POTs, Or Writing On The Wall?

Read certain US websites and you get the feeling that anyone who still has a landline telephone is akin to an aging dinosaur.

Indeed, one US ‘trend’ website confidently predicts that by 2012, all landlines will be dead, leaving users blessed with a fault-free mobile telephone service. The Plain Old Telephone Service (POTs) is dead, long live the mobile.

Okay. Of course, it’s a bit like that ITV drama series Space 1999. Made in the innocent 1970s (top marks if you can guess which were the three years it aired), it predicted that by the end of the 20th Century, quite a few of us would be living on the moon and fighting flying saucers every day. In reality, the year 1999 passed and the big worry was not flying saucers, but the Millennium bug.

As Nostradamus knew, if you’re going to make some big predications about the future, make them far in advance, so that people are unable to prove you wrong for a very long time.

And these latest predications as to the demise of the landline service smack of a useful little exercise by the mobile marketing boys. If you say something long enough, it’s bound to be true, isn’t it?

Well no, although there is some truth in what’s being said. Domestic landlines are being dropped in favour of mobile packages. And one of the main reasons is that the regulatory authorities have given the mobile operators a good kicking and told them to reduce prices across their networks. Little by little the mobile operators are having the premium bits of their business eroded.

What’s more, the mobile business is highly competitive and technology led, meaning that things move quickly and the industry is forever re-inventing itself, and re-marketing itself.

Some experts reckon that the landlines are only still breathing because you traditionally needed one to access the internet. Not so now, especially with more providers introducing fibre optics networks which don’t need a landline telephone to deliver the world wide web. And for those not even bothered to have a fibre optic to come to the house, office, the advent of mobile internet technology is on the increase.

Right, all good so far. But as with the case of many technology predictions, they always assume a level playing field. They start from the basis that everyone who lives in the US and UK is blessed with a high-tech Utopia in which fibre-optic, 100mb internet speeds criss-cross the country and mobile internet networks search out every nook and cranny in the land to provide a never-ending, perfect, cheap service.

Oh yes, we all still believe in Father Christmas, don’t we? The reality, especially in early 21st Century Britain, is very different and will evolve, at the usual pace, over the next couple of decades.

So, don’t expect to be living on the moon by 2012 fighting flying saucers and don’t expect to not have a landline.

POTs it maybe, but not completely old hat yet.