We are officially without an Old School House Phone.
Even though it was a cordless unit on a VOIP provider, it still felt as if was an old black wired Bakelite rotary phone attached to one particular house.
Venezuela was a bitch to get a regular phone. We did not get a house phone till 81 and it was the second on in our street. When I came to the Nashville to study, ordering the phone and getting it within a week was something amazing and this was prior the Ma Bell breakup.
Now, as most people, we have our particular cell phones and decided to cut the cost of having a house line. Still, there are plenty of people, companies and other that only have our “Home” number to reach us so we just went ahead and transferred the number to one of those prepaid cell phones you buy at Walmart and became 100% wireless.
The Home Cell will be relegated to a corner of my office where I can’t mess it up and I set it so it would forward any incoming call to my cell.
Technology is amazing. I admit I feel a bit Luddite but I reckon I’ll get used to it.
PS: And I just got a forwarded call. Bubba James from Mumbai trying to sell me car repair insurance. There goes the poetry.
When I lived in MD I had service from 1-VOIP (best source for raw SIP service).
I went to the NID and disconnected the everything from the street, then used my SIP adapter to plug into the house wiring.
From the point of view of everybody in the house, you just picked up any old “land line” and it worked. They didn’t know that it was a VOIP service. They just thought all the magic came from Ma Bell.
Today we have our cells for family members and a VOIP line(s) for the house. I like the VOIP stuff because it allows me to do things like call up 1-VoiP and add a DID (phone number) in a different *country* to my service. So when I’m doing contract work for people in a different country, they can just call a local number.
Sort of cool.
And I don’t get charged extra for those minutes.
We just cut our landline, too. I think the only real phone calls to the landline in the last two years have been one or two doctors or dentists reminding us of appointments or CVS telling us a renewal was ready. Other than that we had everything dumped to the answering machine. Robot to robot, recording to recorder.
We still have a landline. It’s old, and goes out maybe once a year, but the phone company does keep fixing it. Fortunately they have plenty of spare wires in the cable going up the street — we’re about their only customer left on this last mile of cable. (Rural area, multi-acre lots.)
I’ve hesitated about VoIP because then I have to trust the cable company, which I’m hesitant to do. Maybe they are up to it now — I discovered recently that cable service continues during power failures now, which I think is a change in the past couple of years. In rural NH, power failures occur several times a year, and every year or two one will take 24 hours or so to be fixed.
pkoning, I do understand NH limits. I live in the NH area as well.
When we had Comcast as our provider for just Internet and TV, the mean time to repair was about 2 days, with one outage going on for 5 days. As I make my living via computer support and development, 24 hours without internet is unacceptable.
I got a new job that required me to be available for set periods of time for calls from customers. We did it via VOIP so the fact that I was 500 miles from company headquarters and they in turn were 500 miles from the company they were providing service for, was invisible to the client. (I was 80 miles from our the company we were providing service to).
When I did that, I paid FairPoint to install a T1 to the house. My download bandwidth went down, my upload bandwidth went up. FairPoint managed to disconnect the land line at the poll because “there were no phones hooked into it.”
We had a person in the house who had a heart condition. We used VOIP for day to day, but if there was an emergency and VOIP was down, we would have gone to the NID and used a phone directly to call 911.
BUT the MTR went from 2days to about 2 hours.
If you want to have good MTR for comcast, pay for the phone service from them. You don’t have to USE it, and I would recommend against it. But as soon as you are paying for phone service from them, the required MTR gets much shorter as phone service is considered a requirement.
Have a land line still as well. Not that we use it for anything. When I had a phone connected to it, the only thing we ever got were calls similar to your Bubba James from Mumbai.
Only reason we’ve kept it, out house is in a cellular deadspot, and the home security system requires a phone connection. Probably in the next 6 months, will be upgraded the home security system to be online only and completely ditch the landline.
Sorry, but I may be the one who is still standing up for my landline and answering machine. Only last month I traded in my flip phone (used for emergencies only) for an android smartphone. As you can read in my recent posts (https://wrightingmylife.com) if you care to, I am not happy about being pushed into using this technology as I don’t want to be available at any instant. I value peace and quiet. I like simplicity. Yes, I am a self-proclaimed Luddite or perhaps neo-Luddite but I am not on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety meds either.
Perhaps you will participate in The National Day of Unplugging which is annually held on the first Friday in March. This year it begins at sundown on Friday, March 6th and runs through to sundown on Saturday, March 7th. Whatever you do, however much tech you want in your life, I wish you peace and contentment!