Cutting the cord

I'm no Luddite, but I'm also not so fickle as to dump a proven technology just because it's no longer new & cool. Inertia is a powerful thing. But I may be getting ready to cut my ties to my Telco.

I'm old enough to remember growing up not even having a phone. Where we lived, my family was finally to get 'party line' service in the early 1960s. My grandmother, who lived in the Canadian Maritimes had a crank-phone and switchboard service until the early 1970s.

I live in an old mill town with a surprising amount of 19th century infrastructure remaining. I guess if it simply works, it remains invisible. No one wants to spend money to upgrade what doesn't draw attention to itself by failure or inadequacy.

DSL came to my area around 2000, and I signed up as soon as I could. Even over the cloth-shielded, solid copper cable that came into my basement junction box, it worked surprisingly well. I could finally shelve (alleged) 56K dialup for >700KBPS service, for only $50 more a month.

Since that time, technology has only advanced, while my existing service has remained stagnant, and my telco bill has inched up with fees and services I don't use.

My principal phone number is my Google Voice number. It offers me a bounty of features and options I would have gladly paid Verizon for. I rarely use my landline. It's merely an anchor for my DSL service. An anchor that costs me around $40 monthly. My mobile phone offers me far more calling options - and single-rate calling whether it's the next block or the opposite coast.

I've tried to whittle down the chargeable feature set on my landline voice/DSL service, but still it costs me upwards of $80 a month. ....More if I ever actually USE the damned phone.

I think it's time to cut the cord. Not because the 19th century technology can't keep up. It's surprisingly adequate. No, it's the mid-20th century billing model that's causing my defection. The infrastructure's long bought and paid for. Maintenance is paltry compared to the billions being poured into the communities that are being wired for FIOS and the buildout of 4G wireless infrastructure.

So why am I paying more for my legacy tech than I would to ditch it all & use WiMax/LTE and my mobile phone ?

As I said, inertia is a powerful thing, or as one sage put it "it's a fine line between a groove and a rut". Looking at what I pay and what I get is causing me to reevaluate everything. It may be time to break with the past and embrace the future.

In the end, it's not the tech. It's the money.

It's like 1974 all over again! I was working in a stereo store & got caught up in "Quad fever"... stereo was good, but this was utterly immersive - not to mention a handy way to nearly double hardware sales. All the big record labels got behind Quad - each in their own way of course. There were 3 major vinyl formats, plus a number of small fringe techniques to cram a quart of content into a pint container. There were incompatible 8-Tracks & Reels, and talk of a technical group to draft standards for Quad-FM.

Unfortunately, it was chaos. There were too many parts that wouldn't play nice with others and content was often terrible. Maybe swirling horns or guitars darting from corner to corner would impress a newbie like a game of "got yer nose" captivates an infant. But you can't build an industry on a facile gimmick. Well recorded surround sound was indeed immersive and could enhance the listening experience, yet it's extra clarity made every link in the recording/production/distribution chain that much more critical. When done properly, it was an evolutionary technology. But that kind of subtlety didn't move product.

The 3D TV fad seems startingly similar. Many different means to the same dubios end, a paucity of content, and much of what is out there immature and gimmicky.

I'm not knocking the underlying idea of making the presentation more realistic by adding another real-world perception - depth - to the process. I just get the feeling this is strictly about selling gear through gimmickry, the folly of which, sadly, seems to be a lesson the consumer electronics & content publishing industries have still not learned.

All that said, I'd love to see a medium for distributing stereoscopic content, from campy old chestnuts like "House of Wax" to NASA's stereoscopic survey data. But none of that will fuel a major trend in consumer electronics. Like colorwheel TV in the early 50s, I get the feeling this is just a future footnote in the history of home entertainment.