[1st-mile-nm] AT&T Says "The Telephone Network is Obsolete"

[Marianne Granoff]

AT&T Says "The Telephone Network is Obsolete"

Two months ago, AT&T petitioned the Federal Communications Commission 
to plan for the retirement of traditional phone networks. The 
petition is available at 
<http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/files/pdf/fcc_filing.pdf>http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/files/pdf/fcc_filing.pdf. 


"This telephone network we've grown up with is now an obsolete 
platform, or at least a rapidly obsolescing platform," Hank 
Hultquist, VP of AT&T's federal regulatory division, said. "It will 
not be sustainable for the indefinite future. Nobody's making this 
network technology anymore. It's become more and more difficult to 
find spare parts for it. And it's becoming more and more difficult to 
find trained technicians and engineers to work on it."

"Voice is the most efficient way to communicate," he said. "We have 
had the same voice service for 80 years. The voice quality you get 
when you make a call on the iPhone today is the same voice quality 
Bell Laboratories thought you should have in 1933. Shift forward 80 
years, we're still using the same frequency response, 300 to 3300Hz."

You can read more in the ars technica web site at 
<http://goo.gl/Mlnqm>http://goo.gl/Mlnqm.

Marianne Granoff
Albuquerque, NM 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www2.dcn.org/pipermail/1st-mile-nm/attachments/20130124/5dee9534/attachment.html>