FCC Chair to End Copper and Shift Phones to VOIP

The new FCC Chairmen announced he is in favor of phasing out copper in the phone network and switching to VOIP, which runs on fiber optic. This is already happening on a voluntary basis in many regions as part of your broadband upgrade. I am already aware that Verizon Communications has been offering a copper for DSL deal for years now. AT&T announced their plans to get out of copper over a year ago. And while copper is regulated as to how much the phone companies can charge you, broadband is not. Broadband has other services and its cheaper to maintain. They can make money on it.

So that's that, essentially. There will be some debate, but who really thinks it's going to get much attention? No phone company can afford to install or replace copper wires outside a house. It is too valuable and too easily stolen and there's no reason to continue using it when fiber optic is now cheap, if harder to install, and carries incredible amounts of data, easily. Fiber is also physically smaller, lighter weight, more durable and considerably cheaper. For a long time now, fiber was the next big thing that wasn't and most of it was Dark, or unused. Multiplexing switches meant you could just up the bandwidth of lit fiber and get what you need, however those ran on the trunks across the country. Now we're running fiber to the side of the house. Movie streaming services like Netflix justifies paying for higher bandwidth, as do many of the cable companies. Any on-demand streaming service is using lots of bits, and high resolution TV means even more. Multiple users, multiple streams of data, it all adds up. I've been using VOIP for years now, and its cheaper than a landline phone and a long distance plan. So I can talk for hours at a flat rate, no surprises, no worries, no airtime minutes or contracts. Lots of cable and broadband companies already offer TV, internet, and VOIP phone for a flat rate, and they're reasonably priced so popular. Why not, right?

So while there's probably a little boo-hoo for the deep boonies places which may find their phone service a little more creative as the copper is ripped down and sold for scrap, I can't really say if they'll end up with cheaper broadband or a set-top box to receive cellphone signal VOIP. Considering the govt is involved, it might be a great distracting scandal from some other political blunder.