Some customers, consumer advocates and the telephone-workers union accuse the phone companies of not repairing copper networks that they want to shut down. The new rules would prohibit companies from retiring a copper network through neglect. If it wants to abandon copper, it would need to tell customers.

SOURCE: You still use a landline? FCC voting on new phone rules – Yahoo News.

This was a new one on me. I didn’t know that the phone companies could retire copper lines through neglect.  I guess when that happens they just leave it up to you to try to figure a way to get another source of communications.  For the city folks that is not a problem but for us in the country the copper wire is just about the only option.

We have a five-hundred pair cable strung across our front yard. At points between us and the central office it droops down to within two feet of the ground. I guess you can call that neglect? We do have a “DSL” with that wire but not according to the recent definition. Ours is at about 2Mpbs whereas in the city it is now approaching 25 Mpbs and in the “big city” it is at 600 Mpbs! Our connection goes out at least once every hour for a minute or so. We have complained about it but they say since we are at the max distance from them for DSL that is the best they will do. It seems if we complain about it they will just drop our service!

I hope the new FCC rules going into effect as indicated in the source article above help us in some way but I kind of doubt it.  All of our neighbors to the north of us are stuck with 0.05 Mpbs via dial-up. No, cable is not available here either. We have satellite but that does not provide Internet. I know part of the things AT&T had to do in order to get the DirectTV merger done is to add more fiber networks but I’m sure those will go to more dense neighborhoods than we are in the rural areas. I’m just hanging on to what the give us hoping that someday they will throw a few more scraps off their city table…