said by ropeguru:I would much rather have copper. With storms like Sandy, even fiber customers are going to have long outage times so that is really not a comparison.
However, for 99% of the time, the outage is usually at the customer premises due to power and for long term, the copper will be up 100% where unless the customer provides their OWN generator, they lose all services in 8 hours. With copper, all phone power is provided from the CO, unless you happen to be on an RT inwhich case the telco is on the hook for providing power to that.
Funny how so many people forget the availability that the copper infrastructure gives.
tell that to my parents. They are still on copper here in Northern Virginia. After the Derecho came through this past Summer, they were without phone service for around a week. While the neighbors that had Comcast and FiOS still had phone service.
Although this is the first time in almost fifty years something like that has happened to the phone service at their house, but it still shows that even POTS can go down.
At my place i have FiOS. I have my ONT on a UPS so the ONT BBU won't kick in until there is a 16 to 18 hour power outage. I'll take phone service over Fiber with FiOS or even coax with Comcast over a POTS line any day. Even when i had Comcast and I had a power outage, i still had TV service since all my electronics were on UPSs.. Comcast didn't have phone service back then though but it would have still been up for me.