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You can buy good lightning protection devices from Square D or Siemens. Here's a background paper from Siemens. and a product guide from Square D.. These go between the meter and the circuit breaker box. They're hulking big metal boxes with big inductors inside and a huge ground wire. You can get various peak current ratings, up to 480,000 amps. That's more power than lightning bolts have.

Similar protection devices are available for phone lines. These attach where the phone line enters the building and, of course, have a big ground wire.

This is a completely solved problem. Antenna towers, power lines, and telegraph lines have been taking direct lightning hits for over a century, and the protection devices are available. They're not even all that expensive. Just big.

For those who still have landline phones, Mike Sandman, purveyor of genuinely indispensable old-school telephony gear, has some telco line powered goodies.

Don't even try to order any of them, though.

If it's fixed, we won't be able to get rich quick turning tarballs into, basically, gold!

For those who don't know, Mike Sandman has lots of hard to find things for POTS phone installation and support. Among other things, I replace older PBX systems with asterisk, and sometimes he is the only source for the parts I need.


Having said that, my favorite Sandman product is the Taseler(tm).
"You'll have the best dressed and most respectful children in your neighborhood, or Your Money Back!"

One is to:

www.BP.com/OilSpillNews "Info about the Gulf of Mexico Spill Learn More about How BP is Helping."

The other is:

Tar Ball Burner(tm) "Collect free tar balls from beaches and turn them into unleaded gas!"

Please slashdot both of them.

Sorry, the US FBI already tried that http://www.sandman.com/taliban.html

Click here to hear a WAV file of the tone.

You can go here for the real TeleZapper website, which is a device that detects when you answer your phone, and plays the tone basically as you're saying "hello".

Asterisk has this sound built-in, so you can trigger it in your dialplan wherever you need.

Wikipedia has great information on the Special Information Tone, and other call progress tones that you probably just take for granted.

You're looking at between 10 and 100 milliamps of loop current, depending on the equipment that serves your line and your distance from the CO. You might be able to rig a small radio, LED light, or battery trickle-charger, but that's about it.

Keep in mind that as soon as you draw more than 2mA or so, your line is considered "off-hook" and the switch begins supplying dialtone. You won't be able to receive calls while sneaking power.

Of course, that doesn't stop some jokers from creating an entire line of telco-powered spoof products.

First, as everyone else has suggested, run a bunch of antenna feedline down to the phone, from an antenna parked in a good location. This sucks, because there's a tradeoff between flexibility and performance. Also, the antenna connector on your handset may or may not be very durable. However, if you're going to go this route, check a truck stop for adapters. Truckers generally spend a lot of time outside traditional cellphone coverage, and any well-equipped service plaza that's more than a hundred miles from a big city will probably carry an assortment of antenna adapters. They generally use TNC as the "common" antenna connector, since it was the standard on the old analog bag phones.

Second, you could leave the phone upstairs where it gets decent signal already, and bring the voice downstairs. Do this with a Cellsocket or a Dock'n'talk cellular POTS adapter. Run a regular phone line down to where you spend most of your time, or hook up a cordless phone to the analog port.

Next option: Leave the phone upstairs. Get a really long headset cord, if your phone supports voice dialing and an answer/hangup button on the headset. :)

Yet another dumb idea: Leave the phone upstairs, and use a Bluetooth headset to bring the audio down. You should be able to dial by sending commands from a Bluetooth-equipped PDA.

That is, unless of course you have DSL. In that case you should either use a 2-line adapter to run your VOIP phones on line 2, or change your DSL connection to line 2 and plug in your ATA normally.

There are other ways to do this with DSL without doing the two line thing, which may not be an option for apartment dwellers (like me) who only have one pair available.

The first step is to identify which phone jack is the first one on the loop coming off of the phone box outside. Now take apart the jack and disconnect the pair coming in from the phone box, that is the pair that carries your DSL signal. Now wire this pair into a surface mount keystone jack or whatever and plug your DSL modem in. Put your original jack back together and back in the wall, you have now isolated your internal phone network from the phone box and wire up all of the extensions to your ATA. See pictures of the work in progrees here and the finished outlets here . For good measure I also diconnected the the last jack in the series so I'm not sending dial tone to the neighbors place :)

On a side note I've also managed to get my rotary phones working with Vonage by ordering a Pulse to DTMF adapter from Mike Sandman who also has lots of other neat telco goodies at his site. The Linksys router sends enough voltage to ring my Western Electric 302G and my 554 wall phone clearly, though the 554 wimps out after a fe rings. I think this is because my 302 was originally setup for a long party line install and has a ring isolater tube installed to compensate for weak ringing voltage from too many phones on the same line. I'm looking to replace the 554 with a 364 wall phone from a party line install, with the hope that it'll play nicer with the Linksys.

In any case it's immensely satisfying to use a 60 year old phone on a VOIP service...

Answering machines?

Got to love the glow-in-the-dark telco-powered vibrator for "sore muscles". Guess some chicks can't even make it through a power outage!

Love the anecdote though...

"Last time I was in LA, I had to walk down eight flights of stairs with two big bags to check out of the hotel that had been without power twice during my stay. The vibrator would have really helped my muscles after that stressful hotel stay!"

There's muscles down there, but c'mon, they weren't worked hard from carrying bags.

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This site sells stuff that can be powered from your telephone line. Clock radios, calculators, vibrators, police scanners, wet dry brooms,etc.

weird...

Telco powered electronics

Sprint was used for internal communications until 1968, when the FCC (Carter Phone Decision) allowed alternative to the Bell system. After that they parlayed it into a business.

Actually, the CarterPhone decision related to connecting 3rd party (not leased from the telco) telephones and equipment to your phone line. It was instrumental in allowing things like modems. More info on CarterPhone (and a real cool telco history page) here.

It did not relate to Long Distance at all, that was more related to Judge Green's decision to break up AT&T. Sprint did not enter the LD market until the 80s, with details here. You are correct about the internal communications part though (I know IBM used them for inter-office comms in the 70s).

• Do Zappers really work with telemarketers? (15 posts)
• Telezapper easy to defeat? (14 posts)

Anyway, you can just add that sit.wav to the start of your answering machine message for free, so it doesn't hurt to see for yourself.

Go to Mike Sandman's site, http://www.sandman.com/pouches.html (look for the "Indoor Cellular Antenna" and the "Cellular POTS Adapter", either of which may help - a competing device similar to the "Cellular POTS Adapter" can be found at http://www.cellsocket.com/).

There was some issue about the use of non-Bell phones on the system. Could someone respond with more intelligent and enlightening information regarding this?

There were BIG issues around this. I am old enough to remember when you were supposed to rent a thingie (a box full of caps) to isolate your non-bell equipment from the phone lines (but was young enough then to completely ignore that rule). You can find a lot of info on this with a google search for "carterphone". My favorite page that covers this and a lot of other phun stuff from telco history is here at Sandman's telco history site. Lots of cool pics of phones, old catalogs and shit. The background of the Carterphone decision is towards the beginning.

Correct; here is one such device, with a good explanation.

just like your local phone company would be completely justified in requiring you to buy its phones only,

On February 28, 1885 AT&T was born. Capitalized on only $100,000, American Telephone and Telegraph provided long distance service for American Bell. Only local telephone companies operating under Bell granted licenses could connect to AT&T's long distance network.

Of course, you could argue that AT&T was being Canute-like, but then again, they won, didn't they?

Mike Sandman sells at http://www.sandman.com/tmstop.html a cute device that sends a signal that the phone has been disconnected.

Supposedly the predictive dialing computer then hangs up the annoying telemarketing call and removes your number from the database. If a human is calling, all you do is explain the strange tones and go back to your regularly scheduled conversation.

Has anyone tried this gadget and if so does it work?

If you want to abuse there Predictive Dialers, have a look at this site and the products they offer: Telemarketer Stopper!(TM)