The great sunset date by the FCC for Landlines has come and gone, and my 2
landlines at 2 different locations are at this time are still operating. I
have had a recent pair change done on one of the lines, and the tech told
me he knew of no plans to force retirement at this time.

My understanding is that carriers may continue to sell Copper Based
Landlines, but are no longer required to do so by the FCC. In fact based
on my experence, AT&T in the old Bellsouth region is not only offering
Copper Based landlines including mine, but in fact has a website where you
can still order one today.

Is anyone aware of any tracking of this issue anywhere on the internet? I
read a lot of issues of Telecom Digest around the sunset date, but it
appears that analog retirement has not really been covered here.

I have been investigating alternatives which do not require internet
access to work. I am trying a 4G router, specifically a Yeacomm P21, that
has an available RJ11 that is able to place and receive calls on a
standard landline phone using a mobile network.

Does anyone else have any other ideas? At one time even AT&T had a
similar box, and Verizon tried to migrate Hurricane Sandy people whose
lines were damaged over to such a box but ended up putting in fiber to
replace the damaged copper lines. Considering the so called "sunset", I
have seen very little promotion of any such boxes.

I am thinking about the many lines used for fire alarm and elevator
emergency phones. Any idea what building owners are doing in this regard?

On 23 Jan 2023 12:31:25 -0500,
Albert Erdmann <telecom-digest@remove-this.bbwx.net> wrote:
> I am thinking about the many lines used for fire alarm and elevator
> emergency phones. Any idea what building owners are doing in this regard?

In Switzerland, they had to be replaced either by GSM (and 4G/5G
presumably, because 2G is already obsolete, and 3G will become obsolete
soon), or VoIP.

I heard of some cases where they still had the analog dialing devices
(the WSG35-2 was very popular, it was a modem that could also just dial
and then switch to an analog microphone). They now plugged those to the
ATA port of a VoIP router. As long as the dialing device uses DTMF to
dial, it works like a charm.

Then you just need to either ask those systems to poll the central
monitoring system every now and then to check they are still
operationnal (which most of those systems did anyway in the past
already). They usually used DTMF for checking-in, which works best when
decoded at the ATA itself.

If they used real modem modulation, they are better off replacing the
modem part completely by an IP signaling or GSM system, although my
tests have shown that the VoIP network can still mostly work at 2400
bits/s with e.g. V22bis seems to still work. I could not get higher
speeds even with parameter tweaking and no codec conversion. I used real
modems on both sides: using a DSP directly attached to the VoIP network
might get much better results.

On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 09:36:37AM -0000, Marc SCHAEFER wrote:
> On 23 Jan 2023 12:31:25 -0500,
> Albert Erdmann <telecom-digest@remove-this.bbwx.net> wrote:
> > I am thinking about the many lines used for fire alarm and elevator
> > emergency phones. Any idea what building owners are doing in this regard?
>
> In Switzerland, they had to be replaced either by GSM (and 4G/5G
> presumably, because 2G is already obsolete, and 3G will become obsolete
> soon), or VoIP.
>
> I heard of some cases where they still had the analog dialing devices
> (the WSG35-2 was very popular, it was a modem that could also just dial
> and then switch to an analog microphone). They now plugged those to the
> ATA port of a VoIP router. As long as the dialing device uses DTMF to
> dial, it works like a charm.

In the U.S., it's common to find business Internet connections that
depend on AC power to operate, which go dead during a power
failure. Since most elevators here also run on AC, any widespread
power failure leads to tens or hundreds of people stranded in
elevators, and, if the emergency phones in those elevators require
Internet connections to work, also unable to call for help.

Bill Horne

--
(Pleae remove QRM for direct replies)

In article <20230125201741.GA1374974@telecomdigest.us>,
Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> wrote:

>In the U.S., it's common to find business Internet connections that
>depend on AC power to operate, which go dead during a power
>failure. Since most elevators here also run on AC, any widespread
>power failure leads to tens or hundreds of people stranded in
>elevators, and, if the emergency phones in those elevators require
>Internet connections to work, also unable to call for help.

In some jurisdictions, buildings where elevators are mandatory are
also required to have backup power sufficient to return those
elevators to the recall floor. Of course that does not do much for
older buildings that were never retrofitted, and I'm not sure what
requirements are imposed on the emergency phones specifically.

This is brought to mind by the fact that our building was closed for
two days this past month in order to perform preventive maintenance on
the automatic transfer switch, which required shutting down utility
power and doing a manual transfer for generator loads. Much of my
core network equipment is on generator power, as well as a UPS, but
the office switches and anything powered by them (desk phones and
wireless access points) are not.

-GAWollman

--
Garrett A. Wollman | "Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
wollman@bimajority.org| act to remove constraint from the future. This is
Opinions not shared by| a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
my employers. | - Graydon Saunders, _A Succession of Bad Days_ (2015)

Am 25.01.2023 schrieb Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com>:

> In the U.S., it's common to find business Internet connections that
> depend on AC power to operate, which go dead during a power
> failure. Since most elevators here also run on AC, any widespread
> power failure leads to tens or hundreds of people stranded in
> elevators, and, if the emergency phones in those elevators require
> Internet connections to work, also unable to call for help.

That is a huge problem. In Germany IIRC they now use cellular mobile
network (2G, 4G or 5G) as a backup.

Analog phone lines have some advantages. :-)

Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> wrote:
> failure. Since most elevators here also run on AC, any widespread
> power failure leads to tens or hundreds of people stranded in
> elevators, and, if the emergency phones in those elevators require
> Internet connections to work, also unable to call for help.

Here, the phone systems in the elevator are usually running on
batteries, in case of power failure. It would be however be interesting
to know if:

- the VoIP routers also run on batteries

- if FTTS, the MicroCAN in the street either have batterie or are
tele-powered via old phone lines from a phone central
which has a generator or batteries

The devil is always in the details.

Am 26.01.2023 schrieb "Marc SCHAEFER" <schaefer@alphanet.ch>:

> - the VoIP routers also run on batteries

The entire network needs to run. Bigger computing centres have a
battery backup and a generator for all their machines including
network, but smaller offices/buildings mostly don't have that, so
network (including routers, switches, telephone exchanges) go down -
either immediately or after some minutes because the batteries are
only there to ensure a graceful shutdown to avoid data corruption.