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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?"
Use it as a guide line for ethernet.
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?
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...
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
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.
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.
I dropped my land line a few years ago, and haven't missed it at all.
However now that I own my own house* I'm considering trying to get the cheapest land line service possible. The reason is simply that in the past there have been times when a storm would kill cell phone service, even knock out the power, but phone-over-copper was still up. So something like a $5/mo plan with no built-in long distance just as an emergency backup makes has some appeal. Not a ton of appeal, but some.
Either way, I wouldn't pull my copper just because I was sure I personally didn't want a land line. I wouldn't pull it unless either 1) I knew I was going to be living in that house until I died or 2) I knew that everyone else had dumped their landlines too and thus wouldn't balk** at buying a house with no phone lines.
* Of course there's a bank right now laughing its ass of at that statement, but hey.
** I love this word so much. To me it evokes the image of a skeptical chicken.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
When the blackouts come only the landlines keep working. When the cell tower batteries run down, after 4 hours or so, there goes your phone.
Here in NYC we get a major blackout every decade or so, even if the larger region does not, so I always keep a landline at the cheapest rate.
Redundancy isn't just for hard drives.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
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've never heard Chomsky or Mother Jones on the AM radio. I also wouldn't consider your examples "fringe".
Moveon is solidly pro-Democratic party, that's probably to the right of the American people. Democrats support corporate bailouts, drug wars, terror wars, etc. The American people do not.
Chomsky and Mother Jones might be a little to the left of the American mainstream, but would fit right with moderate European social democrats. I'd hardly call that fringe.
If you want to give examples of the radical left, check out crimethinc, bash back, or infoshop.org.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Yeah my last home was custom built. I didn't even have a landline only cable hooked to a VOIP box. Most buyers were like WTF you have no phone lines? I had to explain it to the bidders that wanted me to reduce the house price $5000 because, "they needed to install phone lines." I finally offered to prepay the internet & VOIP bill for the year, a whole $480.
The buyer thanked me when they realized what they got, but it did take some explaining.
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most." ~Ozzy Osborne
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 ?
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.
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.
The nineteen-hundreds only ended nine years ago - so unless you are under the age of ten, you should be banned from using that other term. Then again, when you say "the nineteen-hundreds" it makes you think of Alexander Graham Bell in his stovepipe hat spilling battery acid and shouting "Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you."
Of course, that actually happened in the eighteen hundreds...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
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.
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
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'
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...