cable, ups, laptops.

$50 - WHAT?

My "lifeline" service - bare minimum - is $12.95 a month...
I use it for my alarm system and incoming faxes.

Yeah, my POTS bill would be $50 ballpark after they add taxes and whatnot. If I start making calls on it outside of local, the bill could easily be $100+. My POTS is just not worth it for the off chance that POTS may be more reliable, which I don't think it is for my home.

Substitute telephone for broadband and 1934 for 2011.

We live in an information driven age and not everyone chooses to live in a rural or under populated area. You either grew up there or living in an urban area is out of your financial reach.

Broadband allows anyone to reach out to the world regardless of where you're located. It can, and does, bring jobs to areas whose historical industries don't exist anymore. The city of The Dalles was founded due to its favourable location on the Columbia for shipping fur pelts back East. Today, the fur trade is long gone and Google has a data center there.

Yea ... why would I want to subsidize the rural customers. I mean this whole newfangled universal mail delivery is stupid. Next thing you know people are going to demand every house have its own telegraph line. That's going to put the small time telegraph operators and messenger boys out of business. Have you no respect for the capitalist free enterprise system?

Sure, most of the western world, outside the US, has universal broadband at low prices but that is just so ... European.

We have to connect the land line to our pvr to order pay-per-view from our satelite tv service. This is the first time i've realized how stupid that is! LOL!

We had a meeting today at work about POTS. We're predicting in my line of work (alarm industry) that POTS will be 100% gone by the end of 2014. The majority of all new systems sold by my company are either cellular or long-range radio communication.

I've heard this prediction from several places, all with different dates. I have my doubts.

But assuming that it did go away, it seems to me that there is a very valuable infrastructure of copper wire going into almost every home in America. Could this be used to provide the "universal broadband" that several folks have mentioned? I don't know how much data that simple copper wire could handle, but I can't see this already installed access point going to waste.

The copper "twisted pair" has been used for ADSL broadband for years. The downside is that you can't be more than a mile or so from a node that is serviced by fiber optic cable. So, ADSL via twisted pair is primarily an urban item, with the telcos and cable companies duking it out in high density markets.

Broadband in my part of the world is generally going the way of line-of-sight fixed wireless. Satellite is available too, for more money.

Interestingly, I was able to get by with a fairly slow dial-up until about 2007. (Patch Tuesday was always a pain though.) This was the point at which every website and service seemed to assume broadband, and everything got "fat" with no accommodation for dial-up users.

I asked this question because a friend was telling me she had some wind damage earlier this winter, and a tree came down on her phone line, ripping it completely loose from her house. The power was already out. Her cell phone had had an unfortunate 'death by toilet' due to a toddler who is big on flushing. She knew her immediate neighbors only had electronic phones, but they did have useful phone jacks.

Sue