Remember the old phone company? That would be pre-1984 when we had only one choice for telephone service, and for most of us that choice was the local Bell operating company; Bell of Pennsylvania, Illinois Bell, Southwestern Bell, blah, blah, blah.
Back then, the telephone and the telephone company were one in the same. Some of us still rented our phones from the telephone company, but regardless of whether we rented or purchased the handset, we gave no thought to the instrument or the service. You know why? Because they worked--all of the time. "Five 9's" the engineers dubbed it, which meant the telephone network was designed to work 99.999% of the time. And it did. Not sexy, and not mobile, but very reliable.
Fast-forward 22 years. I'm writing this note from a house in Chesterbrook PA., 4 miles from the largest shopping center in America. The house is 150 yards from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and it is surrounded by an office park that houses some of the largest drug companies in the world, and a colossal family of mutual funds, all household names. And because of this concentration of high-tech commerce, there may be more T-1 lines running under this house than tree roots. You get the picture? This is not a remote outpost. And yet, I have to walk outside to use my Sprint cellular phone for it will not pickup a signal inside the house (and often not when I’m outside the house). For some unexplainable reason, Sprint overlooked Chesterbrook , PA, a residential community with prices ranging from the mid hundreds of thousands to the low millions, and I must roam on another cellular carrier's network to use my mobile phone.
The Chesterbrook streets and landscaping are torn up now, because Verizon is installing a new hoop-tee-doo Optical Fiber network, that will carry not only telephone conversations, but hi-speed internet access, hi-definition television programming, on-demand movies, and a new telephone service called VoIP. VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol which for us non-techies simply means the old copper wire telephone network that performed flawlessly (remember Five 9s?) for about 150 years, give or take a decade or two, is about to become history.
FTTH, Verizon calls it, which is shorthand for "Fiber-To-The-House." (They don't talk about what you do with it inside the house; they only bring it TO the house.) But fiber is fast and they say we will be able to download movies and games and all kinds of stuff that will transform our lives and cement our butts to the couch for even longer periods of time. And to make sure that we remain on the couch, the telephone company will display incoming calls on the TV. Wow!
Unless, of course, you live in that outback called Chesterbrook, PA and subscribe to Sprint PCS cellular service. In that case, pray that you have a digital video recorder that can play back the hi-definition video segment that you missed while you were outside on the phone.
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