OT: Landline or not?

[Andrew]

Isn't that a bit of a fire risk ?. Mobile phone batteries last longer if they are not charged over 80% (AFAIK), so the same must apply to a powerbank.

[Andrew]

Plus inflation. Neighbour still does car repairs and small body jobs and he says most of the things he buys (paint, solvents, oil, parts) are up 60%. One example he showed me was 5 litres of Waxoil which just cost him 45 pounds (trade) with a 'retail' of 76 pounds (eek). He says 2 years ago he paid 27 pounds for this.

or even the 131.4 KwH per year that adds to their annual consumption, based on 15 watts power usage.

[Andrew]

We have a blue topped bin for mixed recycling incl. glass but council has a long list of 'glass' things that cannot be recycled. Basically any glass jar or object that did not hold a food item is not wanted.

When I changed some single glazed timber windows I spent a couple of hours carefully dismembering the casements into clean painted wood and got the glass panes out intact, which I then smashed up into smallish fragments. Local amenity skip told me to chuck the glass in the domestic (non recycleable) skip.

[Andrew]

If you watch youtube andenter TFU-DREGS in the search box you will find a series of videos about the China residential building madness and the sort of corruption involved.

One video showed a concrete road being prepared for concreting. Directly on top of the subsoil they created a layer of empty glass bottles and jars supporting the 'weldmesh' (elsewhere as shown bamboo shoots used in place of rebar) then concrete poured on top.

[Andrew]

Is there any point when most mobile contracts give you far more free minutes than any non-female would ever need ?.

[Rod Speed]

Ours are almost all unlimited calls, SMSs and MMSs to any landline or mobile in the country and with many to any of the main foreign countrys too, and some data.

The main advantage with what alan is talking about is when you dont have a reliable mobile service at your house.

[Robin]

I don't see why most people would need to add ONT, router and DECT phone.

Openreach's long list of ONTs as at March 2023 ranged from 2.4 to 10W max power consumption. But at least they all have the same size barrel connector.

[David Wade]

Yes, but there are still places where mobile coverage is poor to non-existant, and in my experience "wifi calling" is hit and miss, this would be usefull....

... mind we still keep a landline as a few older friends don't use mobiles, and prefer to ring a number they have used for years. Since switching to VOIP we also get a few free minutes, which is fine, except when my wife tried to use a DECT handset to make a call, she found it "challenging"....

[SH]

If you have reliable broadband internet but poor mobile network coverage, you could buy a femtocell and plug that into your router.

Voila, you have your own mobile phone mast albeit with a smaller coverage area that should be sufficient to cover your humble abode!

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is now less supported and less reliable than wifi calling . I did ALL the research before settling on the cheapest payg phone that did wifi calling, which has been 100% reliable...

[Theo]

[snip]

Fair enough. I think a lot of people communicate domestically using mobiles

- not voice, but IM (SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, whatever). That's less disruptive than having all the phones in the house ring, and allows you to receive the message without having to actively answer the phone. That works assuming you have good wifi signal, which is something a house is likely to want anyway. It also works equally well when the family member is away from home.

I can see some of the use cases when dealing with incoming/outgoing calls (and the doorbell intercom etc) but I think for most people they don't really want to be phoning the kitchen to ask when dinner will be ready, not least because the chef has to drop everything to answer the call.

For a lot of people work calls are Teams/etc. It's only if your role is external-facing that you might be making/receiving a lot of phone calls.

Which is not to say that a basic VOIP setup from a non-ISP provider isn't a decent step up from an analogue landline, but that it probably offers sufficient features for a lot of people.

Theo

[Tim+]

I don’t think you can. There was a time when Vodafone and maybe another provider would supply these in difficult reception areas but I think they’ve been withdrawn.

I could be wrong but I don’t think these are available to buy.

Tim

[Tim+]

Not any more.

Tim

[Theo]

I've not seen them for a while: wifi calling has largely taken over.

One problem with them was they weren't a general access mobile hotspot, so they would only work with the specific network they were supplied from, with phones that were registered with them. So they didn't help if people were on different networks, or for visitors.

Apart from the vagaries of which phones and networks have wifi calling (Android was previously a mess, although at least big-brand phones seem to have sorted it out now, but many networks still don't offer it for all subscribers including PAYG), I'd have thought wifi calling would be superior anyway. Put in the best wifi network that you can and every communicating device will benefit, not just the mobiles.

Theo

[Brian Gaff]

I think also that spam is a huge factor. When I started with demon, I could run local dos based email software in the background and not bother with servers outside, but then everyone went to pop and smtp provided by their isp. Maybe at that point you should have been charged a small fee per so many emails out. The problem was of course that being international, there was never an agreement. Back in the days of Prestel when I edited there, you had a charge for emails, postboxes etc.

In the end there was only a bulk charge done to stop spamming.

The fact was that it was a closed system and only one company ran it so had total control. Other systems like cix and CompuServe were more international, but had time online charges so we tended to use automated clients that downloaded and uploaded very fast, by those days standards in any case. Browsing was not a good way to use the systems. I used to like IRC on the Internet as it seemed you could track people then talk to them at the bottom of the screen. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

I have some ally cables on my cooker but they are being replaced by copper due to the oxidisation where they are terminated causing loose connections. It seems to be trendy for a certain class of person to remove copper signalling cables over bank holiday weekends on the rail network, causing a lot of problems. I imagine they are gradually being replaced by fibre, but if there is a market for cor like this, surely the stuff on poles and under the see has a value, you just have to weigh up the cost of getting it. Don't mention plastic pipes. I wonder how long they last? Brian

[Rod Speed]

David Wade [e-mail] wrote

Yes.

That really depends on how good your house wifi is. Mine is perfect but then so is the mobile coverage with two of the three mobile services in my country.

Maybe, as long as the wifi is adequate.

I have no choice on that, it comes with the FTTN service at no extra monthly charge but they do charge for outgoing calls. I never do that unless the mobile phone service is down locally and that almost never happens anymore.

I don't have any of those anymore. I once every few years do get a call on my landline from someone I know, mainly when they manage to lose their mobile and so lose my mobile number which I dont have listed in the white pages but do have my landline number listed.

I am very tempted to not have a phone on the landline anymore given that I only get spam calls on it now, but then I get another from a mate for the reason listed above.

Get very few spam calls tho, maybe once every few weeks.

I get none with the voip service that comes with the broadband service, just no monthly charge for that.

I used to have another voip service with no monthly charge as well, but they were bought out and now want to charge me a small monthly charge but since I hardly ever used it, told them to take that service and shove it where the sun don't shine.

I have a dedicated DECT phone for each voip service but its not very convenient to use for incomine calls, just because that has a separate history and contacts on each one and since I use the mobile for everything, thats a nuisance.

[Bob Eager]

WiFi? THey are all wired!

The chef calls to say dinner is ready...

But it's very useful when transferring an incoming call to someone in a room where they can't hear you shout. That is the case here.

Teams as well, it's mixed.

[Owain Lastname]

The big brands are proprietary; the own-brand stuff is more likely to comply with

Workzone 18V / Ferrex 20V / Positec / Worx / Erbauer are apparently compatible.

And if you have loads of DeWalt batteries and loads of money you can buy a DeWalt FlexVolt. I think people who need power for their phones are also probably going to need power for computer etc too and will have something like that or a Jackery or similar power station.

It's not an insignificant number, but is something of a niche requirement for personal fall alarms etc in areas where there is no mobile signal.

Owain

[Jeff Layman]

According to the section "Power Bank Safety Features" at

, "Power management circuitry prevents the cells inside your power pack from overcharging, so once you’ve plugged it in you can leave it to do its thing."

Mine's been connected up for at least three years, more likely four. Would it be lithium ion or lithium polymer?