OT: Landline or not?

[Paul]

Just about any metal has value.

Glass is still worth something.

Paper and plastic, not so much.

Paul

[alan_m]

Mine are not blank

enabled = yes; username = "$$$$WSF snip of 75(ish) characters"; authname = ""; authname_needed = no; passwd = "$$$$Z1MY snip of 75(ish) characters"; registrar = "voip2.zen.co.uk"; ttl = 30m; sipping_enabled = no; sipping_interval = 280s;

[Rod Speed]

That the reason why it makes no sense to ever use and ISP email address.

That varys with the ISP

[Rod Speed]

Yes.

No, no one changes them. What we actually see is plastic being used instead of copper, but not replacing copper in existing installations.

Nope, that was tried for a while with house wiring and it turns out to have real downsides so isnt done anymore.

That was what was tried and given up on.

Not with electrical wiring.

[Jeff Layman]

Not at present. This is a little out-of-date, but suggests an electric car uses 83kg of copper (with another 8kg required for a fast charger).

What this will mean for the world copper market is anyone's guess, but you might find this of interest:

Should we be adding the increasing number of onshore/onshore wind generators and solar farms to that, as they will be using a lot of copper too?

It makes the need for a room-temperature superconductor even more pressing, but, perhaps like fusion power, it's /always/ only a few years away. ;-)

[Theo]

That's interesting. So we know the name of Zen's SIP server.

It seems the $$$$ fields are encrypted. There's a decryption program here:

For which various fields like MAC address etc are used to generate the primary password and that then unlocks another password stored in the file, which encrypts the rest.

Theo

[alan_m]

The router requires you to enter a password for the backup. This password doesn't have to be the same as your Zen account password nor the password to access the router from your PC.

[Theo]

That sounds like it's for their business PBX product?

they might be outsourcing some of that.

In which case you should be able to unlock the backup, if you used the above tool.

Theo

[Andy Burns]

This forum post from a few months ago claims you can get your password

"set your DV phone number as the user ID, and get the voip password here: Zen customer portal / My Services / General / select Digital Voice / show VoIP password"

[Theo]

If you read the rest of the thread it says they've removed that option.

The instructions here:

somebody who has used the tool I linked to to extract their password and set up their own VOIP adapter.

Theo

[alan_m]

Slightly offset by water pipes in properties now increasingly in plastic rather than copper .... until "Just stop oil" win their campaign.

[Vir Campestris]

They moved us to FTTP.

We have two copper lines going from the pole to our house. I've disconnected and coiled them up out of sight at the house end. They've disconnected them somewhere else. They haven't bothered to collect them, and I'm not climbing up to do it!

Andy

[John Rumm]

For certain values of "reliable"...

My FTTP connection has had one outage in total so far. My POTS/ADSL connections typically had one or two a year each.

[John Rumm]

There are no roadside cabinets for Openreach FTTP - it is a passive optical network. There are single points of failure - but they could well be in a location remote from the consumer, so may not be affected by local power cuts even if they don't have a backup supply of their own.

[John Rumm]

Depends on the location. In towns where there are already underground ducts and manhole covers every so often they will often pull in fibre from those. In more rural locations or places served mainly from poles, they can use those.

When I got FTTP they ran a new drop "wire" from the same pole, but to a different place on the house. The copper was still in use, so that was left alone.

(oddly the fibre cable form they ran also includes a copper pair - which is unlikely to ever be used!)

[Jeff Layman]

I pasted B64FILE:phonebook into the decode box and it worked (even though I don't have any phonebook entries), but trying the same thing with B64FILE:telefon_misc resulted in garbage.

[nib]

On Wed, 05 Jul 2023 13:35:46 +0100, John Rumm wrote: ...

...

Here in the older part of Milton Keynes which had the original VHF cable, they just ran fibre into the old ducts, to everyone I think, at least I have a fibre end loose in the cable termination box in the wall ready for whenever.

Elsewhere got the narrow slit trench along the road and a little metal box at the property boundary.

nib

[John Rumm]

Where a VoIP phone could also just be a "softphone" - in other words a program running on a computer that is already connected to the router via ethernet or wifi. Not ideal for a home line - but quite good for a dedicated business line.

You can also buy your own VoIP capable routers that are more capable than the ones typically supplied with the broadband deals.

I suppose thye will with time. A more generic search for VoIP phone or IP phone finds lots of options though.

Indeed, when we moved it was only about three miles, and in the same dialling code area - but we could not take the old number - the areas can be quite tight.

Reading between the lines here it sounds as if the router is capable of accessing any voip service including Zen's however they pre-configure it to use theirs, and don't give you the access details to setup their voip service on any other device. So you could change the router to use another VoIP service, but not change it back (yourself) to use theirs, or configure a third party router or ATA to use theirs.

(having said that, there may be a way to extract this information from the router)

If you can give some examples of the bits you wanted better explanation of, and add any new questions you think are missing, we can add more information to the article since it is still in its infancy...

[Andrew]

But who stores the emails in between someone pressing send and me turning my PC on and downloading them into Tbird ?. It seems to me that having a private domain is only part of the 'solution'.

[Andrew]

NOrway has announced that it has discovered massive reserves of phosphorous-rich rock in the south of their country. Enough to last 100 years,they say. Needed to make Li-Po batteries according to this -