Still remembering the Hawaiian storm that made Kauai a bastion of cutting edge telephony in the 1990s and the way people let go of landlines in NY after the Hurricane there about a decade ago.
So long, weird quirky Finnish system, though I hardly knew ye.
It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.
This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.
That said, there are devices that depend on the old phone network that need to be replaced, such as alarm systems for vulnerable people, but the risk of vulnerable people that can't switch to VoIP services is fairly low, especially as this switchover has been known about for a long time.
https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea...
I wish I had a link for the other thing, but it was deep inside some Openreach site that Google don't seem to have access to.
I guess they're just not maintaining that infrastructure like they used to.
Finally my parents succumbed and now their phone is plugged into their router.
They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.
"Copper wires, the kind of cabling used in landlines for over a century, can only carry a limited amount of data. They carry phone calls as a continuous electrical signal that mimics the original sound wave, which is what makes them analogue."
If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL has been around for many years and has pretty high throughput.
It conveys what needs to be conveyed in an approachable way. It could be more accurate and/or precise, but it shares this quality with a lot of other explanations of technical things that are written for broad audiences. I'm inclined to give some slack to a journalist from Kosovo who probably did not learn English as their first language.
If I were editing it then I'd consider replacing the word "data" with "information," to encompass the entire gamut. But it is not particularly egregious as-presented.
> If someone reads this quickly, they might easily conclude that data is also transmitted as analogue sound signals (like a POTS modem) when ADSL has been around for many years and has pretty high throughput.
If someone were to reach that conclusion, then it would be a valid conclusion.
Data may come out as 1s and 0s (or digital words or frames or whatevers) after demodulation at either end, but on the copper wire between those endpoints ADSL is absolutely an analog signalling system. That's what it is designed to be.