AT&T, one of the nation’s three major telecom operators, had a total service outage on Thursday. All customers could no longer access their phone lines or mobile internet, causing widespread concern across the country.
AT&T restored service the following day, but this lead to many questions on how to live without a cell phone. Should people get landlines, and other wired communication devices in general? Digital Trends reports:
An AT&T service outage that impacted a huge number of its customers across the U.S. on Thursday was not caused by a cyberattack, the company’s initial investigation has revealed.
Instead, the cellular and internet outage was the fault of work that it was carrying out on its systems, AT&T said in a message posted on its website on Thursday evening.
Cell phones have surpassed landlines for over ten years, meaning many younger Americans have never known landlines. The biggest issue with landlines is that they require a second phone number, making it harder to consolidate communication. They also rely on the internet to make calls now, unlike older landlines which had their own wire system. Still, they can be more reliable than cell phones as AT&T’s outage proves. CNET says:
Landlines are telephones that connect to specialized wiring in our homes. The iconic image is that of a rotary-dial phone — usually rented from the phone company — that either hung on the wall or sat on a counter or table, though push-button and later cordless landlines replaced many of those oldsters in the 1980s. Landline phones connect to one another through a global communication network that was built over more than a century. But as cellphones became broadly available and affordable, many people chose to drop their landlines altogether.
A 2022 survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that only about 29% of US adults lived in a house with a landline phone, down from more than 90% in 2004. The crossover happened around 2015, which was also when smartphone sales entered a boom period that reshaped the tech industry and helped turn iPhone maker Apple into one of the world’s most highly valued companies.
An outage should be a wakeup call for Americans on how they can live their lives without technology. Republicans have also warned that a Chinese cyber attack could paralyze the country in the event of a war. Americans best look at how they can prepare to live, at least temporarily, in a society where technology can break down.
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