So are safe rooms, with reinforced walls and separately wired phone lines, where residents can hide if the house is attacked.
Since its inception in 1963, Comcast Corp. has evolved from a tiny outfit peddling reliable television signals to a giant corporation selling an array of communication services including wired phone lines, broadband Web access and even wireless service in some markets.
But it also helps to drive customers to get rid of their wired phone lines -- the lines that were never upgraded.
When the copper wire phone lines were originally laid down, the telephone had a monopoly on two-way telecommunications and telephone companies were virtually guaranteed to recoup their investment in infrastructure over time.
Just as remote areas leapfrogged wire phone lines for mobile phones, solar can leapfrog the old way of providing electricity by skipping the capital-intensive, centralized power plants and long-distance transmission infrastructure.
In the same way China and India decided to skip legacy copper wire phone lines in favor of the latest mobile and fiber optic technology, todays companies have a choice to leapfrog a patchwork quilt of 16 disparate software solutions for a single platform built from the ground up with artificial intelligence.
And now competing with the i-modes are an increasingly popular type of cellular phone known as PHS that supports data speeds of 64,000 bits a second -- as fast as the wired, ISDN digital phone lines here.
And Internet appliances have failed to catch on, in part because they are still tethered by wires or phone lines.
To accommodate the personnel and organizational changes that are increasingly common in today's workplaces, layouts, walls, electrical wiring and phone lines are all easily reconfigured.
Even the best standard conductors — like the copper wires in phone lines or conventional computer chips — have some resistance; overcoming it requires operational voltages much higher than those that can induce current in a superconductor.
