phone signals from analog to digital and organizing them into IP or Internet Protocol packets that are indistinguishable from other traffic on the Internet. The ATA communicates with a VoIP phone service provider that lets your phone call any other phone in the world.

Seems like a long way around just to have the same phone service that's always been hooked up to that landline buried decades ago in the back yard. The reason people do this is that VoIP or broadband phone service is often much less expensive than what your local phone company charges for its legacy phone service.

For example, consider SunRocket VoIP. SunRocket is an independent broadband phone service that offers a unique annual plan giving you 12 months of unlimited calling anywhere in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada. Up to 100 minutes of international calling is included each month. Calling features that the local phone company usually charges extra for, like Caller ID, is also included.

The key to this savings, of course, is that you are already paying for broadband Internet service for your computers. The VoIP telephone service simply piggybacks on the DSL or Cable Internet broadband you have now. It's an especially attractive deal for Cable Internet users, since they don't need their old land line service for telephone or Internet connections anymore.

So what does this have to do with wireless? Just about everyone has a cellular phone these days so that they can communicate on the go. Where VoIP land lines complement cellular is that low cost VoIP service gives you unlimited minutes when calling or receiving calls. Heavy users of cellular know that you have to ration your anytime minutes or buy a really expensive plan with thousands of minutes. You pay a fortune and some months they go to waste. By having both a low minutes cell phone plan and home VoIP phone service, you can talk all you want and still have the advantage of mobility when you need it.

Wireless complements VoIP both for the mobility and the emergency backup. VoIP land lines are dependent on your DSL or Cable modem, Analog Telephone Adapter, and perhaps a router. When you lose power, you lose your VoIP connectivity unless you have battery backup on everything. When your broadband service goes down, so does your VoIP. Most people don't have that much trouble with outages, but it's reassuring to know that you can always use your cell phone to call 911 if you need to.

If this sound like a good arrangement to you, consider SunRocket VoIP for residential broadband phone service. If you don't already have broadband, you can find DSL and Cable Internet providers with a quick search. Need a great deal on a cell phone and service? Check out the current special offers at Cell Phone Plans Finder.

Note that these services are intended for home users. If you have a business location in need of excellent pricing on telecommunication services, try Enterprise VoIP for equipment, digital lines, installations and service.