Skip to content

Comment on Landlines are dying out. But to some, they're a lifelineparent

Comments

Landline phones provide power to customer phones, and would need to include the power for thousands of buildings in that.

Also, no one is requiring ISPs to power customer equipment. In most cases, that is impossible to do with fiber. But the provided equipment could include a battery backup. It is now possible to make small LiFePO4 battery that could survive for hours. It is acceptable to make backup power the customer's responsibility.

The important thing is that network equipment keeps working. Which in my experience it does.

There's still several orders of magnitude of difference between powering thousands of landline phones (which, by design, use very close to zero energy while on-hook), and powering thousands of homes and businesses.

No amount of handwaving or goalpost moving is going to ever change that. It is simply fact.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.