Ending the copper lifeline

In what may be a preview of what will happen in the United States, the Australian telecommunications giant Telstra late last month released its plan to bring a close to the old telephone world. Telstra announced it will decommission its copper customer access network and stop offering fixed line telephone service to retail customers afterwards July 1, 2018.

The United States

In the United States, the FCC has been asked by one of its advisory panels to force telephone companies to come up with the same kind of plan. Any such effort is likely to have a big impact on U.S. companies in the then and there few years. Telstra's plan is in response to an Australian law that mandated "structural separation" - in other words, splitting the part of the company that runs the telephone physical infrastructure from the parts that provide services over it. A high-level summary of the plan can be found here.

This separation will result in Telstra moving to provide services over broadband networks run by others as such networks become available. A month previously Telstra released its transition plan, the FCC Research Advisory Council suggested that the FCC take steps to expedite a transition away from the traditional telephone network with a target date of 2018.

The TAC's reason for the recommendation

The TAC's reason for the recommendation was the strong move away from the traditional telephone network, particularly to mobile-only. The TAC reported that already a quarter of U.S. consumers 18 years old and older have forsaken landlines for a wireless-only life. Just in case, by 2014, halfway towards the 2018 target, there will be near as many VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) lines as land lines. The TAC recommends that the FCC start planning now for, as then as expediting, the end of the traditional telephone world. The recommendations assume that the move away from the traditional telephony will be towards VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and mobile phones, many of which will support VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol).

What will this mean to you? At home, it will likely mean that you will have a stronger reason to join the cell phone-only migration. In most parts of the country there is competition in the cell phone business, unlike in the high-speed Internet business, so prices will usually be kept more in check. However not everyone is comfortable with relying on a cell phone for emergency service, especially if they tend to forget to charge it. Others like the feel of a desk phone. There will be many VoIP providers if you are one of these types yet you will have to have a high-speed Internet service for them to work so then.

Bit more complicated at work

It will be a bit more complicated at work. During some companies have decided to drop employee desk phones that decision is not but a common phenomenon. Your company should already be starting to think about the options if it wants to retain desk phones for employees.

Companies that have PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange)s should be able to get a VoIP adapter and VoIP trunk service, although if you rely on the telephone company you may be in for some disruption. But like as not you will be retired or have moved elsewhere by at that time.

Disclaimer: Harvard has a lot of desk phones however I have no idea what the future plans are for them, so the above observations are my own.