Telecom expert Harold Feld explains the importance of the tech. transition

The FCC is voting this week to establish rules for telephone companies that want to replace their copper plant with fiber networks to maintain service and protect consumers. Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge and telecom expert, explains the importance of a regulated technology transition, highlighting the everyday consequences of telecom policy:  

So let me put this in terms folks might find interesting. If you have a child in elementary school, that school has a fire alarm. That fire alarm has a copper wire that plugs into the part of the traditional phone network specially designed to connect directly to the alarm system at the fire station. Even if your school updated its phones to digital, and every teacher and administrator has a cell phone, that old technology on the fire alarm hasn't changed.

Sometime in the next 5-10 years, the phone company that controls that network is going to come along and rip out all the guts of the system that connects the elementary school and the fire alarm and replace it with a nice, shiny new digital guts that have lots of great new capacity and stuff.

That's really awesome neat-o keen cool. Phone companies like Verizon and AT&T are going to invest tens of billions of dollars over the next 5-10 years upgrading their equipment and so forth. Yeah! Creates lots of jobs -- union jobs for a change -- and potentially brings lots of cool stuff to your community. Yeah!

But bad news. No one remembered to deal with the elementary school fire alarm. Because everyone was all Yeah! Shiny! New! Digital! And the ever popular: "I have a cell phone, so i don't see why I need to worry about the old copper line network." Add to that the "regulation is bad and state and federal regulators shouldn't even THINK about getting in the way of this awesome project!" and, well, turns out we forgot to hook up the elementary school fire alarm.

And it's a real shame, because it wasn't a hard problem to solve. It's just that no one thought about it. Or your parent's medical alert system. Or whether TTY and other technologies for the hearing impaired would still work. So now, instead of having a little doohickey that plugs your 1970s elementary school fire alarm into the bright shiny digital phone network, the school teacher evacuating your child and 40 other kids is also frantically calling 911 on her cell phone to get to the fire department.

Feld goes on to explain that, fortunately, the FCC “put values first,” ensuring that everyone that relies on communications infrastructure remains connected after the transition from copper to fiber:

… the Order for once, FOR ONCE, tries to stop the inequality *before* it happens. It sets up a process to make this an upgrade for EVERYONE, not an upgrade for some and a downgrade for others. it shows that we can have good economic policy of encouraging an orderly transition from the old network to the new network *and* protect the public and competition at the same time. It shows that while big companies may not be happy about spending more money -- especially in communities with low rates of return -- they are not stupid either. And if spending extra now prevents a massive 911 failure or meltdown of all the ATMs that still use copper lines, well, it’s worth it in the long run.

Link:

The FCC Sets the Ground Rules For Shutting Down The Phone System — And Sets the Stage For Universal Broadband (Tales of the Sausage Factory, July 13, 2016)