If you came of age in the 1990s, you’ll remember the unmistakable auditory handshake of an analog modem negotiating its connection via the plain old telephone system. That cacophony of screeches and ...

Something of a tempest in a teapot has sprung up over Hurricane Sandy’s impact on one New Jersey community. Last week, a New York Times article cited complaints from some residents (one, actually) of ...

The People's Network: The Political Economy of the Telephone in the Gilded Age, by Robert MacDougall, University of Pennsylvania Press, 344 pages, $55 Since the early days of the telegraph, North ...

No one likes unsolicited commercial phone calls. It doesn’t matter much whether they are automated calls with prerecorded messages or merely calls from unrecognized numbers or whether they come during ...

The shift from copper landlines to fiber-based voice networks is continuing apace, and no one wants it to happen faster than Verizon. Internet users nationwide are clamoring for fiber, as well, hoping ...

Before Ma Bell came to town, and long before DSL, it was barbed wire, of all things, that brought rural communities together. A Sears telephone hooked up to barbed wire—miles of which were already ...

Six months after wireline telephone operators and trade groups asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to begin shutting down their aging switched networks, the agency responded ...

Today, the FCC convenes the first meeting of its “Technology Transitions Policy Task Force,” a new intra-agency group announced in December by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. The bland name belies a ...

Two months ago, AT&T petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to plan for the retirement of traditional phone networks and transition to what AT&T sees as an inevitability: the all-IP telco.

Nigel Linge does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...