In many respects, the clunky category known as plain old telephone service is being put out to pasture.
POTS, despite still being the dominant mode of phone service, is becoming passe. Throngs of new mobile-phone subscribers are being signed up daily-adding to the current 180 million total-while demand for telephone access lines steadily declines. Voice over Internet Protocol is also contributing to the unrelenting, gradual erosion of POTS.
Wall Street has taken notice, routinely punishing laggard landline carriers. Regional Bell telephone companies would have even less respectability on the Street if it were not for their growth-prone mobile units.
Here’s the thing, though: POTS works. The U.S. landline telephone system is still the best on earth. We’re spoiled, but only now finding that out.
These days, mobile phone and VoIP companies are uncomfortably feeling the POTS legacy. It accounts for the hate in the love-hate relationship America has with cell phones. Consumers love the benefits and convenience of mobile communications, but they want the gold standard of service that is POTS. Don’t try to tell them about the vagaries of radio propagation. A dropped call is a dropped call. A dead zone is a dead zone. Confusing bills, shoddy customer service and fine-print contracts that include early termination fees are foreign to many consumers.
The result: complaints, lawsuits, the California bill of rights and a gathering storm in which fierce forces of federal pre-emption and states rights are moving closer to a major collision.
But POTS is not the baseline for tweens and teens who are being raised on cell phones.
Meantime, the mobile-phone industry is forced to confront the consequences of a POTS legacy that is in fact a great curse. So must VoIP provider Vonage Holdings Corp.
Unlike POTS, 911 cannot be assumed to be part of the package when unregulated Internet phone service is purchased. There is some irony in Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott’s suit against Vonage for allegedly failing to clearly disclose what consumers must do to get 911 access when they sign up for service. Vonage and VoIP advocates have a visceral dislike of anything that smacks of regulation.
Yet it is a federal law-the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999-that gives mobile-phone carriers, vendors, emergency dispatchers, medics and others generous liability protection in connection with wireless 911 service. Carriers and others in the supply chain can only hope the 1999 law will keep them out of the line of fire during the imprecise implementation of wireless enhanced 911 service that continues in 2005.
