How much did that equipment cost you? I can cut your phone line with a $1 box cutter before ransacking yours.
Traditional phone service is on the way out, bigly. Less than 50% of US homes have any type of landline, and less than half of that are the old copper lines. Pretty soon, the remaining customer base won’t be big enough to support the technology.
We have a convention land line used in the same capacity as the OP. It doubles as a fax line for a real fax machine and my computer’s print-to-fax device.
I have had a cable-based landline for at least 15 years and it has been fine. (Incidentally, it allows me and my wife to talk to our kids at the same time.) I would like to address some of the issues raised.
Yes, if our cable goes out, we lose service. But if your telephone line goes out you lose service. And 15 years our telephone line went out and our plain old Bell Canada took 7 days to repair it. Seven fucking days. That’s when I switched to cable.
If our power fails, our cable modem has a battery that allows us 8 hours of phone usage (so they claim; all our power failures since then have been less than 3 hours and our phones kept working fine). Of course, the TV cable and internet don’t work. At least I don’t think the internet works. I should try it since my laptop will work for a couple hours.
YMMV of course, but the service from the cable company has been superb. Bell acts as if they still have a monopoly. Anyone remember that old Jules Pfeiffer cartoon where after a dispute with the phone company the customer is told, “You can always use one of our competitors.” Well now they have competitors and are still acting as though they didn’t.
Shaw cable gave me a cable-to-telephone terminal box with a small battery in it, saying it would keep the phones going during a power failure. I thought I would be clever and also plugged it into another UPS to extend its run time during a power failure but that turned out to be pointless. I soon learned that when there’s a power failure it usually involves the entire small town I am in. Shaw forgot to put battery backups in the pole mounted cable amplifiers so there’s no cable phone (or tv or Internet) service in a widespread power failure. Bell has a diesel generator in the central office which keeps their POTS system going. That would be the only thing I like about Bell.
There was a major storm last weekend and the power was/is out for thousands. We learned that 10 hours into the 30 hour outage that the cell towers have less than a day worth of backup power. I don’t know if that’s diesel or just a pile of batteries.
Wait, what? You still use a fax machine? I haven’t faxed anyone anything in about 10 years.
And your not going to cut the telephone line? Amateur!
Every security system I’ve seen installed in the last 15 years, has included a cellular dial out. But jnglmassiv has apparently uses a cell blocking device when he breaks into homes.
Cool story, bro!
I fax for my business about once a month. (Using my cable landline)
Care if I ask, who? Who would prefer receiving a fax? With scanning and email, what purpose would you need to fax?
Landlines are great, I didn’t mean to knock them at all. I kept one as long as I could but in the end I just couldn’t justify the cost compared to what I got with my internet package.
I fretted for a while about what would I do in case of an emergency. But I don’t think it makes much difference. Our power and landlines are on the same poles, so when a tree falls, everything goes down. My cell is actually more reliable in that case, and it’s always charged and within reach, and as a backup we have friendly neighbors close by.
But if a good old twisted-pair landline were cheaper than VOIP, I surely would have one.
In many US regions the fire marshal or local codes required a POTS (ie copper) line for a fire alarm in commercial buildings. Yet this is changing since that copper line requires an entire separate AT&T network to make it work. With dwindling customer revenue, AT&T does not want to support that POTS network.
Also new commercial developments are not pulling copper lines. Everything is digital, served by fiber or coax. It doesn’t matter what the fire marshal wants if copper lines (and the upstream Signaling System 7 infrastructure) are dying out. The irony is in some locales they permit a cellular-based backup system for fire alarms. Cellular!
A digital phone network as provided by Comcast is different than VOIP. They may both run over the same coax to the premises, but the spectral layout and upstream handling is different. If a backhoe cuts your cable your are down. But if an internet meltdown happens affecting VOIP traffic, in theory Comcast (and similar) digitally-served landline phones can still work. Maybe someone more knowledgeable could comment.
There is a good argument that a combination of digital telephony (not necessarily VOIP) and cellular are more reliable than POTS ever was.
When Hurricane Michael hit the FL panhandle in October 2018, the copper and coax infrastructure was broken in thousands of places. Local telecom providers flew cellular antennas on drones several hours per day. You can’t do that with a physical cable system.
I mean if burgulars show up with suppressed rifles, body armor, cell phone jammers, they cut the coax and phone lines connections which are exposed right on an outside wall in almost all homes, and they come in wearing night vision - yeah. They are gonna get my stuff. And if I am there at the time and they don’t want any witnesses, they are probably going to successfully kill me. Whether or not I sleep with a pistol under my pillow is unlikely to make any difference.
But in normal situations, nobody is using cell phone jammers. Generally if your cell doesn’t work it’s because you are in a dead spot, the batteries are dead, or the phone got dropped too many times. And this is, on average, barely any less reliable than land lines, which cost $120 a year.
So the obvious fix is to have a second cell phone. Maybe on a different carrier, but this will cost more than bundled lines do.
I don’t know if this is being done on a regular basis, but if you wanted to make that fire alarm signal always get through, you’d do the following:
But. of course, all that extra electronics and wiring increases the probability that something will go wrong and cause a fire.
There are some cases in Financial, Legal, and Medical where scans and emails are not accepted forms of documentation.
Agencies like the Social Security Administration and others do not make their email addresses public, but they still include fax nos.
We still have a land line, and we’ll be keeping it for the foreseeable future. There’s a couple of reasons for that:
We get power outages fairly often – at least a couple of times a year, usually due to summer storms knocking a tree limb into a power line in the area. And, it’s not like we live in the middle of nowhere – we’re in the near-in suburbs of Chicago. But, it’s an old neighborhood, with old trees, and the power utility has not done a good job of trimming trees along their right-of-way. While most of those outages only last a few hours or so, five or so years ago, we had a summer in which we had four different outages, each of which lasted for 48 hours or longer.
We suffer service interruptions from our cable company (Comcast) fairly often, too – easily at least once every few months, for at least a half-hour or longer. We actually have a phone line as part of our Comcast bundle – as several others have noted, it wound up being cheaper to get the TV and internet service if they gave us a phone line, too, but we have never used that phone line.
Cellular service in our area is pretty unreliable. Our cell service is with one of the carriers which has, overall, a very good network. But, we’re in an area that has a lot of forest preserve land, plus the suburb immediately to our east (Riverside) has strict laws about placement of cell towers in their preservationist-minded neighborhoods. So, in and around our house, getting only one signal bar is pretty typical. AT&T gave us a microcell a decade ago, which works tremendously well, but if the power or the internet go out, so does that.
And, despite all of the power outages and such, in the 23 years we’ve lived here, we’ve never had the telephone landline go down. So, yeah, we’re paying for a security blanket; I’m OK with that.
Yes. A scanned copy of a signature isnt valid but a FAXed one is, for some really fucking stupid reason.
Mostly by people who just havent changed the rules since 1984.
Business tax and banking stuff.
Security reasons. There’s less danger of someone eavesdropping on a fax than on email. I get medical records faxed to me frequently as well as exchanges of info with the Social Security Administration. Both of those contain my clients’ protected personal health information. The legal profession has gotten better about using email over the last fifteen years, especially with the integration of electronics filing, but the medical profession is still cautious because of HIPAA.