As a kid I remember how I needed to ask permission to use the landline phone to make calls to my friends before going over to their houses. It was an era before everyone had a direct line to all their contacts in their pockets, and when making a long distance call was a decision based on whether you had enough money budgeted for that month. It was a very different time for how we communicated, and we felt a lot less connected than we do now. This describes a time not that long ago, probably only one generation away. While most people have accepted our new reality, many people have not caught up, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to live without catching up. Things like scheduling a doctor’s appointment without a cell phone can be an insurmountable task if you don’t have a device that can accept text messages. One of those people, who until recently was not living in our new reality, was my father.
My father has had the same landline number for our house for the last 20 years, and for better or worse, used it for everything. However, we recently learned that AT&T is looking to end its landline service in California. For anyone who works in technology or is even remotely abreast of the current state of communication technology, most everyone uses cell phones. So it’s not a surprise that they would try and end their business on landline services. However, something that did come as a surprise to me, which honestly should not have, is that landlines are protected under the same service level agreements with the government that utilities are. Meaning, they are mandated under the “Carrier of Last Resort” obligation which forces AT&T to serve all customers within their territories, including extending services when new facilities are needed. This means they were being treated as critical infrastructure, just like water and electricity. There are people who rely on these landline services for their own health and safety, and most of these people are elderly. They are being forced to change with the times, to an arguably less reliable service and to more complex devices.
This white paper details some of the finer points of the current legislation in regards to Carriers of Last Resort.
https://www.oregon.gov/puc/utilities/Documents/COLR-NRRI-White-Paper.pdf
Personally, I find this example of landlines going away to be a little scary. Not everyone can afford to catch up to the current world, and I imagine with technology moving as fast as it is, that many people in my generation, and the one before me, will run into similar hurdles as we all slowly fail to keep up. I think this is probably the first case of many where consumers are being stripped of a service that could end up saving their lives in the case of emergencies. However, I don’t imagine in the United States is going to be the first one’s to set precedent in protecting these individuals.
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