The FCC will be gearing up to upgrade the U.S.’s telephone backbone soon. The current chairman of the organization announced that it will begin a new set of experiments in 2014 to prep phone lines with bigger networks that use IP instead of the current analog switchboard system.
In a blog post, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wrote, "This is what I call the Fourth Network Revolution… History has shown that new networks catalyze innovation, investment, ideas and ingenuity. Their spillover effects can transform society -- think of the creation of industrial organizations and the standardized time zones that followed in the wake of the railroad and telegraph."
It's a big step, and the full roll-out could take several years, but by the time it's all said and done, everyone in the U.S. will benefit from better call quality and more reliability.