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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?"
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.