I wonder if anyone has considered the political component of all
this. What reactions will the proposal to kill landline service do
to various voting blocks in the electorate--some of whom will
protest, write their congresspersons, sign petitions, and generally
make life unpleasant for anybody who wants to cut their telephone line?
Example: we finally got my mother to buy a small cellphone for which
you buy service with little phone cards, because we didn't want her
to get stranded on the road somewhere, far from help. She keeps it
turned off, most of the time. She's not a Luddite; she loves email
and took to OS X with an alacrity that surprised us. But to her, the
telephone is a LANDLINE in her house. She would be very DISPLEASED
with any proposal that meant that she had to carry a little phone--
with a tiny, hard-to read keyboard--around with her all the time and
pay a lot more for the resulting phone service. And where she lives,
the cell coverage is very spotty, whereas landline service is pretty
much universal, even in hard-to-reach areas.
If anyone has the illusion that people like my mother will gladly
suffer the cutoff of landline service, without making a lot of noise
about it, and making elected and unelected officials very unhappy?
That they will let this happen without taking major retribution at
the ballot box?
A lot of political issues are pretty abstract (e.g. carbon trading)
and don't have an immediate effect on everyday lives. Cutting off
landline phone service has an immediate effect on a lot of lives.
There will be repercussions--and retribution--if this goes forward.
--Constance Warner
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