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TagsBY REBECCA SHEEHAN
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
In today’s day and age almost everyone has a cell phone and because of that the percentage of landlines inside homes is almost nonexistent. Verizon Communications is on the verge of eliminating the landline telephone and replacing it with its new wireless alternative, Voice Link.
Full time residents of Fire Island, NY and Mantoloking are trying their hardest to get back to normal after Hurricane
Sandy ravished their shores. In Fire Island, as CBS 2′s Jennifer McLogan reported, Sandy submerged parts of Fire Island, destroying underground copper wiring and as a result, home service telephone transmission to the barrier beach was cut. Verizon is using the island as a test case, offering Voice Link to all 300 of its permanent
residents and dozens of businesses. Voice Link uses a wireless signal and has a rechargeable battery (two hours of talk
time and 36 hour4s of standby time).
“It’s a proven, reliable technology,” noted Thomas Maguire of Verizon Communications to CBS New York. “I think it’ll serve the customers well.”
In the small Jersey Shore town of Mantoloking, the streets still resemble a worn torn country. Since Hurricane Sandy graced the locals of Mantoloking back in October, its copper wiring system was largely destroyed. But residents of Mantoloking can get phone and Internet service from Comcast by cable, unlike those on Fire Island.
According to Verizon, replacing the lines just doesn’t make economic sense because it would cost Verizon hundreds of dollars per home to rewire a neighborhood, and statistically less than a quarter of customers are likely to sign up for phone service and many of those drop it after a year or two.
“If we fixed the copper, there’s a good likelihood people wouldn’t even use it,” says Maguire.
The number of U.S. phone lines peaked at 186 million in 2000 and since then, more than 100 million copper lines have already been disconnected, according to trade group US Telecom. The lines have been supplanted by cellphones and Internet-based phone service offered by way of cable television and fiber optic wiring. According to the Associated Press report, just 1 in 4 U.S. households will have a copper phone line at the end of this year, based on US Telecom’s research.
In the meantime, New Jersey state regulators are talking to Verizon about Mantoloking but haven't approved the landline-to-wireless switch that Verizon has already started. In reality for all those residents who rely on a landline there is still hope. In theory, Verizon's application could get denied and force it to rewire copper phone lines back into the town.
