[Boatanchors] POTS vs. Other Services (Was: Short Wave Broadcast Folks)

[Jim Haynes]

On Wed, 16 Apr 2014, Frederick Bray wrote:

> Absent 
> physical damage to the line, you have a dedicated copper pair running from 
> your house to the central office.

Or to "pair gain" equipment located remotely from the central office -
and what kind of backup power does it have?

Also I remember an incident a while back where a fair-sized city lost all
telephone service when a fiber optic cable connecting to a much bigger
city 40 miles away was cut.  Apparently all the switching intelligence
was in the office in the big city; and the switching equipment in the
smaller city just took orders from the big city.

The May issue of the amateur radio magazine QST has an article about
using off-the-shelf home wireless routers with new firmware to create
High-Speed Multimedia (HSMM) networks.  "The development of mesh
technology has made it ridiculously easy to set up highly redundant
HSMM networks.  Mesh-enabled router/transceivers communicate with each
other and route data automatically to wherever it needs to go.  If one
router in the mesh network goes offline, the network instantly adapts
and establishes new routes."  www.broadband-hamnet.org   Maybe that's the
wave of the future, each house having a routing node to build a network
with the survivability that was the concept behind packet switching in
the first place.