This has been expected for at least 10 years. I still have a ton of pots lines though. Mostly alarms and scada, which should really be on wireless at this point.
Have to wonder since copper is at an all time high if it’s worth it to pull all that copper out of the ground. Wouldn’t think it would be but who knows
Fair enough.
POTS is all but dead in Australia (chopped up for NBN FTTN), pretty sure most of Europe killed ‘real’ POTS in the 80s with ISDN.
US is actually an outlier still having a copper pair that’s purely analogue.
until mobile phones support fax I don’t think POTS will be going anywhere
Most devices with modems will just be plugged into cheap ATAs. They can handle v34 no problem.
We have 20-yr old equipment that still utilizes POTS that we’ll have to upgrade when Verizon gets their wish. We had just reconfigured things to leverage Verizon POTS because the terrestrial phone provider abandoned their service suddenly last year. I was hoping it’d be good for a while. No such luck.
Can you not just get some ATAs? The other guy talked about his AVM router with a built-in ATA, but you can get them as standalone devices for next to nothingm and they work fine for voice, fax or modems up to 33.6k.
Well, I didn’t really think about that. Thanks for the suggestion! Are there any that stand out? My cursory search brings up the more expensive versions.
The most common routers here in Germany have POTS connectors and convert that to VOIP internally. At least for POTS with DTMF. I keep one specific router around that even still supports pulse dialing as I have two rotary phones from the 1950s and 1970s still hooked up for fun. (They work, except for the fact that nobody knows the number of my land line)
When the biggest provider in Germany switched from POTS and ISDN to VOIP there was also a number of solutions available for bigger installations, so you could keep your POTS installation while the adapter does the VOIP conversion.
So all in all switching worked mostly fine.
I keep one specific router around that even still supports pulse dialing as I have two rotary phones from the 1950s and 1970s still hooked up for fun
This router can put out enough juice to ring them like normal? If so what’s the model?
It’s an old FritzBox where I turned off wifi etc and just use for VOIP - Pots. When I set it up a some time ago it was EUR 15 or so on ebay, as these old FritzBoxes have no other modern use. They put out “just” enough juice to ring the phone. Ringing is softer than what I know from. my childhood, though.
Pulse dialing works, but you can’t pause while dialing as it interprets a pause as “now connect the call”. (Real POTS had “incremental” dialing)
I have these phones for fun, but if I’d need to use them I’d probably buy a new dedicated voip adapter (EUR 150+).
Old FritzBox routers are cheap here, that’s why I use them.
Just slap a mosfet in between the modem and ringer so you can boost the signal with an external power supply.
It’s good enough for what I need as is. I was thinking about doing something like this with an esp32, IIRC there’s a voip firmware for the esp. I was thinking of hiding it in the rotary phone along with a battery, connecting it to the mobile network via a hotspot or just setting the esp32 up like a BT headset. Then put the rotary in a backpack and using it to receive a call on the commuter train or so.
