bye-bye land line telephone

Way back in 2003 when Comcast launched internet service, reliability was a little sketchy. But for the last 10 years, Comcast has provided awesome reliability.

At&T U-verse is very reliable as well but all T offers is 6Mb down and less than 1 Mb up. Basically useless for today's web.

When my UPS switches to battery power it clicks a relay and turns on a fan. So it's easy to tell when it's running off the battery.

It's annoying when the power blips on and off quickly, such as when a branch is on a powerline or something. Click-click-click-click....

I couldn't wait to ditch our POTS line. They charged $100 a month, everywhere was a long distance fee, and we had zero features (caller ID, call blocking, etc.).

I switched to VOIP for $20 a month, free long distance, and a full array of features. I haven't regretted it for a minute.

Dial-up was my only option until Comcast brought their lines out. We can't get DSL, the forest blocks satellite signals, and our hilly terrain and distance blocks wireless signals. We can barely even get cell signals here.

Of course, my only dial-up option back then was long distance, so it got really expensive.

Our Comcast service has been very reliable. We've probably had fewer than

That said, I did have issues with weak signals when I was splitting the signal to my cable modem and TV tuners. Comcast tried boosting the signal slightly, but said it was within "recommended specs". The TV's would often drop out, my computer tuners would lose the signal and stop recording, and my cable modem would drop out frequently. Thankfully, once I dropped cable TV and just use Comcast for internet, I haven't had any issues. The cable line now runs directly to my cable modem, that's it.

Anthony Watson

When I got cable phone, I had a multi-handset cordless phone, and put the base there their adapter (called a MTA) was going. The company (Suddenlink) insisted on sending an installer just to plug it in and that's all I let him do. After the old phone line quit working (it took almost a day), I disconnected the incoming phone line and used the existing wiring to connect other phones.

Make sure you never have the new phone adapter connected to the old phone line.

My wife still has Comcast at the club and they suck there too (commercial account) When she talked to the senior tech (25 years in this area) he said Comcast bought out all of the mom and pop cable companies in SW Florida but they have not done much to upgrade the 40 year old infrastructure and the service sucks at his house too, Calling customer support is it's own nightmare. OTOH when Sprint bought out the mom and pop phone company here they replaced everything with new. The stuff is still pretty old now (20 years) but the backbone is buried fiber and it works very well. Century link (the latest owner) installed the equipment to allow DSL to run at 10mb and that seems fast enough for anything I do. It is very reliable. I would rather have 10m all the time than 50m intermittently.

Even $20 sounds high to me. I switched to Ooma a year ago. Cost me $60 for a used unit on Ebay and $4 a month for unlimited US calling for $4 a month. I only have to pay the taxes each month, that's the $4. Very happy with it, reliability has been excellent, voice quality is good too.

I wouldn't have thought to do that, but we don't have any table or floor lamps. All of our lighting is ceiling or wall mounted.

I do have an LED lantern that runs off of 4 D-cells though. I haven't changed the batteries in years and it's still going strong. We also have a few rechargeable lights that come on automatically when the power goes out.

Yep, I have a laptop with extra oversized batteries that I use for similar things. I typically pull it out when the power goes out during the day when I'm home alone. There's nothing else to do, so I'll fire it up and watch a movie or something.

Book? That's one of those rectangular paper things, right? :)

If I'm writing code, I usually just save what I'm doing and do something else till the power comes back on. My laptop isn't really set up for programming, and the interuption kind of ruins my thought process anyway.

Depending on what my computer is doing, I can run between 60 and 90 minutes on my UPS (my computer uses less than 60 watts in normal use).

Around here, it always seems like it's rainy, snowing, or extremely windy when the power goes out. I'm not about to go outside! :)

Sex at 7pm, check. :)

I've called to report an outage twice in the past. Both times they said "we already know". :) I think it's an automated line these days, but I'm more likely to use their web site than their phone line anyway.

I hate phones and almost never make a call out. We don't get many incoming calls either, and those that do can wait till later.

We're several miles from town so they usually always have power when ours is out. Sometimes I do take care of shopping when the power goes out, but it always seems like the power goes out AFTER we have just gone shopping. :) I don't shop unless I have a specific thing I'm already going for.

Anthony Watson

My landline adds $11 a month to my Century link bill plus another $10-15 in taxes but I probably pay those taxes, just for having DSL. That includes free long distance and a bundle of phone options (caller ID, conferencing, call waiting, voice mail and about a dozen other options)

That is not what we see here. My weather station logs downtime and I was filling up the logs when I was on Comcast. After any kind of little storm, it was down for weeks. Part of the problem is Comcast is still up on poles and the Telco is buried. Now days Weather Underground sends me an Email when the station is down and I get about one or two a year on my DSL, Usually I get the "it's back up" message a minute or so later. The exception is when it is on my end.

I have lots of LED portable lights here and we have the standard "emergency light" you see in commercial installations in the hall. I swapped out the sealed beams for smaller LED lights and I imagine they will run for days on those gel batteries. I do have a switch on them so they can be turned off. That is handy if the power drops at night and you are suddenly in the dark.

I first got internet in 1995, when the local phone company started considering a nearby (30 miles) city to be "local".

Here (with Suddenlink) there haven't been many outages. The only one that lasted more than a few minutes was a 5-day one in May 2015 when we had a tornado what broke a lot of poles. Power was out for 4 days.

One of the features I have with cable phone is "call forwarding". I find that very useful at times, to transfer calls to my cell phone when I'm out. I don't want that all the time because of junk calls, but it's helpful when I'm expecting a call and want to go out.

BTW, I'm still getting a bunch that have caller ID showing "TOLL FREE CALL" and mess up my answering machine if it's set for 4 rings. It looks like there's a message, but it's just some clicking noises followed by a dial tone and an error message from Suddenlink.

I have an old UPS that won't put out enough current for a PC, but works OK with a string of LED holiday lights I have in the hall.

I call these "Lilly's lights" after a cat I used to have who slept in the hall and didn't want to be stepped on. That cat is gone now, but they make good emergency lights. There was a short (44 min.) power outage this morning and they worked.

A battery will usually fix those "Bad" UPSs. They are not horribly expensive online. That is why I have so many units around here. They all came with bad batteries for free. I still have a few dead soldiers back in my shop but I am UPSed out here. ;-) There only seems to be 2 basic sizes with either 1 or 2 in each UPS (APC).

You can use the existing house telephone wiring.

Last year I disconnected Verizon and went with Time Warner Cable for land line and internet. The TWC modem has a connection for a telephone which I connected to one of the existing wall outlets. That allowed me to use any of the other receptacles in the house.

I got it done this morning - thanks all.

1. disconnected Bell cable at the outside interface box
2. re-routed the internet cable to a better location
3. RJ-11 splitter into the phone jack
4. hub + 1 old phone into splitter
5. 1 other old timey phone in basement
6. 1 cordless pair for main floor and master bedroom < 1 old timey phone relegated to spare-dom > Everything seems to work OK - fingers crossed. ... just need to read-up on the cordless set - it wants to call out the incoming calls ! ... we never knew they could talk ! < never had call display before .. > John T.

No overhead lights in the bedrooms -- all on "bedside tables", etc. Living room has overhead lights -- but also floor lamps (for reading). If I need/want a light someplace that doesn't have one handy, I can grab a table lamp from one of the bedrooms and carry it to .

I don't like buying things for a specific (esp rare) event. E.g., our flashlights are not intended for use in the absence of power but, rather, in teh absence of *light* (e.g., under the hood of the car, under my workbenches, inside the furnace, etc.).

I have one large "flashlight" that runs off 8 D cells and has a CFL "bulb": You can tug on the front bezel to convert it to a "lantern":

But, it eats batteries. Someday, I'll make a wallwart adapter to use it as a lantern for these occasions. (The idea of installing rechargeable D cells is almost laughable)

We read a lot (in my case, ~500pp every week). We both consider it a "guilty pleasure" as it is a "selfish" act -- totally exclusive of other people.

All I need is a text editor to write code. I'm not the sort that writes

Ah, my workstations are big power hogs. I spin 1T on each, have each configured for 4 monitors (though I only use three), a pair of SCSI HBA's in each, etc. I have a separate UPS just to power the monitors...

We could probably save a fair bit in our monthly electric bill if I moved to a laptop for most of my work. But, getting all the various I/O devices attached (tablet, motion controller, scanner, etc.) makes that impractical. Also, I've not found a laptop keyboard that I'm happy with...

As it says in the airport: "360 days of sunshine" I.e., we KNOW when it is NOT sunny!

Sorry, I'll be busy. Maybe your wife can take care of that for you??

I tend to be awake at hours that most people are asleep. So, the neighborhood will be dark -- save my office light. Also, the way the power feeds this area is wonky. The folks a block from here are on a different feed -- yet still very much part of "our neighborhood".

We keep the phone for contact our "providers" (doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc.) and for the few random calls to other vendors (e.g., I ordered replacement rollers for the refrigerator and we'll get a call when they come in).

Shopping is one of our weekly rituals -- always done as a couple (unless one of us is incapacitated). It lets us plan our menu for the coming week based on what we encounter in the stores ("Hmmm, asparagus looks good! We can do that meal Wednesday...")

Our outages tend to be infrequent -- I think in large part due to below grade services. OTOH, we had a distribution transformer kick the bucket in the neighborhood, once. Another time, a fire in a cable vault. But, never "some drunk hit a light pole"...

That's only for the smaller, consumer-ish units -- 12V 7.2AHr batteries.

I have a couple of these: Which take the battery pack:

I took a pass on a pair of these: because they require *two* of the above battery packs (the bottom compartment is all battery)

The unit I've set aside for my network switch uses this:

I'm not keen on throwing lots of money into batteries in the hope that they'll NOT be needed!

(APC is also notorious for floating the batteries at too high of a cell voltage and prematurely cooking them! But, that appears to be their business model -- sort of like toilet paper salesmen giving out free prune juice samples...)

Great! Now, the windows in the car desperately need a washing...

Did you manage to find a "maximum REN" rating listed anywhere?

I have one just like that on my TV and sat box and you can replace that "battery pack" with 2 batteries of equal AH that end up being about $40 less if you shop around.

Nope - not on the hub. link below. One of my 3 old phones had it 1.2 I think. "load number" was specified on one, as 29. Dunno ...

John T.