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You've Dropped Your Landline — Now What?
smurphmeister writes "My wife and I recently moved up to the world of cell phones, after taking our sweet time to make sure this whole newfangled technology was going to stick around. We moved the old landline phone number to her phone, so we're disconnected from the pole. Now the question is, what to do with the copper already in our house? My first thought was an intercom system, but that just seems so old school! So what ideas do you all have for what to do with the 4 little wires running to every room of my house?"
put voip on it, duh
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Use it as a guide line for ethernet.
I know! You'll need to make a weapon. Look around; can you construct some sort of rudimentary lathe?
1) If you got the budget, rip it out, replace with Cat6, if Fiber to the home comes to yours, you'll thank me later :-)
2) The intercom idea isn't bad, depends on the size of your house (what happened to "just yelling" sheesh)
3) Just yank out all the copper and sell it, few bucks anyways
At any rate I'd make sure you're real sure you like being away from your landline. Give that decision a 6 month wait period before you decide to recycle your wires one way or another.
...in bed
FastEthernet should be able to run over 2 pairs. :-)
There's more important things to worry about.
Move on.
AT&ROFLMAO
Get one of these:
http://www.myxlink.com/index.aspx
And keep the legacy landline handsets in the house. This way, no matter where you are in the house, whether or not the cellphone is with you, you can still make/receive calls - leveraging your cell minutes.
You can probably integrate that with an Asterisk VoIP system and get additional things like intercom, room-to-room dialing, etc.
Get something like this and you can be wired and wireless at the same time.
I suggest using them for a transmitter for Very Low Frequencies (VLF), so you can chat with u-boats and scuba diving friends.
pull the copper out of the wall and sell it for crack money!
Most likely the phone line is already Twisted Pair, so assuming it's CAT5, it's easy to change over to Ethernet. One idea I had was to install cameras at central points (doors, windows, etc) and set up tablet PC's with a simple web interface to pull up images from the cams.
Heard a noise at night? just go to the tablet on the wall, scan the cameras, and alert the authorities if necessary.
Landlines? Cables? Telephones? WTF! Something from stoneage?
Use the old wiring as a pull-rope to run Cat-6.
Other than that, it's not much good for anything. It's too small to carry any amount of power, whether supply or audio, it's unshielded and may not even be twisted pair.
It's as useless as iron telegraph wire in this day and age, or close to it.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Wire all of them to a tin foil hat. Perfect for broadcasting your thoughts to the mothership.
There is nothing really you can do, you can rip it out, but the problem with that is the hole in the wall and the twenty bucks you will get, not really worth it. Now if you are looking to spend a little money you can rip out all the cable and hire someone to come in your house and run cat5 cable, you can always buy a cisco telelpresence and pay for them to install it then you won't need a phone you will have a hi-def video phone, but i doubt you have that kind of money so just leave it be and go on with your life.
Morse code communication system.
Connect it to your computer for music everywhere.
Now a real thought. Do you have, or are you going to have kids. At some point you will have to let the communicate, and a cell phone may not be a good option. If this is the case you may wish in just a few years that you had left the phone lines alone.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
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I'm going to have to say "leave it." If you want to run an intercomm, it'll be useful for the wires as guides, but due to the set up, you're never going to find something useful to send over the wires themselves. Find something you DO want in every room, and just run alongside, since all the holes in the studs should be pre-drilled for you.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
They might make good AM radio antennas. You know, the kind of radio where you can listen to ideas too far off in the ideological fringes to make it onto the Internet.
in-home telegraph system
imagine the envy and awe of your friends and neighbors as you show off a morse telegraph key in every room
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Rig up a some doorbell switches, D cell batteries and bulbs to use as a signalling device that you need another bottle of beer
DO NOT remove the wire. In this economy, it's hard enough selling your house as it is... If your nerd level is high enough, I recommend interfacing it all with a nerdkit... alarm clock in every room, irritating beeper that goes off every 15 minutes, lights that flash when you get a new email, maybe even "backup lighting" (preferably red) for when your main power goes down...
...my house has a land line connection. LOL! The memories. I think I destroyed part of the line along the side of my house about 4 years ago with a weed-eater. My advice? Do what I did - forget the line is there (except don't completely forget and ruin it on accident like I did :)
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
If you live close enough to a phone switch you can get DSL. I don't know what else it can be used for right now.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePNA
While technically possible...it's not really financially viable.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Get a stand alone adaptor for Skype/ other VoIP system (SIP?) and hook in your old landline phones to that. Cheaper internet calls out, emergency and incoming calls to your mobiles. Best of everything. And fairly easy to convert back to being wired into the normal telephone network!
Get a cell phone docking station and plug your house wiring into the cell phone. There are several available: Dock-N-Talk, Cell Socket. Example: Cell Docking Station. Simply google "cell socket" to get more results.
AFAIK, phones only use CAT3.
I like the idea of ditching the Vonage line we have (we already ditched the POTS service for our primary voice line) and going cell phone only. But when I'm home, I'd prefer to use the cordless phone system with the handsets strewn around the house, and leave my cell phone plugged into the computer to charge.
To that end, I bought an XLink bluetooth gateway box. The idea behind this box is that it provides dialtone and ringing to your POTS phones and then places the calls over between 1 and 3 bluetooth-paired phones. An excellent concept, but alas, it was plagued with reliability issues, at least for us. Maybe in a year or so either there will be a competitor or they'll have updated their firmware or something.
So at least for now, we still have the Vonage line.
In case of major blackouts no cell phone will work, while the old wired phone does, especially if you have a phone set which does not require any external power supply.
You can run a one wire network which uses 2 wires. There is a range of devices you can read information from, http://owfs.org/.
For example you could run a temperature sensors in each room.
Combined with a tool like http://www.cacti.net/ you can log an ongoing temperature graph.
Combined with X10 http://www.linuxha.com/ you now could act on the information you receive. for example if the room reaches a certain temperature you switch on the fan.
racker79
How about connecting it up in a big loop and making an antenna. I've got no idea what you might pick up but hook up a recording device and work it into your next techno track.
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
Can you grab the few volts of electricity off of the line that the phone company is sending you for free?
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Depending on which state you live in, the phone company may be required to provide a "soft dial tone" so that you can continue to make free 911 calls with a land line phone. In this case, it would be extremely foolish to remove or mess around with the phone lines. In an emergency, you may not be able to 100% rely on your cell phone to have a charged battery, get signal, etc. If your wife starts having a heart attack, you may not have time to run across the house and grab a charger if the battery is dead or reset the phone if it freezes.
I'd be very surprised if you found CAT5 being used for phone lines in a normal house. CAT3 maybe, if it's relatively new, but even that's on the high end for residential phone wiring. You'd be disappointed with the performance of any ethernet network you setup using the existing phone wires in a typical house.
I'm seriously surprised nobody has brought this up. I'm not sure if its state law, but at least in my state, the law requires telephone companies to allow 9-1-1 calls to be placed even on "disconnected" phone lines. Do you have kids? You may want to keep those lines connected to the telephone company. Imagine your child chokes on a marble, and you go to dial 9-1-1 on your cell phone, only to realize you forgot to charge it and it has no battery, or the service isn't good. Imagine you're having a heart attack, you do manage to call 9-1-1 with your cell phone, but are unable to speak. Hopefully your cell phone company has properly transmitted the billing address to the emergency center..
This is why I always have at least one standard, non-cordless, non-battery operated phone connected to my standard copper phone system.. just in case. I realize even POTS has a chance of faillure, I just think cell phones are exponentially higher.
Plug your old corded phone back in, so you can still call 911 in an emergency when the power is out and the cell towers are either down or jammed to capacity. AFAIK, all local phone companies in the US are required to still connect 911 calls, even if you're not paying for service.
Maybe you're doing most of your chatting on the cell but there's still some good reasons for a landline:
1) home fax machine
2) landline more likely to function in an emergency as cell systems usually overload and are unavailable
3) landline call to 911 is more likely to show your address to the dispatcher possibly saving your life with a faster response
4) landline will not be lost or misplaced
5) landline more likely to continue to function during an electrical power failure
6) landline can provide emergency dial-up internet service
7) landline will not expose you to uhf radiation
8) landline will not suffer from battery failure
9) landline will not suffer from poor signal quality
10 landline is legally much more difficult for authorities to eavesdrop on
I haven't subscribed to a landline telephone service in at least 7 years. I've never had an irrational desire to make use of those few little wires running through the walls in all that time. Just think, someday when little Tommy asks, "Daddy, what are these strange holes in the wall for?" you can share with him your fond memories of the technology of yesteryear. He will then share with you just how old he thinks you and the house are by saying, "you used to talk with wires?!?!"
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
It's only required to be Cat3, but it's possible (unlikely though) that he has Cat5 or higher run through his house, with only four of the eight wires terminated. Were I to build my own house, I'd go this route, myself, and this is what they did at a networking lab I used to work at instead of buying phone extension cables.
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Apparently there are Home Phoneline Network Adapters that use your existing phone lines to connect your computers. It can run up to 320Mbps, and can co-exist with existing phones.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
About a year ago I had been searching aggressively for this exact device. They aren't easy to turn up on Google without a lot of trash to wade through. There were a couple manufacturers then (can't remember the names right now), but they were all in the $150-$250 range. This is cheap enough and seems to have good ratings that I will probably buy one in the next month.
Someone will be right over to strip all that nasty unused copper right out of your house.
Have gnu, will travel.
you must be the most dimwitted fag i've ever seen on here. do you wonder what to do with your used tv dinner trays too? i bet you voted for bush.
And you don't have any doubt about the reliability of the cell system?
And in an emergency where POTS is the only functioning technology.
Mature systems that have been tested in dire situations, old fashioned switched telephones and HAM radios come to mind.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I just had a new house built and they ran cat 6 to all the phone jacks. I thought it was neat and if I ever cancel vonage I can use it as a lan. Then I thought about the fact that wireless is easier and doesn't require a network cable.
This signature would be better if I was creative.
Not that any Slashdotter would know anyone that might get arrested.... Still one should be aware that in many places (like Texas) your "Phone Call" has to be a collect phone call through some third party (don't know the name of the third rate company in Texas), and they won't make a collect call to a cell phone.
So.... If the police show up at your daughter's apartment because of a domestic disturbance call, and she isn't entirely interested in letting them search the house (like she is studying for finals barefoot in her night gown after finally kicking out her very loud boyfriend) .... And the police are so worried that she is being held against her will and being beaten up by her boy friend that they throw her on the ground and beat her up and haul her to jail....
THEN when she tries to call you and you have no land line.... You will not be disturbed.
THEN she will get tossed barefoot on the streets at 4:30 am in her night gown in downtown Austin Texas and will finally give you a call when she borrows a phone from a construction worker....
AND you will be thankful that you got 45 extra minutes sleep.
I am not entirely clear why so many states like Texas have decided that it is a great idea to only give people the right to a COLLECT phone call to a LAND LINE ONLY in this day and age, but that is the way it is.
TRUE STORY.
I'm sure there's some way to send an electrical signal through all the wires and create a time vortex of some kind. It'd be tricky, but I think it'll work. Of course, you might wind up trapped in a hostile time or even a violent alternate universe inhabited by giant fish-frogs. I suggest caution if you decide to do this. If I'm not mistaken you have to use 220 instead of the standard 110.
Check with your local hardware store in their time dilation isle, they usually stock converters if you get stuck with the wrong polarity. And remember to keep the humidity down when you turn it on, you don't want to fog anything up.
Just a thought.
ed duval the very last person
Cat 3 wiring is still usable for various LAN applications - home automation being one.
Unless if course your furnace NEEDS 100 Mb/sec connectivity.... 10 Mb/sec will probably do. I find mine gets by with zero actually, but it is controlled by an oh so boring programmable thermostat.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Indeed, usually only 2x single pairs, hardly enough to be usable at all for any sort of Ethernet network.
Anyone who's stupid enough to start fucking with the copper in their house should be aware that they actually don't own the copper. I know here in Australia, if you touch that copper, even though it's inside your house, you are liable for quite hefty fines from ACMA (Australian Communication & Media Authority). There's also the issue that if you have destroyed the line to the telco's joint out the front you will have to drop between $5 000 and $20 000 from your house price (depending on the distance & local contractor rates) to have a new lead-in installed. Although I doubt you are actually not connected to the joint out the front, telcos usually won't do that unless they need the pair you're sitting on, they like to keep in-place services for future customers. So now you've got a set of 50v live wires that you want to play with? Not exactly dangerous, but I wouldn't be plugging anything into it that's not approved for telecoms use in your country. If you do disconnect this, it goes back to vandalism of telecommunications equipment, hefty fines, etc.
All in all this is one of the most monumentally stupid things I've heard of someone wanting to do. Leave well enough alone and install some Cat-V/Cat-VI cabling (I'd recommend Cat-VI so you can run a gbps network). It will improve, rather than degrade, your house price and you don't end up with huge fines.
1) LAN for your home 2) Play the "tie me up" game 3) Weave a hammock 4) String it out to your neighbors house and make a cup-phone (for emergencies) 5) Wind a giant electromagnet and use it to steal change out of people's pockets on the street
You can run a one wire network which uses 2 wires. There is a range of devices you can read information from, http://owfs.org/. For example you could run a temperature sensors in each room. Combined with a tool like http://www.cacti.net/ you can log an ongoing temperature graph. Combined with X10 http://www.linuxha.com/ you now could act on the information you receive. for example if the room reaches a certain temperature you switch on the fan. racker79
No That is a large and most likely incorrect assumption. The wire used for phone runs in most homes, especially older homes, is unsuitable for ethernet. The runs are also daisy chained and terminate at your outside MPOE. The amount of work required to convert would be greater than making brand new appropriate runs.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Ideas for future Ask Slashdot articles:
Seriously, use it for telephone service when the wireless companies inevitably try to jack you, either with service cuts, signal loss, price gouging, sneaky tactics to overcharge you, etc.
Only require CAT3. I see people using CAT5/5e as phone line all the time, including new construction (building in ethernet to every room seems to be increasingly popular), and just ignoring the extra wires. Saves them from needing 2 different spools of line and the price difference is pretty minimal. CAT5e only costs $20/1000ft more than CAT3 phone line.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
In my state in the U.S., there is a box on the outside wall of the house. The copper on the house side of that box belongs to the customer. I don't know what the laws are in other states, but I think they are similar.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Along the lines of an intercom system, I'd try distribution of stereo music throughout the house. Not sure about resistance/quality issues. Have a set of speakers per room with an on/off switch, or carry the speakers with you and plug them in.
POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) is likely to keep going long after a power outage puts cell phones out of commission. Either the cell towers run out of electricity or your personal cell phone dies from lack of juice.
For the above strategy to work, you need a wired (ie. not cordless) phone that doesn't need to be plugged into the electric supply. It has to work just because it is plugged into the telephone jack.
How often does it happen that the electricity goes out long enough to be a problem? Maybe once in a lifetime.
Remember a few years ago when the power went out all over eastern North America. My family was out of town. They needed to phone me ('cause they ran out of money) and they could because I had POTS. My bank was where there was some power. The Western Union office didn't have power but they had POTS and were able to phone the money down to Miami (where it seems that the power didn't go out).
If I'd needed the cops or a fire truck, I could have called for help.
POTS will have to get really really expensive before I'm willing to dump it.
By the same token, diversity is good. After 9/11, the only thing that could get a message through to Washington was Blackberry. I guess the moral is not to have all your eggs in the same basket.
no, it's not possible.
Clearly he didn't do that becasue THEY WERE JUST USED FOR THE PHONE.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Anyone who's stupid enough to start fucking with the copper in their house should be aware that they actually don't own the copper. I know here in Australia...
I can't speak for Oz, but here in the US you own all the copper past the box. That's why they have different types of service plans. Some cover the line all the way to the phone (and even include the phone in some cases) while cheaper service plans only cover to the box. The phone company didn't pay for the copper to be put into the house, you did or the original owner of the house did initially. The cable company also tries to claim ownership over the coax in the wall too (which they don't own), but just try to get them to come an remove it if you use satellite.
My brother's house is 5ish years old and had cat5 run to the phone jacks, BUT they still daisy chained the jacks instead of star topology.
In Ontario (and I presume throughout North America), the telco owns the wire up to the demarc location, which is usually wired as a regular phone jack. All of the phone lines in the house get connected to a single RJ12, which is then plugged into the demarc jack. If you have a problem with the phone lines, one of the first things the telco will tell you to do is plug a phone directly into the demarc jack. If it works, the trouble lies in the household wiring, and it's your problem to deal with. If it doesn't then the trouble is on the telco wiring and they'll deal with it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I have an old hat in my closet. I used to use it, but now I have a new hat. What should I do with the old hat ?
Maybe my cat could wear it, and I could make a LOLCAT video, but what do you think ? What should I do with my old hat ?
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
Is that really the question on the table? "Now What?"
Where do I start? Well, when you give up your landline you can take a nap, make a call on your cell phone, send an email, have lunch, walk your dog, scratch your nuts...
Giving up a landline really isn't the end of the world. Some people find it economical, others find it a nuisance. It's really not that big a deal. One of the big telcos is still getting your money either way. Let's not make it seem like giving up a landline is really such a momentous decision.
I have heard, although I've not confirmed this myself, that if you give up your landline, you can actually get another one if it doesn't work out for you.
You are welcome on my lawn.
http://www.amazon.com/RABBIT-VCR/dp/B001F87TWI :-P
Everyone in the house can watch you play Ultima V on your C64 or you can play old school VHS pr0n in EVERY ROOM!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
This is neat, but I would rather have the exact opposite - an ability to answer landline calls on my cell, when I am in the house.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
your cellphone requires a working computer with an independent power source and some pretty complex software and the right environmental conditions to make a phone call
your landline is just 2 wires connected to speaker and a microphone
which one do you trust to make a 911 call?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Oh the broadness of the internet. In Canada you own what is in your walls. The phone company is only responsible for for the line to your house, and the rest is the home owners. Disconnect the connection to the phone network and do what ever you want with your copper. Just remember that you may need to restore it at some future point so unless you have a really neat idea I just wouldn't bother.
You can run a network over it using something called "homelink" -- runs at 10Mbps, and is apparently similar to DSL. I had one for a while, and it mostly worked OK.
Even though I have EarthLink Cable broadband, I have thought about an EarthLink DSL broadband connection when the cable broadband goes out, and/or performing simple load balancing across them, or considering EarthLink Business DSL service for hosting.
Besides that, I haven't come across anything interesting. Wireless is the future.
Maybe put nice blank plates over the jacks if it bothers you that much. By "better" I'd say fishing cat 5, cat6, or structured wiring to each jack and then home running them somewhere. A loop is no good, you'll only make what's there worse with any other scheme.
The only thing worse than trying to un-fuck the wiring in a new place you just bought because the last owner did some "project" is being that home owner and trying to get it all unfucked on your own because an inspector told the potential buyers that the wiring is all screwed up. Trust me on this. Your wife will be a defcon 0 with the stress of moving. You'll be either paying two mortgages or dealing with the close on your new place, trying to get things timed just right. (And they never can time things "just right.") The new buyers will be ready to close yesterday, except for the list of stupid crap you need to fix and or explain. A contractor will want to tear up walls and fix it that way, for a couple grand (maybe more if they know you're bent over the table) and you'll have to re-clean the place with that lovely drywall dust just about everywhere... And it's going to be about 200 degrees in your attic where you cleverly "hid" most your dirty work... If you're there forever, then knock yourself out, but if you plan on selling the place, just realize that a lot of people still like to have phones in rooms and phone service (even Vonage or 8x8 or whatever can run over the old loop if you plug it in to the house instead of a phone)
Or maybe the new buyer will get a kick out of your "intercom" system or home brewed HPNA, with the speaker about 2 feet off the ground where the phone jack was... You never know.
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Resale value.
Just think of the look you'll get when potential buyers find there are no phone lines left... it was was a great idea to rip 'em out and sell them all for $40!
Maybe someday in a few decades things will not be like that, but now...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You could make a gigantic I2C bus to hang sensors/microcontrollers off of. Just make sure you transmit *really slow*.
If I had all that extra telephone wire in my walls, you know what I'd do with it? The same thing I did 10 years ago.
Nothing.
The best you could do is use it to pull more useful wire through the walls but it's probably been stapled down in places and run through tiny holes so that's not likely to work very well. Pour one on the curb and let the old wire rest in piece.
Sorry dude. I own the copper. I fucking put it there. There's a junction box outside the house, and from that point on, it's my property, my responsibility, and occasionally, my problem. If I want ANYBODY else to touch it, I either have to pay them or I need to get line protection insurance. But I don't, you see, because I fucking put it there, and I can handle any problems it throws my way.
Just because it always seemed an annoying, snarky thing to say and I've never got the opportunity to say it: not everybody lives in Australia, and not everybody who reads Slashdot is Australian. Stop being so aussie-centric.
(Roofles. I made myself giggle.)
ooma
More is Better.
Neg, they've been using it. My dad's house was just built less than 2 years ago, and they used Cat5e throughout the lot of it. I know because I swapped over half the phone jacks to network jacks and wired it all up for them.
Most likely the phone line is already Twisted Pair
The hell you say. If the insulation colors are red/green/black/yellow then its plain old straight wire. Cat-nothing. If it's solid/stripe, such as blue/white-blue-stripe then its twisted pair but don't bet on it being cat-3 let alone cat-5.
Cat-3 is a relatively recent development in telephone years. Its common use in new home construction is even more recent, really only within the last decade and hardly universal.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I bet you can find those Farallon dongles on ebay for real cheap.
My mother in law still has an appletalk-ethernet gateway on her shelf.
If you're interested in embedded systems, a simple home sensor network would be a great project for getting started. It just so happens that RS-485 is a very simple serial interface to get working over existing phone cable. There are a number of (relatively) inexpensive off the shelf sensors that speak Modbus over RS-485 as well. Most of these sensors are for industrial control (SCADA) systems, but I'm sure you'd be able to find some interesting devices to play with in your home.
Good luck, and don't forget to disconnect your phone lines from the telco before playing with them!
I read this as "landmine".
I expected a story about a soldier placing land mines, dropping one, and being stuck in one of those "oh shit I can't move or I'll blow up" situations.
ladies and gentlemen:
/. and throughout the interwebs.
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Leave it alone.
If you sell the house it will be there for the next person.
Really, why mess up perfectly operational systems just because you are not using it at the moment?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I know you can get cordless telephones with built in sim card support that supports up to 6 handsets around the home (Siemens Gigaset comes to mind) but no one as far as I know is making anything that interfaces the mobile provider to your normal telephones/copper, maybe this needs to be looked at ?
-T
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Yeah, but last time I checked, you couldn't get gigabit wireless.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
This is by FAR the best use for this cable. As someone who does low-voltage wiring for a living, i can tell you that in almost every house the POTS phone wiring is useless for almost everything else but phone and as a pull string. *Sometimes* you'll have cat5 or cat5e in new homes, but half the time those are daisy-chained anyways.
Use it as a pull-string for 2-3 cat6 wires (or at least cat5e), 1-2 coax RG-6 wires, and an actual pull string. And put low-voltage wall rings in the wall if you can, or else you'll be lucky to get a wall plate on it with even a single coax connection. Home-run all the lines to a central location; NEVER daisy-chain if you can avoid it (and it wont work at all if you want to use the cable for networking. You don't have to actually terminate all these connections behind the wall, but if you add even a single outlet in the future you'll be saving yourself time. Also, it definitely wont hurt your resale value.
The place I just bought had Cat5 run for the phone jacks to every single room in the house. I have since converted most of the ends to ethernet and use them for my desktops and xbox, easiest home network setup I have ever done, replace some ends and setup my wireless router where the old phone connections terminated.
Turn your home into a giant wi-fi antenna. You could then either open it up to other to use, or keep it locked down, and brag to your friends that you can connect to the net from halfway accross the city. Or both.
Emergency lights At least thats what I've done in my home power goes out and I have a light in every room where there is a phone jack. I set it up with two 12 volt batteries in parallel and use LCD bulbs. Make sure you remove the drop end from the isolation block where the copper comes into the house as it is probably still running telco power through it
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Or just run a network over the phone lines .
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Did that very thing myself...Though I pulled a couple keystone audio connectors, a CAT6 and CAT5 for a new phone jack (just in case), a CAT5 for VGA over cat5... not to brag:) Having a wire in an exterior wall with insulation is very helpful. Mike
My house was build in 2002 and it uses Cat 5 for the phone lines. I've thought about using the unused pairs for data. Just haven't had time to test it out.
Kilroy was here.
While I wouldn't bother doing what he proposes myself it's an interesting nerdy suggestion.
. . . in other words - shove it up your ass.
How about hooking up some low-power emergency lighting around the house - even LEDs would be useful to let you find your way around. You could also tap into the mains ring, so if power drops a small set of lights could come on. You might even be able to neatly recess some small bulbs into your skirting, or lower down in the wall. I'm sure it would break the rules on any service plan with your landline provider, and may even be illegal, but if done well it would be very cool and also pretty useful.
I saw a two-phone cordless system on sale today at Office Depot. It mimics an ordinary household phone. But you don't plug it into a landline. Instead a base station, linked to one of your cellphones via BlueTooth, ferries voice (phone calls) between the cordless house phones and your cellphone (wherever it is within range of Bluetooth). And yes, you will use your existing household wiring. While the base station is linked to your cellphones, the cordless home phones plug into the househould phone jacks just like any phone. In effect, the Bluetooth base station simulates a landline hooked into your household phone wiring and jacks.
Of course it offers none of the other advantages of a real landline (mentioned above including operating during power failures, reliable 911 service, ability to fax, etc.) but at least it lets you use your household phone wiring and enjoy the better ergonomic comfort of a full-size cordless phone.
Did that 6 years ago when I arrived at my appartment. Disconnected the pole line from its initial connector.
Since back then, I got a cable modem and a VOIP provider, and a nearby 5GHz wireless phone. No need to connect anything there.
Why did I disconnect the external line? Because the VOIP is ALSO connected to these wires. That way, I can plug a physical phone anywhere in the house, in case I need it.
Why didn't I simply strip the cables? Because I'm in some appartment, it's not mine. And why would I do that.
That may be the case in the Peoples Socialist Republic of Australia, but in Western democracies, phone companies have a demarcation point at the master socket where the phone line enters your property, beyond which you can do anything you like provided it doesn't cause interference or damage equipment on the other side of that demarcation point.
That's apparently a good one: Pairs with up to 3 cellular phones (plus a landline if you buy the appropriate model). Searches for a free trunk or lets you select the outgoing phone. Lets you switch between calls on different cellphones ala call-waiting. Forwards caller ID info to the POTS phones on incoming calls. Supports pulse dial as well as tone so you can use antique phones.
Here's another one (only two lines): Cell2Tel
A third one is Dock-n-Talk which can be connected either by wire or bluetooth (with an extra-cost adapter).
There are also both handset company and aftermarket docking cradles for some phones (example: Cell Socket). Unlike a bluetooth types (which pretends to be a headset as far as the phone is concerned) the direct-connect types are only for a particular cellphone model so you lose your investment when you switch handsets.
= = = = =
NO FAX / modems / satellite pay-per-view uplink:
Note that cellphones, with or without POTS adapters, will NOT carry high-speed modem signals. No FAX, 56K modems, satellite pay-per-view connections, etc. (Those require the full 64K-equivalent DS0 signal to carry their bandwidth, while the cellphones use a lower bit rate and run a voice-optimized CODEC.)
Same is true of VoIP adapters (i.e. Magic Jack), but for a different reason: While the software and POTS card/dongle could convert to/from DS0 byte streams with A-law or u-law CODEC, the high-speed modems also require a very accurate (Stratum-III) clock synchronized with the phone system's clocking. While your DSL or whatever may use this clocking for its hop to the net, it isn't forwarded to your computer. (Maybe once Synchronous Ethernet is deployed this will change.) Even IEEE-1588 isn't good enough for this timing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
With a worldwide depression, copper costs have plummeted, so any scrap value the copper has is far outweighed by the time and labour of ripping it all out. In the immortal words of Lennon/McCartney, 'let it be.'
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Anyone who's stupid enough to start fucking with the copper in their house should be aware that they actually don't own the copper. I know here in Australia...
I can't speak for Oz, but here in the US you own all the copper past the box. That's why they have different types of service plans. Some cover the line all the way to the phone (and even include the phone in some cases) while cheaper service plans only cover to the box. The phone company didn't pay for the copper to be put into the house, you did or the original owner of the house did initially. The cable company also tries to claim ownership over the coax in the wall too (which they don't own), but just try to get them to come an remove it if you use satellite.
In the USA the telco's and cable companies do not own the copper in your house passed the initial connection spot (the gray box on the side of your house for telcos, and the main connection to the coax splitter for cable companies) unless you have a maintenance contract, even then they do not own it per se, they just request that you DO NOT touch it, as they have techs that are for that purpose. This can vary from state to state, but that is the general governing 'laws' of who owns what in the US.
I've just emerged from the stone age and bought some 802.11N routers. What should I do with all the CAT5 in my walls?
Old bell labs hand here.
When AT&T was a monopoly they owned everything right up to and including the phone.
You only rented.
They would install and maintain the wire in your house.
The equipment was designed to last 100 years. No joke, that was the requirement.
You could beat the burglar senseless with your phone, they were heavy, it would hurt.
Then you could use it to call the police.
The recommended fix for a bad carbon microphone in the handset was to bang it on a table.
A phone today will break if you drop it.
I connected our in house phones to a VOIP adapter from Vonage. Another idea is to use the existing wires to pull Cat-5e through the walls. Start with the farthest away, because the phone wires are likely daisy chained, and you need a full run for each Cat-5e cable. You now have high speed wired network in house. You can even connect selected outlets to VOIP if desired. If you sell, the new owner can use it either way.
You could use the existing lines to send stereo audio to any room in your house. There are four wires so you can take a regular phone jack and splice it to a set of RCA cables then plug that into the output of your main stereo system. Then any other room in the house with a phone jack will have an available signal to tap in to with a similar spliced jack to the input of any speakers you want in there. The wiring isn't "beefy" enough to carry an amplified signal so you should use the amplified output on your main stereo and have a separate receiver in the other rooms. It's not going to sound as good as surround sound but it's great for parties. You can have multiple sets of speakers throughout the house running from the same stereo/room.
Other than perhaps upgrading to CAT6, but keep the phone lines intact otherwise (and keep it hooked up to the wall plates as normal single pair instead of converting to ethernet plates). If you have an emergency and the cell phones are dead/no signal, you can still hook up a land line wired phone and dial 911, even if you do not have land line service. It's required in virtually every state, even if service is disconnected for any reason (including non-payment). Plus, if you decide to sell the house, you won't worry about hooking them back up when the buyer insists in order to close on the house.
Talk about stupid! This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in quite a while.
This is an instance where my half-second misinterpretation of the title of this story was more interesting than the real title.
"You've dropped your Land Mine. --Now what?"
Admit it. Assuming it's self-arming upon impact with the surface of your front yard, (you were loading it into the back of your mini-van for some reason.) --Before you sleep tonight, you'll have spent time trying to solve for this scenario.
I know I did.
Why were you loading military ordinance into your mini-van for anyway?
-FL
It's been about 8 years now, since we last made a call using our landline.
Unfortunately, there is (was?) a restricted cable infrastructure in the UK, so most of us are forced to pay BT ~£15/25 line rental per month, just to get DSL.
If I had the option, I'd consider hooking the lines up to the speakers I have dotted around the house, to synchronise them with the amp in the main room. Has anyone tried this?
Just leave it alone.
In particular: Removing it may lower your house resale value. Keep it in place.
(See other posts below about things like cellphone adapters to make it live so ordinary phone instruments or antique phones will work in the house.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We're a cell phone only household. Our house was built in 1980 and wired with a two phone jacks, each one home-run to the demarc with 2-pair POTS. Later on, a sloppy homeowner or telco tech installed some baseboard phone jacks. We removed all of them--and replaced the two builder's phone jacks with electrical outlets, since the wallplate opening is the same size. WARNING: Make sure you do this to National Electrical Code. If in doubt, call an electrician.
I also removed the builder's CATV jacks (RG-59 home run to the cable demarc) and installed structured wiring, so all the Ethernet and CATV wiring in the house terminates in a closet.
My wife pointed out that if we ever decide to sell the house, I'll have to install phone jacks, especially if the buyer is elderly. Of course, I'll install them all home-run to the structured wiring panel.
All the original phone and CATV wiring is stapled to the studs, so short of ripping drywall out, there's no removing the wire. It's just sitting there abandoned.
Socialist Republic? Our coins still have Elizabeth II on them...
Anyway, it was Little Johnny and his neo-con capitalism that sold our public infrastructure off to private investors not Kevin 007 and his merry band of Bolshies.
There is a bluetooth device that will couple with your cell phone and let you use regular telephones inside the house. Basically you plug this device into one jack, and then it will ring your phones in the house when the cell phone rings. No need to go searching for the cell.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Why not use your old phone cabling for remote speakers? Most good audio receivers have an extra pair of speaker inputs. When I moved into my condo, the former owner had a PBX some and cat 3 and 5 wiring. Since both cat 3 and 5 cables have 4 pairs of wires, I used the solid color for the positive, white for the negative, and it works like a charm.
...using one-wire sensors (actually requires two wires) and owfs. Then, interface with a network-accessible thermostat and multi-zone HVAC controller for the ultimate in temperature control!
(I only lack the thermostat at the moment...)
Talk about they just don't make 'em like they used to.
Leave the wires alone. You may need them again.
That said, feel free to mod this off topic if you like, but the question in the title made some of the voices in my head yell stuff at me that makes sense, of a sort.
The author of TFA went to cellular phone only, dropping wired service. In most cases/comparisons cell service costs more than wired service. That comes with benefits, primarily portability, but the fact remains.
I used to install home TV antennae for my dad's TV shop. For $200 or less a home could get 5 to 10 years of service picking up signals broadcast over the air. Portable TVs could with rabbit ears and loops could, in our area, pick up the same 10 stations (VHF and UHF) as the big rig fed to the house. For that matter even larger TVs came with rabbit ears back then, making the rooftop gear unnecessary. Then along came cable and direct satellite, and we get our TV fed to us by wire and/or receiver boxes, and pay a good deal for the feed.
In the first case we trade hard wired for unwired, and we pay more. In the second we trade soft- or unwired for hardwired, and we pay more. As I said, it makes sense of a sort, but some of the voices keep saying "huh?".
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Incorrect, you own all the copper past the network termination point, usually the first point in the house, or in recent houses a little grey box that's outside the house so Tel$tra can do even less to hook up your line
In the few houses I've tried, I've found the old phone wire to be well and truly stapled in place, and the wire usually breaks before I get the Cat 5 moving. It's worth a shot because fishing a new wire through a finished, insulated wall is a bitch no matter what, but I wouldn't bet on it being much help.
John
OMFG! That's just lose-lose all the way around! Didn't your brother make the electrician fix it?
John
A phone today will break if you drop it.
At which point you run down to the store and pick from one of the several thousand phones that are available without having to resort to perpetual financing options. Or, even more horrific, you hook up a modem. Without asking permission.
Yeah. I remember those days too. :P
1. Have your head examined.
2. Fashion the wire into bracelets (they're green!)
3. Pound the wire into plates for your flux capacitor in case you find a DeLorean for sale cheap.
4. Use the wire to make EEG electrodes and then have your head examined.
You could hook up an amp to your computer and run the output from the amp into the wiring in the wall, if you built a few adapters with RJ11 ends on it, you could even do it without having to destroy any of the wiring in the house. Just keep in mind how small the wires are, you wont be able to play anything super loud, and dont expect perfect quality.
Curious about Storage and Virtualization? Check out
As someone who does low-voltage wiring for a living, i can tell you that in almost every house the POTS phone wiring is useless for almost everything else but phone and as a pull string.
And its usefulness for phone is debatable, at least if you've ever seen a Melody home. The $0.01 per yard spool of red 24-gauge at Radio Shack is better than what I have in my walls.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I agree. I install cable and internet for our local telco, and it almost never works to use existing cable to pull new stuff through the walls. If you're very lucky and the initial install wasn't done by an overzealous electrician with an unnatural love of his staple gun, you might get away with it. Also, if you have a basement with a drywalled ceiling, you can just about forget about it. Why would anyone permanently cover up the only access to most of the utilities in their home?
I wouldn't mess with it. It's fun to void the warranty on your iPhone. Voiding the warranty on hour house is a different story. Scenario: House burns down. Fire department investigates and finds nerd kit attached to phone wires. The investigation is inconclusive. J. Random Hacker, meet insurance company lawyer.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
what kind of extortionate horseshit is that?
here in the US i paid verizon $100 to send a tech out to my apartment and drop a brand new phone line from the pole to my room. and nobody has ever accused verizon of being a discount rate telephone company.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I suspect that perhaps it was a computer-generated post.
Maybe written by someone in the same family as the guy who "wrote" 100,000 books (with a computer doing much of the work)
Unless you had a professional Integrator install the Phone and home ran everything It's useless that way. Most Phone wires were wired by a uneducated Electrician and it's all daisy chained.
And yes, Even a certified electrician is a complete moron when it comes to Phone, Cable, and Ethernet. I have seen the worst jobs done by the "best" electricians out there.
If you are building a home, demand ALL wiring to be home run to a distribution panel. If they cant do that, hire someone that can.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Leave well enough alone and install some Cat-V/Cat-VI cabling (I'd recommend Cat-VI so you can run a gbps network)
wtf mate? Cat-V? since when did we number our cables with roman numerals? never, thats when! dont go making up your own naming conventions, you just look like a dickhead, like the guy a few posts up using the term "TwenCen" to describe something from the twentieth century. and FYI, gigabit runs just fine over most cat-5 (even cat-5e is unneeded); only very poorly made cables will cause problems.
I live in a free country that allows me to OWN the wires I paid for and had installed.
I dont know why the land Down Under is so opressive to the homeowner, but I suggest complaining about it to your local government and start getting other citizens outraged about allowing a company to hijack something you paid for.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hook it up to a telco adapter at homeseer.com and you can use any phone to give voice commands to your computer to things like "turn on the outside lights", or "play artist zztop". Cool stuff.
Heard a noise at night? just go to the tablet on the wall, scan the cameras, and alert the authorities if necessary.
You are the biggest fucking drama queen I have ever seen on this website. Do you even live in the real world?
so assuming it's CAT5
A very tenuous assumption, unless it's a new house with Cat5 wiring installed for a special reason, or the previous owner had a digital phone line wired up (e.g. ISDN or DS1).
Even if it is cat5, Most likely phone jacks are wired to each other, so this is not amenable to placing a central hub; moreover, not all pairs required for Ethernet may be even wired (or good).
You probably have to put a hub where every phone jack was, either that or be prepared for collisions and other nastiness (plugging multiple PCs into one physical shared wire)....
Suffice to say, Gigabit Ethernet doesn't support such a situation, you'll be lucky if you reach 10 megabits on wiring that was installed for phones.
Probably better to pick wireless.
802.11n is almost as fast
Yup.. just like a CATV line. The coax in your house you can do as you please, tap and split as many ways until sunday as you want. Now if you split the line just OUTSIDE your wall, you'll get visitors from the cable co knocking on your door.
Same goes for the phone line
Anyone who's stupid enough to start fucking with the copper in their house should be aware that they actually don't own the copper. I know here in Australia, if you touch that copper, even though it's inside your house, you are liable for quite hefty fines from ACMA (Australian Communication & Media Authority).
Not true. You can do what you like with copper in your house in Australia, its only an issue if you try to connect said copper to the carrier's network (in most cases Telstra) or the power grid.
There's also the issue that if you have destroyed the line to the telco's joint out the front you will have to drop between $5 000 and $20 000 from your house price (depending on the distance & local contractor rates) to have a new lead-in installed.
Your dreaming. Having just built a house, I can tell you first hand it costs nothing like that to run a cable from the pit out the front of the average suburban block. I won't discuss the topic of "Universal Service Obligation" which is mandated in Australia and also impacts this.
So now you've got a set of 50v live wires that you want to play with?
Ever considered the possibility that the links in the MDF might be pulled if you cancel the service?
Why just Cat5? Maybe it's better to nip it in the bud and run single mode fiber alongside a few bundles of Cat5.
That way you'll be prepared, whether the next great thing in home networking is 100gb/s copper or 500 tb/s over fiber.
We've done the same thing, ported our house landline number to a cell phone that is a $10/mo add-on to our cell family plan.
In addition, the cell phone that now ring on the house line is Bluetooth interfaced to an Xlink box, which in turn drives the existing house wiring so that every original standard POTS house phone rings as before and interfaces with that cell phone. (You must disconnect the in-coming landline connection at the de-marc point, just as you would for Vonage/NOIP, etc). So the cell phone is a total replacement for the landline and we still use all the same house phones around the house.
Further, and not mutually exclusively, the house phone wiring also carries our home intranet via the HomePNA interface -- its basically Ethernet over phone wires. It does not interfere with the standard voice/phone usage of those wires. It forms the wired backbone of our home intranet. Why not Wifi? We have that too, but the house is a little too big for a single WiFi access point to cover it. So a major function of the HomePNA is to be the wired backbone for several WiFi access points.
I am of the understanding that Telstra own the copper to the box mounted on your gutter. You own the copper in the house. Telstra will only install 1 point in the house. Anything else must have been pain for by the owner.
As an employee of a Cable Co, I can state w/o equivocation that we don't claim anything past our box either. Any lines we run are considered 'lost' and simply part of doing business in a competitive market.
That's my company...yours may vary.
I thought of that. Right now I have cable access and I haven't had problems with it yet. If I do thought I can and will switch to DSL, I'll lucky because both cable and DSL are available where I live.
Unfortunately, I'm in a "cell phone + dry loop DSL costs more than a land line + DSL" area.
Would it be cheaper if you also had cellphone service? And what about long distance? Though not all the tyme, I spend more tyme on long distance than I do local calls. My cellphone service includes long distance but I'd have to pay extra for long distance with a landline. The service also comes with an answering service, call waiting, and other services.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Oh please! As a former heavy smoker of the doobie the only posts you'll get from potheads is along the lines of "I'm hungry. Have you got any cookies?" or "cartoons are cool". Pot heads are about as much of a menace to society as a care bear. The only thing that needs to fear a pot head is the fridge.
if you want fun and excitement, try dealing with a cranker for awhile. It can be quite...uhhh... interesting to sit there and watch as one empties his 9mm(they just love firearms and are quite paranoid...what a combination!) over and over into a tree because he is sure the FBI has a camera in it. meanwhile all the pothead wants to know is if there is anything good on TV and if there is any leftover pizza.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Pretty simple here, may or may not work however do not loose the oppourtunity. Tie on the line or wire you want in your walls (to the copper lines) and use the copper lines to pull them through (the walls). Then sell the copper.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
Yeah sure...
http://80211n.com/80211n-speed.html
Site is run by Broadcom, they make and sell 802.11 chipsets. They say real world throughput is about 160Mbps (link speed means about as much as a politician's word). Real world speed on my wired LAN is ~980Mbps. In what world is 160Mbps "almost as fast" as 900+Mbps?
Simple physics, wireless simply can't compete with wired for speed. Wired is also switched, wireless is shared. More than one stream on the network and they all suffer.
Cat6 is NOT required for gigabit. It was designed for Cat5 wire and works just fine up to 100m over it. I've done it myself, works fine. I don't know why people keep repeating this myth on tech sites.
I was hoping for some handy suggestions in case I dropped one of my landmines some day. Disappointed to find out that's not what this is about.
AFAIK it is the first point in the house. If that is disconnected then you can do what ever you like to the copper inside your house.
Point taken it might not be advisable, but there is nothing that you can get fined for.
Cool thing about Cat5 is you can terminate all the jacks with RJ45 wired for ethernet and plug RJ11 phone lines right in. Works great.
I've seen a number of houses in the last 5 years or so built with Cat5, though the electricians running the lines daisy-chain them as they are speced for phone, not networking. Retarded, but people expect to have "normal" phone connections, not a patch panel. I wired my house before the walls went in. Every room got 2 Cat-5e, and 2 RG-6. Double for the entertainment areas. The wire was chosen mostly because the bundled wire was a great price for 5e and it works fine for gigabit.
Yes, the first thing I want to do if I hear a noise at night is put my face up to a wall, highlight my silhouette, ruin my night vision, and fiddle with some electronics.
Correction, I'll go downstairs with a bat, or gun, and a really bright flashlight to blind any intruder with before I bat them. And if it's a miscreant child, blind them and scare the shit out of them so they'll stop sneaking out at night.
I certainly do not intend to wait for authorities after putting myself at a serious disadvantage first.
Question everything
It's not that they own it, it's that in Australia you have to have a cabling license, a registration to install cabling in order to install, terminate, connect, disconnect any kind of data cabling for telephone, computers, alarms, etc.
Oh, and you can't install your own Cat5 to run your home LAN either, same rules apply, you've got to get an electrician.
But it's not just existing cabling you can't change, you can't install new cabling either.
Generally the first jack (closest jack to the outside box), and everything before it is what the telco is responsible for. The "Network Boundary Point", and everything on their side is their responsibility; sometimes that may be on the outside the building.
You own everything else, you just aren't allowed to touch it yourself.
If you're willing to pay, you can get a licensed cabling installer to disconnect the jack at the NBP from your other jacks and to re-terminate your existing cabling in a manner that permits you to plug Ethernet devices into it (provided it's Cat5)
Of course, this is not free... and when you get the bill, you may wish you had just gotten a new install of Cat6 cabling done, while you were paying.......
Do absolutely nothing to it. Leave it as-is. When you accidentally swim with your celphone, drop it in the toilet, leave it at the mall, or otherwise obliterate it, you'll need a land line.
Are you comfortable giving your SSN and credit card number out over a celphone? I'm not.
When you need to call 911 do you want to take the time to give the address? I don't.
If you need to get DSL when your cable/wireless/satellite whatever fails, do you want to have to undo everything you did? I wouldn't.
There IS such a thing as leaving well enough alone. Messing with things that don't need to be messed with don't make you a "hacker geek" or a "tinkerer" but rather they turn you into "That guy I know" who wastes time trying to make something amazing out of a couple of hundred feet of copper wire that an electrician wired in 30 years ago.
Yes. You WILL be "That Guy"
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
Why do you have to do anything? Just leave them alone! Find another project because you obviously have WAY too much time on your hands! :)
I just bought a house and am in the process of Geeking it out. There's phone wire (looks like 4-wire CAT3) in most of the rooms, either that or a RG6 CoAx plug. I'm going to run at least 1 CAT6 drop (or 6 depending on location) to each (retrofitting the RG plates with combos and removing/replacing the RJ11 jacks abandoning the wire in place). Going to run a new home run from the phone box to the new wiring closet (all of 30 feet through a crawlspace) and break it out such that any new CAT6 drop can be used for POTS (I have as Asterisk system that needs hardphones). my house is between cell towers for AT&T (I move from a faraday cage to a house between two cells, Kobayashi Maru)
Ever considered the possibility that the links in the MDF might be pulled if you cancel the service?
Don't rely on that - there are going to be a lot of lines with soft dial tones, among other things it makes new line provisioning really easy at the same address.
If you ever mess with your cabling like the Ask Slashdot question suggests, disconnect yourself where your house cabling joins the telco-owned cabling (at the "network boundary point").
I'm guessing wireless is even more popular in Australia than it is other places. That is the most profoundly ridiculous thing I've heard in quite a while.
you can hook the old line up to a 9000 vac neon sign transformer and fry the wire-munching critters.
A good first step if you plan to replace it with cat6
Ok, so you complain about an unfair generalisation of marijuana users, but then go on to make generalisation about amphetamine users? Why is it that from alcohol to heroin and every drug inbetween, people always protest that it's only ever the next more addictive substance that causes social problems?
We don't have coax running to all rooms in our house, BUT we do have copper phone lines.
My sons (Caltech & VT), who know much about such things suggested I might connect my Coax signal
where it enters our home (next to the phone junction box) to pass the signal to the phone junction box
in the desired room(s). I tried twisting the cables together, and it actually works. However, the TV signal is
clear on some channels but not on all. It was suggested I combine several of the six phone wires together
(say Red & Green) for a better connection to purchase 2 Coax-RJ11 adapters to get a better signal. I can't
find such adapters, even on eBay. Any suggestions?
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
I've used the POTS copper around the house to extend a VoIP phone (Primus TalkBroadBand) to all the rooms. By (a) disconnecting the outside twisted pair of copper from the punch down block, and (b) plugging in the RJ11 into the one in my basement office - and voila - dial-tone everywhere in the house - no need for a cordless phone system with a hundred handsets.
HMK
Ooma is a voip solution that uses your existing phone line inside the house for each "scout". Only the base station needs to have the internet connection. http://www.ooma.com/ Check out the videos here: http://www.ooma.com/flash/ooma_SHELL.html?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=false&height=630&width=774 BTW, it works...it really works :)
Insert_Ending_Here
I could be completely off here, but if you're only getting 100m over Cat5, wouldn't you *require* Cat6 to actually get gigabit?
Just because you can do it with less doesn't mean you're getting anywhere near the full potential.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
I purchased a Grandstream VoIP unit and connected the POTS line to my house copper, the ethernet end to my switch.
I purchased inbound VoIP service with les.net for a mere $1.00 a month. Outbound is $0.01/min
So, for $12/yr, I still have house POTS service.
Makin' money, makin' friends, makin' whoopee and wearin' Depends
Ever considered the possibility that the links in the MDF might be pulled if you cancel the service?
My understanding is that—at least in the US—the telco is required to maintain those links for 911 service.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
about 10 years ago! Seriously landlines are not worth a damn. Phone companies should start offering unbundled DSL.
I have run many 10meg Ethernet links over cat3 phone cable. Most Internet connections are slower than 10megs anyway.
Antennas of course!
I would have assumed that 100m was a measure of distance: 100 metres, with the gp claiming that gigabit works over cat5 up to that distance... but what would i know, not living in a country that insists on using broken units.
Ditch the cell phone. It will give you cancer.
Melt down the copper, add around 12% tin, and make yourself an awesome replica greek helmet or a bronze axe. Keep it on your desk at work as a symbol of your coolness
well said
If you simply replace the current runs with Cat5/6 (6 being way harder) and keep enough slack to terminate at the Demarc again, switching between data and telephone is as easy and swapping out the connector plates. If you did sell the house again, it's trivial to convert things back to standard telephone lines. Not to mention, it would be the best damn phone install that person has probably ever had. Telephone wireing is usually as thin as possible, doesn't account for crosstalk and it usually stapled in place.
You don't need cat6 to run gigabit. Save yourself some money. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_5_cable#Category_5e
Copper is copper, there's no reason why cat-5 cables couldn't be used for phone lines in a house (though there are few reasons why it would be used as such).
I can only wonder what has happened to those accounts through all the upheavals of phone company ownership in the past 20 years or so.
Sure. It only affects your hunger. I guess that's why one ran over my neighbor with a car thinking he was some of wild animal.
Fucking potheads are WORTHLESS.
I have not been interested in running network cabling in my house in New Zealand, so I don't know what the rules are about do it yourself. I do know that homeowners are NOT allowed to do electrical wiring changes in their homes. That requires a licenced electrician, who must issue a certificate of compliance for the work when he is done. Likely DIY would be no problem unless there was some kind of adverse result, and it could cause difficulty in a resale of the house if the proper certificates were not available. But I have not tried to sell my house, either.
The OP wasn't some generalization, it was a crazy troll by someone with social issues and no where to channel their creativity. Or maybe this is the place. Either way, I expect to see it copy/pasted elsewhere.
Its the same in australia too, almost. If there is actually a box at the front (with proper connectors, not just butt connectors) , you own everything past that point. If there isn't, you own everything past the first phone (although this depends on how the copper in your house is actually arranged...). That is, Telstra will fix everything up to your first phone socket, past that and its your problem. What that actually means though is you need a properly certified sparky (that is, certified to deal with telecom) to come and work on anything else. If you mess with it yourself, you can get in trouble, even though you may own it - because its connected to the telecom infrastructure.
I'm sure someone else will correct the details, the 5v on the line will power normal phones to work as an intercom, getting them to ring is a bit trickier. I think it's historically a 80V pulse? Since I don't see any futuristic good ideas, go retro. Get a couple of old hand crank phones, (there are old desktop models reasonably priced) disconnect the line at the incoming box, add a 5v wall wart to power the line. Then when you want the kids to come to dinner, you crank the phone and they'll pick it up because it's novel.. works for a few weeks at least! Actually inspired by a friend who had wired one out to the small guest/kids house, ours is just upstairs/downstairs.
I'm guessing you're not in Australia (or one of the other countries that offers it), or you could use the line for fast wired broadband without having to pay to have a dial-tone.
Make sure there is no voltage still coming down from the "pole", then use all the copper as an indoor antenna for a ham HF transceiver or shortwave receiver and enjoy!
Some composite video security cameras support connection via RJ-11. Two wires for power (or sound), and two for video. If you can isolate the branch wiring, multiple cameras are possible. An RF system could also do this over short distances with multiple channels on a single backbone. Then just hook the outputs up to your switcher and capture device and presto!
It's for your security. Because we care!
Okay, point 'em out the window then...
You technically need Cat5E for the full 100 meters with gigabit, but plain Cat5 isn't really sold anymore. Cat 6 was originally designed for Gb, but then Cat5E came along. They started designing Cat7 for 10Gb, but then Cat6A came along and does 10Gb for the 100 meters.
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
... and your cell dies. How do you call people? Or 911?
In New Zealand it is standard practice to use cat5e or cat6 when wiring new houses for phone. Some sparkies daisy chain but when I wire houses I star it from a central point.
Since 100baseT ethernet only uses pairs 2 and 3 (orange/white and green/white), you could punch down pairs 2 and 3 on an RJ45 jack and pair 1 (blue/white) on a phone jack.
Better would be to just run 2 cat6 cables to each location, then you can use GigE.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
In New Zealand, the Telco is only responsible for the line up to the demarcation where it enters the house. The owner of the house owns the internal wiring. Most phone subscribers pay an extra $2.50 per month to have their Telco take responsibility for the internal phone wiring, but the Telco doesn't own it.
The owner of the property also owns the cable that runs from the boundary to the building, but it is generally understood that the Telco fixes any faults on the outside cable even if the customer opts out of the $2.50 wiring maintenance fee.
Yes, I do work in the telco industry.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
As a former heavy smoker of the doobie the only posts you'll get from potheads is along the lines of "I'm hungry. Have you got any cookies?" or "cartoons are cool".
I disagree... I get all my fives while wasted.
Gigabit ethernet. Dipshit.
Consider then buying a SIP compatible phone, and registering it as an extension on your asterisk-type system. Personally, I wouldn't buy or recommend a cell-phone unless it appeared on a list like this, meaning the SIP registration stack is part of the OS (which also means less power consumption than a 3rd party app like say, Fring):
http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/voice_over_IP/voip_support_in_nokia_devices.html
If you are home, and your phone is within 802.11 range, it will register to your LAN and Asterisk server.
A ring-group configuration will ring all extensions in the group, including your Nokia SIP cell-phone. So if someone calls your home, your cell-phone will ring too.
Buy an old school vt100 terminal and make it a serial network.
or possibly a 'First Post!' as the final post
That's for sure. I use those "ancient" jacks to access high-speed internet. Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
Also I like having old-fashioned phones in my house, because in an electrical outage, they are the only things that still work.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Here in The Netherlands, all wiring is run through plastic PVC pipes. That way, it is actually quite easy to reinstall cabling without hurting the drywall. I would assume other countries follow the same logic ?
Or use it AS ethernet wiring. The place I'm in has 6-conductor phone wiring, and I needed to connect two computers in different rooms. Only two of the phone conductors are being used for phone, and 10base-T Ethernet only needs four (2 for TX, 2 for RX). I had to play with the wire assignments to get it working reliably, most likely until I got each of the TX and RX on their own pairs. It works great now, though I have to force the link to 10 Mbit/sec for reliability. It's probably 100 feet of phone cable total between the machines. I do realize that I'm probably broadcasting all the data sent across the link.
ADSL. Surely you're not slashdotting via your mobile?
In New Zealand you can do your own wiring (eg install a new power socket or light fitting) provided it's your home and you follow NZ ECP 50 (Electrical Code of Practice).
You may not do anything inside the switchboard - that requires a registered electrician.
You may not do any of the above for reward (own home or near relative is fine).
You ARE allowed to do any ELV (extra low voltage) wiring yourself. ELV wiring is not regulated. ELV in NZ is defined as below 50V AC or below 120V DC.
Telephone networks in NZ operate at ELV, so you can legally do whatever you like, but Telcos reserve the right not to connect your dodgy work to their own network.
Data cabling and AV cabling is all ELV.
The wiring standard, AS/NZS 3000, requires segregation between your ELV wiring and mains voltage wiring.
In this post, ELV has nothing to do with rugby.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
My grandmother had one of these phones. It was a rotary phone hard wired to the phone line in the house. Just a couple years ago she had the phone company come out and install a second bell in the phone to make it ring louder. I couldn't believe that they actually still had mechanical ringers to install into rotary telephones from the 50s. It worked quite well too, you could hear the phone ring almost a block away.
In my almost new house, they used cat 5e for the phone lines to all the rooms. They are all terminated in a connector in the closet with my cabletv amplifier, the natural gas heater, fusebox, heating control system etc.
They also had prepared a RJ12 connecter for the DSL router(I think there is a frequency splitter inside) and I can see there is a pipe for fiberoptic cable put in the ground together with the power cable(so it will be easy to get 100megabit internet when it comes to my area later this year)
So it was easy for me just to pull out the phone connectors in the wall and replace them with ethernet connectors and then put connectors on the cable in the closet and plug them in my switch.
Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
Wow, I thought BT (UK phone company) were bad when they charged me £100 to install a line to my house.
I have used the Dock-n-Talk and I have used the X-Link. I believe the X-Link is much nicer. The X-Link allows for MULTIPLE phones to base themselves on the receiver unlike the Dock-n-Talk. When one of the cell phones rings the land lines would ring. you can either do this with a wireless basestation as I have or you can use the wired phones. Top use the wired phones you would disconnect them at the DMarc box and tie the wires together - signal from the X-Link can then be injected at any phone jack. This isn't hard to do - same thing you would do to add a PBX. As I recall Asterisk was working on supporting something liek this but when I was doing my setup the support was poor and i was never able to get it to work - I'd be interested in hearing if Asterisk finally has this working well. In any case the X-Link isn't very expensive and reuqires ZERO maintenance so if you simply want ringing phones and have no need for voicemail or call management the X-Link is a better way to go.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
"A phone today will break if you drop it."
Not mine :-)
I have a gen-you-wine Western Electric white Touch Tone Princess Phone, which I got at a flea market for $2. A new handset cord and some 409 cleaned it up just fine, and it works as well as it ever did. Nothing like the heft of a real handset and the positive feel of those full-travel (illuminated) buttons!
It has some dents and dings on it, but, as you say, it's probably good into the next century. And the handset can be used as a hammer or "persuader".
After a power failure, where our cordless phone base station stopped any calls from being made, I decided I wanted an old school wired phone in one room of the house.
Now, get off my lawn...
Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
You dislike running cable enough to drop your offer a few grand over it? For a few grand I'll come up and do it for you if you want ;)
I usually wind up running new telco cable in every house/apartment I've ever lived in. I've never had the fortune to move into a place with good cable that's up to snuff for DSL. It's usually got a couple hundred feet of old wiring with corroded green connectors and splices held together with scotch tape. I helped a co-worker with a bad DSL connection once upon a time and discovered cloth insulated cable that was essentially acting like a giant antenna. If you disconnected the phones from the pole and picked one up you could hear a local AM radio station.
I usually replace it with Cat5. Twisted-pair is better than the old stuff and gives you a nice upgrade path for the future. Most of the installs I've done for were dry-loop DSL with no dialtone but I did do one with dialtone. We split that one in the basement and put all of the phones behind a single DSL filter instead of having individual ones at each phone. That works pretty well and usually brings the DSL signal levels up a bit.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Leave the wire in the walls and disconnect it from the telco at the d-marc, then plug your magic jack into it.
(the latter may not support historic mechanical bell phones as ringer loads, but it will enable you to use the old land-line phones transparently.)
You'll save far more per year in not paying the Verizon Tax than the copper is worth.
Throw a party now you've entered the 1990s'
BUILD AN APPLE LOCALTALK NETWORK for using old Macs
Or maybe a CORVUS network for your Apple II's
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Nice thought, but phone jacks are usually daisy chained and ethernet can't be, unless you were to put a hub in each room. Not entirely a bad idea, but if you're going through the trouble, might as well do it right and run them all to the punch block area. It will still be handy to use the existing lines to fish your cat5 down the walls to the jack. That way, when you sell the house, you can just wire up the phone jacks to your Cat-5/6 and nobody will be the wiser.
I'm surprised nobody has yet suggested that you use it as a power distribution system. Just get a couple of solar panels to the roof, couple of batteries to the basement and run 12V through the wires, that way you could power some light and appliances when the mains is out.
I believe you are correct, thats the way it is in KY anyway. If you have phone troubles, the telco will fix anything up to that box on their dime (if it isn't your fault), but if they have to come inside your house, its $75/hour.
BUT THEN WHO WAS WIFE?
(Score:0, Offtopic)
Connect all the copper to a alarm in each room, and have it go off every 108 minutes. Then rig up a console where you can type in a code to reset it.
It's debatable whether they do in general ;-)
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Depending on how easy it is to pull and replace the wires (are they in sufficiently wide ductwork?), you could install Ethernet instead of plain telephone cable. With Ethernet ports in each room instead of the telephone jacks and a central switch.
There are also mixed installations: at my last workplace the Ethernet cabling could be used for telephone instead. I don't know offhand where to buy that stuff, but that might be a possibility for going back to telephone if you ever need it.
C - the footgun of programming languages
It never ocurred to me to do that, I assume it means you can only use one of the sockets at a time?
I wasn't talking about speed, I was talking about crank. Crank is to speed what shooting up Jack Black is to having a nice whiskey after a hard day's work. Have you ever seen what they put in that garbage? They will happily use Raid or anything else they think will give the dope a little extra "kick". And then of course you have to figure in the damage to the environment.
My county has won "meth capital of the USA" for something like the past three out of five years, so I have had plenty of opportunity to witness the destruction first hand. First all it takes is one cook that doesn't know what he is doing to cause that stuff to go off like a stick of dynamite, they see NO problem with cooking that crap with kids in the house, because when they get to the point that they'll risk the huge jail times for cooking instead of simply going and buying some they are so far gone that have have ceased giving a fuck about anything but the next high, and most of the time after hazmat has cleaned up a lab they have to bulldoze the building to the ground. You see, the fumes from that crap are so damned strong that it literally penetrates the ceilings and floors and walls so bad that all the cleanup in the world isn't going to remove that garbage, so the house has to come down.
So say what you want about the pot smokers, but frankly they are about as dangerous as marshmallows. What really pisses me off is they will label it a "pot related accident" when they get some fool who has pot AND crank AND booze AND pills in his system, like those extra things didn't have any effect at all. And of course they always have booze in their systems as well, why don't we label them "booze related wrecks"? With the economy in the shitter, our debt climbing to astronomical proportions we need to let go of the "reefer madness" BS and legalize and tax pot. Personally as someone who has lived many years on the bad side of the tracks and has watched as someone who just got out of a 5 year stretch went straight from the prison to his dealer that we should legalize it all, since you can't make junkies quit being junkies by putting them in jail.
But at the very least we should have already legalized pot by now. It is no worse than the booze or cigarettes that we sell and tax now. And if it were legal we could actually control its manufacture and sale. As it is now where I live a kid would have a hard time scoring booze, but pot wouldn't take him more than a half hour tops. The booze prohibition just created more profits for organized crime and ruined American lives, the pot prohibition is doing the same as we speak. Legalize it, sell it, control it, and use some of the profits to pay off our massive debt. But trying to pretend that pot is in the same league as crank and smack just makes the kids disbelieve everything you say.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Connect all wires to your stereo and hook up some speakers around the house!
\m/
Why not use the 4 leads to wire stereo audio from an amplifier to each room? you could replace the wall plates with speaker jack wall plates and have audio throughout your house. If the gauge is too small for amplified audio (not sure if telephone wire is normally 24ga, 22ga, 20ga or 18ga) you could send line level to RCA jacks and use small amplifiers in each room, or amplified speakers. Plus if you sold your home, you could always put the phone jacks back on the walls, not to mention install the same setup in your next home. This IMHO would be awesome for entertaining guests.
That's true in every state.
The box you describe is your legal demarcation point with your telco.
You as a consumer have a legal demark with your telco
Telco's have legal demarks with each other.
The Demark is the point where one parties legal responsibility ends and another begins.
Once upon a time one telco owned the whole network in the US, up to and including your telephone handset.
But A US Supreme court decision declared AT&T a monopoly, and did a few things in the process.
1st it broke up AT&T into 1 national carrier (AT&T) and several regional carriers (The baby bells)
2nd it opened up the national market to competition (MCI, Quest, Verison, etc.)
3rd it defined all the network elements inside a consumers premisis (i.e. the customer owned side of the demark) as belonging to the consumer.
That created multiple interconnected networks under different ownership, ...so we had to define where each parties responsibility for that network begins and ends. ...hence the legal demarcation points.
fahgeddaboudit
Installing a line TO your house is different than running lines IN your house. ;)
One requires 30-60 minutes of phone-company minion's time (if he's slow), the other takes a phone guy, carpenter, electrician (maybe), and a loooooot of cable to run through the walls. :)
"My wife and I recently moved up to the world of cell phones, after taking our sweet time to make sure this whole newfangled technology was going to stick around."
Seriously? April 3, 1973 was the date of the first cell phone call. Cell phones have been around for 36 years (incase your math is bad) and this is posted today?
I must say to you sir gtfo slashdot and never post here again. This is the reason we should be able to vote garbage like this off the front page anonymously.
AT some point, you may want to go back..
My wife and I do the "we don't need a land line any more"... but then there's always some goofy situation where we do... usually because of either a hole in cell phone billing plan or some cell went into the washer catastrophe.
This is my sig.
Or, even more horrific, you hook up a modem. Without asking permission.
I remember calling Ma Bell to report the 'ringer equivalence number' of my first modem - they really had no clue what I was talking about.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Presumably the residence still has internet access (via cableTV) ?
So, sign up for a free Voice-over-IP (VoIP) account (even cheaper than cellphone service). Then get an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) and plug it into one of those jacks. Now all of the house jacks are "live" for old-fashioned analog telephone service, except via newfangled VoIP.
This gives you cheaper service than cellphones, and a backup for when batteries are low on the mobiles. For the best implementation, plug in a DECT 6.0 cordless system and get all of the fancy calling features "for free".
Just make sure the wires *really are* disconnected "from the pole" before plugging in the ATA.
Cheers
Check out phonelabs Dock N Talk. http://www.phonelabs.com/
I have had one of these for over seven years. Excellent gadget.
I can use any wired phone in the house to answer or call out on the cell phone.
Work done by an officer's doppelganger in a parallel universe cannot be claimed as overtime.
In my state in the U.S., there is a box on the outside wall of the house. The copper on the house side of that box belongs to the customer. I don't know what the laws are in other states, but I think they are similar.
You mean it's a demarcation point?
Generally speaking, customers can do anything they want to their side of the demarc.
We have considered changing over to something like magic jack, because it can cut the price on a service we never use, but I have my reservations due to the way they do 911.
Anyway, the odds of this being relevant to you are low, but the point is that whatever plan you go with, try to make it future-proof. Some things to consider are:
FWIW...
Leave the wire as it is, maybe over time it'll be painted over, covered by new wires. In years to come future owners of your house may then find the old copper and think it was a cool relic of the past.
Like anything else your house has a history so why not keep it.
I know this is a troll an we aren't supposed to feed them, but....
Who here actually knows someone injured in a car accident where the driver at fault had nothing but weed in his system (and was over 18, any younger and they just suck at driving period)? Of all the people I have asked this to, nobody has ever known anyone that was injured in a pot related accident. I personally know 4 people that have been killed by drunk drivers. I also know one that was practically humpty dumpty from an 80 year old that couldn't see.
Controller area network is a two wire communication protocol. It it usually run on a twisted pair but try it out.
Just magicJack it. You will get enough power from the USB to energize the rest of your house. Then just use wall phones like you normally would. Security providers are already balking due to collusion with phone companies. EG. security firm A says you need phone provider B to wire your house to the mothership.... The argument they provide is basically that they are protecting me from myself, in case the magicJack isn't working at the time I need it to work. Not fair. Anyone wanting to start a firm like this should call it "Orwellian Security" - we protect you from others and yourself!
You know you want to network that collection of old Macs you have.
I have one of those phones. It's beige. It has a rotary dial. It works just fine, thank you. I got it from a friend who bought three on EBay.
If you're into that kind of thing, you might like SparkFun Electronics Bluetooth rotary phone and GSM rotary phone or ThinkGeek's retro Bluetooth handset.
Unless you have Verizon FIOS, and your UPS battery has died.
In what world is 160Mbps "almost as fast" as 900+Mbps?
In Imagination Land, obviously.
In all seriousness, the GP probably doesn't use their LAN for anything but Internet access, and even 802.11b is good enough for most people there, aside from the latency.
I agree with this completely, just bought a house and if it didn't have phone jacks wired already that would have played a part in what I offered. if you ever want to get a security system it is cheaper to use one that can use a landline, they make ones that use cell signals but they cost more. Not a huge issue but a potential issue for a buyer. If you know you are never going to sell your house you've no worries.
Run a small distribution amp ($40 at radio shack), and make custom rca/rj11 dongles for each room you'd like your music. Get some amplified computer speakers for each room, and plug them in to the dongles. That way the existing jacks stay intact. You could also just replace the jacks themselves with the RCA jacks. I don't even know how well this will work interference and ground-loop wise, but it works very well for me over cat5e using leviton jacks to the amp. You'd need to find a place where all the phone wires splice together (every place I've ever lived it's been like this), break that, and make individual connections to the amp, is all.
Keep in mind that telephone systems (at least those I'm familiar with, here in the US) use high voltage for signalling ringing. This high voltage can couple in as noise to the ethernet pairs and cause flaky operation. Run phone line as separate. I ran cat 5e in parallel with some old three pair cat 3 I had laying about for my house. Networking on the 5e, many phone options on the cat3
Wait until you get sick of the huge charges your cell phone company hits you with, move to Pay as You Go and then reinstall your landline.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Here in IL, the unemployment office warns you that you *really* shouldn't use a cell phone to do your bi-weekly certification by phone, that there may be problems.
mark
Another option to replacing it would be seeing if the wire was at least somewhat centralized anyway. If that is the case make it centralized and then converting back and forth between a PBX and a standard phone system wouldn't be that hard. If anything it would increase resale value.
I would pay more for a house with centralized, easy to maintain wiring.
I doubt we'll ever see pot legalized, because too many people are making too much money from the "war on drugs". If a cop finds a few pounds of mary-jane in the trunk of a car... someone's getting a promotion. Plus, if it were legalized, what would anti-marijuana groups use as a scapegoat for their "troubled kids"?
That's for sure. I use those "ancient" jacks to access high-speed internet. Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
What the hell? I installed cat 6 structured cabling throughout my house when I moved in - it really wasn't that hard. Certainly didn't take a few grand's worth of my time.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Amen! It would be a major problem to sell a house that's not wired for POTS. Even if you don't intend to sell anytime soon, things happen. You don't want to do anything irreversible.
Bear in mind that most home phone wiring (at least in my experience, in the midwestern USA) has just a few runs; all the jacks in each run are daisy-chained together. This is not particularly useful for something like eithernet. Also, the wires are generally not run in conduit. They're probably just threaded through holes in the studs and stapled in place. That's going to make them hard as hell to remove, anyway.
About the good only use I can see is to wire your stereo into the system and use the phone jacks as speaker connections. I'm sure audiophiles would cringe at the suggestion, but it might work well enough for most people. Or it might not; the amp might not like a bunch of speakers wired in parallel to a single connector. Give it a try and tell us how it goes!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I have read better suggestions on the washroom walls of a men's washroom!
Hope about utilize the old wiring in your house and you old phones to interface with your cell phone:
http://www.jakeludington.com/gadget_envy/20051021_cell_phone_to_landline_converter.html
This way you can answer your cell phone anywhere in the house, while keeping it charged.
You could also get creative and get two of these and wire it to the second pair for a second line through out the house. Grab some cheap line switches or dual line phones and you are set.
U
Also I like having old-fashioned phones in my house, because in an electrical outage, they are the only things that still work.
You mean apart from the, uhm, cell phone?
Not only that, but wireless performance degrades as more devices connect. If you are using 1 gigabit switch with enough ports, each port has a gigabit connection. Granted, you are likely not getting more than 50 Mbps for your Internet connection, but if you do media streaming and/or file storage over your LAN, wired is damn near a requirement.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
Everything is proprietary. The walls that compose rooms to a house should be nothing more than insulation, except for a hinge here and there to conduct the function of a biway door. People that have in-door plumbing are reaping the benefits of a broken pipe and its costs to dig it out. At the most, the floor should have a covy where the wall meets the floor or ceiling; and this only to cary such utility or service. Proprietary things of these transient causes should not be embedded. They will not work out in the long run. Maybe soon, we'll find a reasonable response to all this crap in our houses called a "wall." Should be able to grow a nice shrubbery to subdivide area for one's araingments of domicile. Without a roof, we then could get it watered for free from the precipitation from up in the sky. I like to swing from trees too, by the way. A hammock is my kind of bed.
None answered my question the last time I asked. I know this is a discussion forum on Vintage Games, but I think my behaviours are vintage as far as man has been alive and playing with women.
I've always wanted to ejaculate on a woman's period in a petri dish, wait 3 days, then install the fertilized egg into a chicken egg to keep it under a lamp for 4 months. Will it grow? Inquiring minds would like to know. Also of note, when I get realy randy I would dig a hole in the ground out beyond a line of trees and drop a couple cumwads and burry it: anyone ever see any of those walking tree men, or dendrites as they call them? I can almost swear that these new saplings have ears, maybe from me, and they can't be trusted to keep secrets (as I swore I wouldn't write any of this on slashdot, yet I did!)!
Shit, even living in a country using broken units(US), I understood that he was referring to 100 meters and not megabits per second.
Cat5 and up are supported for gigabit at up to 100m. However, with gigabit over copper, you are more likely to get errors from interference and crosstalk. Cat5e includes specifications for far-end crosstalk, and Cat6 is even more stringent. However, neither are required, just recommended if doing a new install.
Said, "It's just like dice but it's got more sides And it tells me who lives and who dies"
I use my old Phone lines in my house to run 1-wire sensors. You can leave the wiring intact, if you ever wanted to use it again.
Even if you don't pay for a landline, it has to stay active to allow free 911 calls. This means that the phone company is holding your line at some DC voltage for you. Just rig up a simple LED night light for each jack to get some sweet free power goodness.
Simple physics?
They're both propagating magnetic fields traveling at the speed of light in the medium they are traveling though -- which is faster through air than copper.
So, speaking in simple physics, you are exactly wrong.
Anonymous, because i'm too lazy to log in...
Wired is also switched, wireless is shared.
Wired *can* be switched, but does not *have to* be. It will just be slower, and half-duplex. But this allows Ethernet to be used in just about any situation, and for short enough runs, I see no reason why 10 or 100 mbit ethernet can't run on cat3. (such as in houses)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe with some rigging you could hook up a balun from an a/v reciever and distribute a video/audio signal to all the phone jacks in the house; or at least a couple. You would, of course, need another balun at each location you wish to recieve the signal.
POTS phones don't work in an outage if the phone provider has switched to VOIP. Power goes out at the house, so does service.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I've still got one of those old Bell phones. Princess model, and you're right -- small as it is, you hit someone with that, they're going DOWN. When the phone co transitioned to "own your own phone" they offered me the option to buy what I had in place for $35.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
I doubt it can be used to pull ethernet cable. It's probably stapled to rafters and studs every six feet, or so. Just leave it alone.
Well... if you don't have wireless across your house, I suppose you could always hook up a bunch of old modems and run yourself an old-school network...
Not really sure what you would use such a thing for though these days.
I can't understand the logic behind this: You didn't switch over to cell phones until recently because you wanted to make sure they would stick around and be dependable. But you are quick to completely discard your existing well-tested and dependable technology (the landline)? Why not keep it in place? (As a lot of people above have mentioned, of course.)
Conformism is the new nonconformism.
Lost electricity, cell phones ran out of juice. Before that, though, the emergency responders had allocated or saturated the cell capacity.
Land lines stayed up for a month while we had no appreciable cell service or electricity.
Unfortunately, Verizon has started using the home owners electricity to "power" the land lines.
What a cluster....
Dude, have you ever seen a care bear on a rampage? They shoot freaking rainbow lasers from their bellies.
I wouldn't want to mess with one.
Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
That's rather funny come to think of it.
I had bought a house a few years back and didn't notice it didn't have phone jacks. It was a refurb where they gutted an old abandoned house and made it completely new.
Didn't notice until had a conversation one day about how much we hated a particular Cable company because they were increasing their rates.
My room mate said "Why don't we go with the phone company DSL?"
I looked around and said "You know I never noticed but we don't have phone jacks."
(Note the pone company has a bad rep with DSL here anyways so its a moot point.
And frankly it seems to be a common issue because I realized the last two houses I had rented before buying in the city didn't have phone jacks either because they too were refurbs and we always used cable and cell phones.
Hell even the alarms are cellular these days.
Either way, if they are there don't bother tearing them out, but I would suspect in a few more years when FiOS is more popular, you'll have to tear them out anyways.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Cell phone towers normally have plenty of backup generators so your cell phone will still work even in a power outage. I've never understood that argument for landlines.
Burn it. BURN IT ALL!
I would not use the cellular to phone socket device:
i.e. Dock-N-Talk, Cell Socket, Hellodirect Cell Docking Station, MyXLink, etc.
Air time is expensive.
If you have the time, build a Skype server for your home phone system.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8592/
It's cheap (under $200) and you get to pay Skype rates instead
of your cellular telco.
...sortof like the intercomm suggestion, what about using this to extend your sound system? My apartment is wired for two phone lines, so I have four wires in the wall (red/green, black/yellow). Each pair would be sufficient for a single audio channel, right? On this basis, it really wouldn't be difficult to create an adapter for a stereo headphone jack to interface with rj-11. Make several adapters with either male or female audio connectors, and you can easily put speakers in different rooms.
Of course, I won't do any such thing because I'm renting, and although we have no voice land line, we do have DSL.
?/o
Works great until you put 2 ports (one ethernet, one phone) right next to each other and accidentally swap the labels.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Although I had not read anything one way or the other about phones or data cabling, there is an entire array of such things for sale in the electronics stores, so I figured it must be mostly alright to do oneself.
Bah. I was tired, it was late, I apparently can't read.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
heres a thought, use a small amp to run from your computer/stereo to the nearest phone jack and pipe music through the house. you could use floor speakers or satelites on posts in every room that has a jack to have cheap whole house audio. ive been debating doing this in my own house i just bought 3 months ago. of course im a layman and havent thought it through, but off hand i think it would work
I read, "You dropped a land mine, now what?"
Not when hurricanes blow the cell equipment off the tower. I finally moved out of Florida, basically because hurricanes and learning spanish sucks. I'm not sure which is worse though.
Common sense is not so common.
What, monopolies?
Plus the previous guy bolded the wrong part:
it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>>>Also I like having old-fashioned phones in my house, because in an electrical outage, they are the only things that still work.
>>You mean apart from the, uhm, cell phone?
Hand your technician or engineering degree back to your college. (shaking head). Cellphones don't work when the receiving towers have no electricity to power them. Duh. That's why it's good to have a wired phone for backup; it's only $5 a month and is typically the only thing that still works when the rest of my house is dead.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>Land lines stayed up for a month while we had no appreciable cell service or electricity.
Can phone lines be used as a power source? I know there's not much there, but perhaps you could recharge a battery. I'll have to investigate further.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Hand your technician or engineering degree back to your college. (shaking head). Cellphones don't work when the receiving towers have no electricity to power them. Duh. That's why it's good to have a wired phone for backup; it's only $5 a month and is typically the only thing that still works when the rest of my house is dead.
I don't need a degree to understand that the critical cellular base stations are up using the same generators and backup power as the electronic PBXs switching your wired phone calls. You do realize that all phone calls use the same PBXs and the same core networks, it's just the last mile that's wireless.
Isn't that the point? If you're buying something that's damaged, you're hardly likely to pay extra for it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I was holidaying in NYC a few years back when the power went out on most of the East coast. Cellphones either were out or overwhelmed by everyone trying to call relatives to say they're OK, it's not another 9-11 etc.
The payphones were still up, even if the lines were loooooooong.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
icepick him and refresh your Ice-T
i'm tired of being stereotyped. Yes, I am a pothead, a stoner, a user of maryj.
You will never see any posts saying I'm hungry, Have you got any cookies, or the ever lame, cartoons are cool.
You find my posts either try to add some wit (which I admit, being stoned, probably isn't that funny to anyone else), or heaven forbid, actually trying to add some info or facts into a convo.
In fact, even though I'm baked out of my mind, I managed to keep on track with whatever i'm trying to say. (not sure yet, really stoned).
But please, drop the lame stoner stereotypes. Or i will have to start stereotyping peeps like you.
Be seeing you...
Hum.. I'm surprised our fax machines at work even work then. We have a pbx with a dsl internet connection for phone lines and the faxes are on the pbx as I can just conference the fax extension when someone sends a fax call to a desk voice line using the pbx features.
I have only one contact that I know has problems faxing to us, someone with an HP all in one fax machine.
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
There are a number of ways that FAX machines can be made to work in such a system.
1) The DSL signal is synchronized to the network clock. (It's typically just another ATM carrier system.) Both phone/internet boxes and PBX equipment can recover this clock and synchronize their D/A converters and other phone switching timing to it. This gives you full-quality POTS signal - just as if you had a T1 line unit in your building.
2) The PBX or VoIP equipment can recognize the FAX or high-speed modem signal and take over: It acts as the far-end modem, recovering the digital signal, and packetizes THAT for transport to/from far-end equipment that also acts as a modem to construct a new signal. (Think of it as a benign man-in-the-middle attack.) Because the A/D conversion is only done at the modems, not to pack the analog signal onto a digital carrier, the timing is not as critical: The modems sync to each other rather than to the network clock. The protocols for FAX and most things you might send on a high-speed modem have gaps that can be stretched or shrunk to accommodate the minor timing differences between the two ends.
3) If the FAX machine or modem has fallen back to a REALLY SLOW signaling standard it can still make it through flakey timing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
http://www.instructables.com/id/Hidden_USB_Storage/ If I was in a situation like that I would use this...Unfortunately you won't be able to use USB 3, since that requires 8 contacts.
Actually, you're on crack. I have a cell tower on my property; it has a battery and fuel-cell backup power source that gives it approximately 48 hours of backup power. We lost power for two weeks a couple of years ago from a blizzard, and the POTS phones worked like a champ for the entire ordeal. The cell phones did not.
Additionally, state law and contracts with electric companies generally require priority power restoration for telephone infrastructure. In several instances that I am personally aware of, telephone switching facilities have a restoration priority higher than the hospitals in the region.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Actually, you're on crack. I have a cell tower on my property; it has a battery and fuel-cell backup power source that gives it approximately 48 hours of backup power. We lost power for two weeks a couple of years ago from a blizzard, and the POTS phones worked like a champ for the entire ordeal. The cell phones did not.
Additionally, state law and contracts with electric companies generally require priority power restoration for telephone infrastructure. In several instances that I am personally aware of, telephone switching facilities have a restoration priority higher than the hospitals in the region.
What does your property's cell tower have to do with anything? I said critical regional base stations, not your backyard antenna. They are powered by generators and other auxiliary systems, not AA batteries. Yes, the telephone infrastructure is very highly prioritized, which includes the base stations, at least where I live. Keep your duhs, head shakes and crack, pal.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/GaffneySC-CellTower.jpg
Since 100baseT ethernet only uses pairs 2 and 3 (orange/white and green/white), you could punch down pairs 2 and 3 on an RJ45 jack and pair 1 (blue/white) on a phone jack.
We are running ethernet on our old phone lines. Works fine.
chuk