Once upon a time I worked for a company that provided DSL internet.
One day we got a call from a customer complaining that they had no connection.
We investigated and discovered that their line had been completely cancelled from under us and ask the customer what happened to their telephone line.
They said they had set up VoIP on their internet connection, and thus no longer had need of their telephone line and so they cancelled it.
The telephone line on which we had provisioned their DSL internet…
“No more hand-written code” sounds to me an awful lot like “we don’t need that telephone line any more”.
The real shame here is that the fall-out won’t be as sudden and the people who ought to be getting the brunt of it will manage to squirm out of any responsibility.
While I get what you’re saying, you don’t actually need POTS service on a copper line to have DSL work. I used to sell DSL circuits without telephony services in one of my first technology jobs. We’d order “dry circuits” and pipe data only through Copper Mountain or Paradyne branded gear (pretty sure both companies are dead now). Most telephone companies wouldn’t let you do this because they wanted to prop up POTS line sales, not because it was technically necessary.
This was the in the UK over a decade ago, back in the bad old days of migration codes and everything being underpinned by BT Openreach who basically had their arm twisted to allow other ISPs to exist and use that infrastructure. And even then they guarded everything jealously (and sometimes incompetently, but that’s another story).
We didn’t sell telephone lines, so every DSL we sold was on an existing POTS line that each customer already had. Most of our customers wouldn’t have known about getting a separate POTSless line even if that was possible at the time. And the customer in question certainly didn’t.
They had it installed on their company’s one and only telecommunications line. Of all the hundreds of customers I dealt with over the years, it only ever happened the once… although we did have to warn at least one other customer off the idea when it happened to come up in conversation.
Yeah I worked for a company that sold DSL in ATT and CenturyLink areas in the United States. We could also sell stuff with telephony from ATT, but we had some ancient agreement that let us sell DSL using their lines without telephone service. They were ordered in ATT’s system as “alarm circuits”. We also could run service 3x further out because of some old tech called ReachDSL. It was only 256k to 1.5M, depending on distance, but most of the people on it could only get dial up at the time, so this was the best they had available.
The real shame here is that the fall-out won’t be as sudden and the people who ought to be getting the brunt of it will manage to squirm out of any responsibility.
Thank you for the wise way of putting this, because I was getting excited with the whole “too subtle and sudden approach of justice to escape it” opposite emotion-driven interpretation, where dangerous fools always escape justice with some scratches, leaving others to suffer, but this time they will get complacent. Like with debt or with antivaxxer ideas.
Once upon a time I worked for a company that provided DSL internet.
One day we got a call from a customer complaining that they had no connection.
We investigated and discovered that their line had been completely cancelled from under us and ask the customer what happened to their telephone line.
They said they had set up VoIP on their internet connection, and thus no longer had need of their telephone line and so they cancelled it.
The telephone line on which we had provisioned their DSL internet…
“No more hand-written code” sounds to me an awful lot like “we don’t need that telephone line any more”.
The real shame here is that the fall-out won’t be as sudden and the people who ought to be getting the brunt of it will manage to squirm out of any responsibility.
While I get what you’re saying, you don’t actually need POTS service on a copper line to have DSL work. I used to sell DSL circuits without telephony services in one of my first technology jobs. We’d order “dry circuits” and pipe data only through Copper Mountain or Paradyne branded gear (pretty sure both companies are dead now). Most telephone companies wouldn’t let you do this because they wanted to prop up POTS line sales, not because it was technically necessary.
This was the in the UK over a decade ago, back in the bad old days of migration codes and everything being underpinned by BT Openreach who basically had their arm twisted to allow other ISPs to exist and use that infrastructure. And even then they guarded everything jealously (and sometimes incompetently, but that’s another story).
We didn’t sell telephone lines, so every DSL we sold was on an existing POTS line that each customer already had. Most of our customers wouldn’t have known about getting a separate POTSless line even if that was possible at the time. And the customer in question certainly didn’t.
They had it installed on their company’s one and only telecommunications line. Of all the hundreds of customers I dealt with over the years, it only ever happened the once… although we did have to warn at least one other customer off the idea when it happened to come up in conversation.
Yeah I worked for a company that sold DSL in ATT and CenturyLink areas in the United States. We could also sell stuff with telephony from ATT, but we had some ancient agreement that let us sell DSL using their lines without telephone service. They were ordered in ATT’s system as “alarm circuits”. We also could run service 3x further out because of some old tech called ReachDSL. It was only 256k to 1.5M, depending on distance, but most of the people on it could only get dial up at the time, so this was the best they had available.
Those were indeed dark days.
Thank you for the wise way of putting this, because I was getting excited with the whole “too subtle and sudden approach of justice to escape it” opposite emotion-driven interpretation, where dangerous fools always escape justice with some scratches, leaving others to suffer, but this time they will get complacent. Like with debt or with antivaxxer ideas.