Imagine that an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) struck the United States and destroyed our communications infrastructure—fried the switches, destroyed the circuits, melted everything else—and we had to start over from scratch.
What would a new, built-from-scratch, all modern communications network look like?
It’s hard to imagine that any elements of the old copper network would be rebuilt. We would certainly rely on wireless to a much greater degree, definitely in rural or hard-to-serve areas, and especially in light of consumers’ eager embrace of current wireless solutions. Yes, before wireless, you had to run a cable to every structure, no matter how distant, but today’s wireless technologies have made that burden obsolete.
So it’s pretty clear that a new, built-from-scratch network would be heavily dependent on wireless. Nobody thinks we would just go back and rebuild the old circuit switched network the way it used to be.
Well, guess what: Something like an EMP hit part of our country when Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeastern United States last October. The old telephone network on Fire Island, a barrier island on the south shore of Long Island with about 300 residents, was completely destroyed, and it can’t be fixed—for a lot of that equipment, the necessary repair parts don’t even exist anymore. Verizon has to build a brand new communications network (which would be more resistant to such damage in the future) in order to serve its customers on Fire Island.
Of course, Verizon wants to use all new, cutting edge technology, which would be based on an advanced fixed wireless service. Exactly the kind of network you’d build in a place like Fire Island today.
But there is opposition to Verizon’s plan to build out this new network. It’s not so much coming from the residents of Fire Island, since up to 80% of voice traffic on Fire Island is already wireless. Rather, it’s from our old friends at Public Knowledge, ever the champions of government control of as much of the economy as possible, and who for instance in the past have advocated the near nationalization of broadband networks through structural separation.
Why are folks like Public Knowledge opposed to the new wireless network? Are they just in love with copper? No, but they’re in love with the regulations that are attached to the old copper networks, and they know that the rollout of new, IP-based networks also dumps the old regulations in the rubbish heap along with the old networks. And it’s the regulations they want to hang onto. So they’re cynically using Verizon’s plan to mitigate the damage caused by Sandy to call into question the entire project of migrating to new, IP-based networks and away from outdated regulations.
It’s ludicrous to expect network operators to indefinitely incur the costs of maintaining two networks: The new, modern network we all want, but also the old copper network just so that some supposed public interest groups can leverage 80 year-old regulations.
The fact is that the copper network is going away, it should go away, and it’s going to be replaced with something that makes more sense for the future. It’s already gone in Fire Island, and insisting that it be replaced with outdated technology is a step backward rather than forward.
August 22, 2013