Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
Use the old wiring as a pull-rope to run Cat-6.
That probably won't work. The old wiring would be stapled in place.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
Does this mean that the token ring drivers that have been in the Linux kernel for seems like forever dont exist, or does this mean you are a troll?
./kernel/drivers/net/tokenring ./kernel/drivers/net/tokenring/3c359.ko ./kernel/drivers/net/tokenring/abyss.ko ./kernel/drivers/net/tokenring/olympic.ko ./kernel/drivers/net/tokenring/tms380tr.ko ./kernel/drivers/net/tokenring/tmspci.ko
From the modules in ubuntu 9.04:
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
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.
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.
911 service works even if you have no local provider.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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!
GPS isn't required, e911 IS. The providers can provide e911 data through triangulation. In fact indoors they often have to since GPS doesn't work well.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The problem with cell-phone 911 is that, while it does figure out where you are and connect you to the local emergency dispatcher (most of the time), it doesn't connect you to their 911 system, only to their non-emergency line. So the dispatcher can't really see your GPS information without involving the mobile carrier. And, as an added side effect, in big emergencies (e.g. floods, etc.) the dispatchers are more likely to ignore their non-emergency line in order to keep up with the calls coming into the 911 system, so you could effectively lose contact with them simply because you're on a mobile phone.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Ah yes, my tongue can attest to that.
Note to self: do not hold bare telephone wires with mouth when reaching for a new RJ11 connector to crimp on.
Galaxy Quest does actually qualify to a surprising extent... not only is it a basically a Star Trek parody, but it's probably a better Star Trek movie than a couple of the actual Trek movies. It's not at the level of Star Trek itself, Red Dwarf, etc., but I would say it does qualify. If you haven't seen it I rather recommend it.
Extended power outage, due to any number of different reasons.
The telco CO will have a huge array of batteries to supply -48VDC to all of their switching gear in a very uninterrupted fashion, and a diesel or natural gas generator which will start up shortly after the power goes out. It will probably also have redundant capacity for long-distance links, allowing them to reroute things in the event of a cable cut somewhere.
The cell tower may, in fact, have none of these. No or limited batteries, no generator, and no circuit redundancy. In a lot of cases, you'll just have to wait until Verizon (or whoever) rolls into town with generators.
Kid-proof tablet..
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
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.
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.......
Shock image, like Goatse. Don't look it up.
Sure you can do that. The poster I was replying to seemed to want to know why VOIP was better than a regular phone line.
You don't need to replace the jacks or re-terminate any runs though. You don't even need to change anything at the junction box either. A RJ-11 connector, which is what a phone line will use, will fit into a RJ-45 jack just fine. I have done that several times. As long as you don't pull on the line and leave it alone, the contacts are still made with the right pins. It works.
Take the money you were going to spend on all the outlets, which is $4-$5 per outlet at the cheapest (not including labor costs), and buy a CAT5 patch panel. Take the incoming phone lines and connect them to the appropriate pins on the patch panel. Use a long length of wire and and connect it to Pin 1 on each port one after the other. Do that several times and you have your pairs to connect the incoming lines to it. Now you have Line 1 & Line 2 on the patch panel. If you connect a POTS phone to a port on that panel, you will have dial tone and it will work. Then just use standard patch cables ($1 a piece or less) to connect each port on that patch panel to the existing patch panel that was distributing ethernet. If you have more than two lines, just dedicate one group of ports to Line 3 & Line 4, and another group of ports to Line 1 & Line 2. Heck, you could even create a couple of custom ports if you want, or even a custom cable for a specific room to give them just the right lines they need.
In any case, it is much cheaper and easier than converting all the jacks, re-terminating the runs, and modifying the existing patch panel. Other than an RJ-45 jack being bigger, I doubt that the new owner would notice anything. He can still plug his POTS phone into the jacks quite easily, and as long as it works, why should he care about the "wierd" outlet? As long as you do the work right at the junction box, the phone company should just be able to connect the lines to the telephone junction box on the outside of the house and it should work without any further intervention.