quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:

ATT

I think I see your problem.

quote:

Every once in awhile I broach ditching our landline to my wife. Last house we needed one due to spotty cell coverage, down here in flat Florida there are no such issues. I was going to bring it up to her and then ATT had their fiasco. I might wait a bit now. Lol

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I got rid of my landline a few years back.Still have one at the office for the fax. The nice thing is that landlines work in Category 3 or 4 hurricances. Electricity goes out for two weeks minimum but your landline still works. They are promising to harden the cell towers as most went down during the last bad storm.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
Yup. Though they're often (?) limited in how much and how fast they can raise rates by state-level regulation, such as is the case in Michigan.

Either way: POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) has become unprofitable. In some cases the original LECs (Local Exchange Carriers) have already sold their POTS businesses off to somebody else.

I believe I read where some of the remaining big carriers are talking about seeking government permission to begin shutting down their POTS services.

I'm doing that, using an LTE modem. If the Internet border router detects the primary Internet connection going down it automatically falls over to it. It automatically "fails back" when the primary comes back.

But I am using our mobile carrier due to economics. The third line was free Besides: My only other options were Verizon (expensive) or "AT&T" (we hates).

I have a Dual Wan Router. Fiber with coax backup ISP. Works seamlessly. When I cut off the satellite, my redundancy for something to do at home went TU. I have a lot of home automation and I want my surveillance to remain up 24/7 to the point it’s all backed up even if power goes down. Dual ISP connections works extremely well even in the corporate environment for smaller sites. I have designed many rings, elaborate WAN and it’s great that with broadband speeds continually going up, well there is a lot of $ to be saved. ATT and several other big coms are throwing down 5Gb symmetrical, and 10Gb via broadband. MSO’s are following suit. All will offer symmetrical connections in the next 2 years. Similar speeds as well. As long as you have the more recent coax on your prem (had mine replaced 2 years ago) no new coax will be required. New modem, and bam, 1Gb and above speeds symmetrical via cable.

POTS are being priced out. When a carrier decides they no longer want to support something they just jack up the price to obscene levels then a little while later they straight up pull the plug. Ma Bell already has new solutions for the enterprise environment. POTS in a box and such where it can be placed on a circuit or a broadband connection. It does the muxing so you can break analog lines out of the box to run to call stations and such for parking garage call boxes, elevators, name it. They did this with DS3’s as well, pricing them to obscene levels to force people off them and onto fiber for enterprise sites. POTS is the last remaining coffin nail. It doesn’t matter what state it is, already seeing it in many states where I have sites to manage. We have been disco for several years and I took out all the DS3’s years ago. Now it’s MPLS that is on my chopping block. Getting rid of it completely.

I dropped my landline about 10 years ago, didn't really use it for anything other than dial-up for internet access at the time. But I got tired of paying all the extra fees connected to my land line which ended up being more than the bill itself. When I cut my landline I neveer looked back and never had a moment of regret plus I'm saving about 60 dollars a month by getting rid of it.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
My old man was a telephone installer for Wright Patterson AFB. As such, we had multiple phones in our house at a time when most people only had one.
I was rigorously trained to unplug all the extra phones in the house the second the OD green Ohio Bell car was spotted in the neighborhood. It seems that the phone company could find an illegal phone by the voltage on the line that the ringing bells drew.

My grandfather got around this by disconnecting the bells in all of his phones except one. I remember helping him re-connect those bells in the early 90s.

Later in college I had a job hooking up automated meter readers that would phone in their reading over a POTS line. On one job I was holding both telephone leads in my hand when somebody called. Nominal voltage on a POTS line is 12V, but to provide enough power for a mechanical ringer it jumps up to 48V. That got my attention and I was more careful with bare leads thereafter.

Side note, useless historical trivia: When the US started building the electric grid, a lot of telegraph lineman were used for the work. Because those guys didn't really understand the potential danger of electricity, a lot of them died by electrocution.

quote:

Originally posted by shikemd:

Nominal voltage on a POTS line is 12V, but to provide enough power for a mechanical ringer it jumps up to 48V.

For most of the 1960's, I was a design engineer at Bell Labs, then moved to Puerto Rico to do the same job at International Tel & Tel.

Every electro-mechanical type of Central Office that I worked on in the old days (Strowger, Panel, #1 Crossbar, #5 Crossbar, A1 PentaConta), standard line voltage was 48V DC. Ringing was 130V AC.

Coin lines had higher DC applied (I forget the voltage), positive or negative, to drop the coins into the collection box or to send them to the return slot.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by shikemd:

Nominal voltage on a POTS line is 12V, but to provide enough power for a mechanical ringer it jumps up to 48V.

For most of the 1960's, I was a design engineer at Bell Labs, then moved to Puerto Rico to do the same job at International Tel & Tel.

Every electro-mechanical type of Central Office that I worked on in the old days (Strowger, Panel, #1 Crossbar, #5 Crossbar, A1 PentaConta), standard line voltage was 48V DC. Ringing was 130V AC.

Coin lines had higher DC applied (I forget the voltage), positive or negative, to drop the coins into the collection box or to send them to the return slot.

Thanks for the correction. That 130 VAC really got my attention!

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by shikemd:
Nominal voltage on a POTS line is 12V, but to provide enough power for a mechanical ringer it jumps up to 48V.

Every electro-mechanical type of Central Office that I worked on in the old days (Strowger, Panel, #1 Crossbar, #5 Crossbar, A1 PentaConta), standard line voltage was 48V DC. Ringing was 130V AC.

I always thought it was 90VAC RMS?

Either way: You don't want to be hanging onto those wires when the phone rings. It probably won't kill you (not a lot of current supply capability), but it will certainly get your attention

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

standard line voltage was 48V DC. Ringing was 130V AC.

I always thought it was 90VAC RMS?

You might be correct. I worked on that stuff 60 years ago, did not keep any CDs (the Bell System abbreviation for Circuit Diagram). I know for sure that it was in the neighborhood of 100 volts, so 90? 130? Close enough.

Hmmm . . . I did logic design, my education was actually math, not EE, so refresh me on this: What's the relationship between RMS and peak voltage for a sine wave? Might that explain 90 vs 130?

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

Hmmm . . . I did logic design, my education was actually math, not EE, so refresh me on this: What's the relationship between RMS and peak voltage for a sine wave? Might that explain 90 vs 130?

130 V Peak is about 90 V RMS. The factor is sqrt(2)/2, or about 0.707.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
What's the relationship between RMS and peak voltage for a sine wave? Might that explain 90 vs 130?

Damn close: 90VAC RMS = 127VAC peak.

RMS = .707 * peak
Peak = RMS * 1.414

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

Damn close: 90VAC RMS = 127VAC peak.

RMS = .707 * peak
Peak = RMS * 1.414

D'oh! I shoulda knew.

I work nights so I demand an alarm system that works for my family, which for many years made me keep the landline, though at one point this was through coaxial modem service from Time Warner. Changed my alarm system monitoring provider to Alarm Relay many years ago (great company by the way, much cheaper service than most if you are able to maintain your own system). After several years, they offered me cellular service for the system, which means no one can just cut the phone line at the house before breaking in. Once that was in place, I kept the landline a few years since we had a child, wanted her to be able to call 911 on the house phone if something happened. Found OOMA, and converted the landline to VOIP for $7/mo or so. OOMA, as others have noted, is great, no spam calls at all. Our power rarely goes out, but I do have a UPS that is good for at least 4 hours on the router, OOMA, and WiFi. The fiber optic modem has a backup battery, as does the alarm system, both of which should work for several hours. So we are good for short term disruptions. Longer than that, we should know what is going on and be together to hunker down or bug out.
As an aside, replace your alarm backup batteries every so often. Mine died last month. The system sent a notification of low battery voltage to the monitoring company, which gave me a call. The battery was as old as my house (14 years by date code) and well past replacement date. Easy fix, and I was thankful for the notification (another reason I highly recommend Alarm Relay as a company, look them up. Second aside, once had an alarm go off when we were at my parents house, got the call, told them we were not home and police were dispatched appropriately. They found the front door opened, and cleared the house. No problems found, likely the front door was not fully latched and got blown in by the wind, but was taken seriously, which I appreciate. I have set off the alarm forgetting to turn if off when I let the dogs out, they always call, unless its a panic alarm, which has accidentally been set off by the key fob in my pants). Replaced both SLA batteries with higher capacity units and have scheduled future replacement dates to prevent problems.

In summary, still have a “landline” but it’s a VOIP unit connected to the house NID. I don’t see any need for twisted pair coming to my house for the majority of people in today’s environment.

We changed over our POTS landline to a VOIP landline several years ago. We were moving between the states and didn't want to lose our home number and it had the lowest priced international long distance.

Now that we are settled, I've contemplated disconnecting but it is always good to have backup communications. I've recently re-networked the entire house, with UPSs, and integrated the VOIP telephone adapter to power our remaining phone jacks. Works pretty well overall.

My "MaBell" landline was dropped and replaced by a Comcast line in the TV PC bundle. I also have an AT&T iphone.
I love the comcast line because it is just a phone with only a couple features. I am too old school to really like the iphone with so many whistles and bells.

quote:

Originally posted by Hamden106:

I am too old school to really like the iphone with so many whistles and bells.

This thread has called to mind the fact that I still have my childhood phone number memorized.

Me too. We moved from there in 1968.

quote:

Originally posted by YooperSigs:
This thread has called to mind the fact that I still have my childhood phone number memorized.

Still remember all my places of work phone numbers, full time and part time together with all home phone numbers. Talk about useless information.

Wow, will have to research some of the options you all have done. Currently, we have internet, landline and email from one company, but their internet had gotten worse, and their web browser is a pain. Plus, almost nobody calls the home ph unless it’s either a scammer or political parties.
We’ve been considering getting rid of the landline and that company's internet, as we now have T -Mobile, and it has been faster and more reliable. Just have to figure out what cancelling both phone and internet would change.