Death knell for landlines - RANT

[ultrarunner]

We have DSL at the Hospital and have since 1990... the central office is across the street... run the whole place on what is now $80 per month.

Just was told we must convert to Fiber as DSL is going away... the problem of power outages is a concern... the DSL has never gone down... the Fiber that was put in last year has required several visits to change out fans...

Technology is great when it works.

The old AT&T designed for simplicity and reliability... they had to as they had sole responsibility... not like this anymore.

Mom has landline... same number for 60 years... no cell service in the house... have to got out to the yard and stand a certain way...

One of my retired friends was a line engineer for AT&T... shortly before he retired he was charged with planning for a new upscale subdivision... went way out on the line and specified 2.5 lines per home... the subdivision was 50% built and there were no more lines... some homes had 4 or 5 dedicated phone lines back in the day when each kid might have their own phone...

I'm guessing it would not be a problem any more?

The cabin has an old rotary phone with the same number over 60 years... sometimes not a single call is placed all year... we were told if we every gave it up... we would never get another... so we still have it functional... $30 a month

 

[cqaigy2]

I have a suspicion we would drop further then 1859. Alot of that technology is lost to most of us.

We lose power frequently, usually for a day or two. Four or five years ago, we were down for 15 days. Lost the cell towers after day 3, we were able to get out after 7. We never lost the land line though.

 

[ultrarunner]

^^^That's the thing... landlines are incredibly reliable and sometimes the only thing that still works.

Almost seems like a step backward...

Telephone/Bell Labs had some of the best engineers/designers bar none and reliability was paramount.

 

[MossRoad]

We have DSL at the Hospital and have since 1990... the central office is across the street... run the whole place on what is now $80 per month.

Just was told we must convert to Fiber as DSL is going away... the problem of power outages is a concern... the DSL has never gone down... the Fiber that was put in last year has required several visits to change out fans...

Technology is great when it works.

The old AT&T designed for simplicity and reliability... they had to as they had sole responsibility... not like this anymore.

Mom has landline... same number for 60 years... no cell service in the house... have to got out to the yard and stand a certain way...

One of my retired friends was a line engineer for AT&T... shortly before he retired he was charged with planning for a new upscale subdivision... went way out on the line and specified 2.5 lines per home... the subdivision was 50% built and there were no more lines... some homes had 4 or 5 dedicated phone lines back in the day when each kid might have their own phone...

I'm guessing it would not be a problem any more?

The cabin has an old rotary phone with the same number over 60 years... sometimes not a single call is placed all year... we were told if we every gave it up... we would never get another... so we still have it functional... $30 a month

The beauty of fiber optics is there's always some guy with a backhoe willing to cut it for you!

We have fiber at our employer and are on a community wide fiber network. There are redundant fibers and it runs in several wide loops around the community in a sort of clover leaf around 4 major areas. If the line is cut in one place, the signal takes the other way around. Sounds great. But you can only get on it in specific locations, so you have to have fiber run to those points, which can be several blocks away to a mile away, depending on location. So the guy in the backhoe can still kill you on that single path out of your building to the connection point. So, we run one fiber out one corner of the building to one connection point, then run a second fiber out the catty-corner of the building to a different connection point. That takes two guys with backhoes on different streets to kill you. Until you find that the whole community gets onto the internet superhighway at one common location! So that gets resolved by using two different ISPs in separate buildings. Then the day comes when the backhoe guy kills your fiber, and corporate IT never set up the 2nd router on the redundant line to takeover as master if the main goes down. Then you find water gets into fiber conduit at your corporate HQ and when it turns to ice, it crushes the fiber. Then you find out that corporate (who acts as your ISP), never set up their 2nd router to become master. Then the master burns up. Then their redundant fiber gets ice crushed a year later and you find they never set up the master to take over if the slave burns up...... you get the point....

You have to have some redundancy in your systems, but on the other hand, you can redundancy yourself into the poorhouse. And all the redundancy in the world isn't worth spit if its never tested by yanking out one of them and seeing what happens. Doing it on paper doesn't reveal any shortcomings in the system.

 

[ultrarunner]

Doesn't sound promising...

The old DSL has been totally trouble free and for years was only a $20 add on to are 26 line phone switch.

It is still only $80 now and we run the whole Hospital on it... EXCEPT Imaging which is totally separate and has their own Comcast Deal.

 

[Kenneth in Texas]

ok im stupid and semi old. I have a landline for my business, $75 per month total. So what are my options as far as wireless goes to have in my office? Still need my business number, still need a local to my area number, still need the ability to send an old fashioned fax and still need the ability that it works perfectly regardless of storms, clouds, etc. So what are my options?

 

[wcampbell47]

ok im stupid and semi old. I have a landline for my business, $75 per month total. So what are my options as far as wireless goes to have in my office? Still need my business number, still need a local to my area number, still need the ability to send an old fashioned fax and still need the ability that it works perfectly regardless of storms, clouds, etc. So what are my options?

Ok before you pull the plug on the land line pull out your cell phone and check the signal strength. The link instructs on how to access the field test code on an iphone which will give the strength in decibels rather than bars. A -68 is a great signal not gonna get much better. A -90 would be iffy for business. If you have 4G LTE and a great signal then switching to wireless may work for business and internet - but compare pricing.

Access The Hidden Field Test App For iPhone [iOS Tips] | Cult of Mac

Efax - never used it but know that it is out there.
eFax® | Online Fax to Email | Internet Fax Services

Watch how the term wireless is used. Are they talking about a cellular signal as in Verizon or AT&T. Wireless internet could also be delivered by radio bounced from tower to tower. It is that last mile of getting the signal to your place of business that can make or break a redundant connection.

Phone numbers are highly portable these days. Just cause you switch providers does not mean you have to change phone numbers. Be careful of Voice over IP (phone over the internet). I rolled out VOIP in the office and found that it works best if the connection speed is the same both ways (up and down). Maybe improvements have been made since then.

I administered a network in Houston where the T1 line came into the building through 1 port. So a guy with a backhoe could take me down so easily. I found a wireless provider that made a second connection to my network for redundancy. The internet service provider programmed his router to automatically switch my connection from the T1 to the radio signal if the T1 was down longer than x number of seconds. Found out later that the internet service provider set up a connection for the Houston Rockets the same way. Just used the radio signal as primary and the T1 as secondary. The router programming saved thousands of dollars in BGP equipment which is how redundant connections were made at the time.

Then again all this new fangled technology may just break the bank and be too expensive for your operation. Your call.

 

[k0ua]

You have to have some redundancy in your systems, but on the other hand, you can redundancy yourself into the poorhouse. And all the redundancy in the world isn't worth spit if its never tested by yanking out one of them and seeing what happens. Doing it on paper doesn't reveal any shortcomings in the system.

Ain't that the truth. I have seen this failure mode many times in my career. No one really tests like they should. It cost's money to test and it carries some risk in the form of downtime. '
The good news about the guy cutting your fiber is that there are guys willing to splice the fiber back into service too.

 

[Industrial Toys]

Out here, landlines run off DMX units. Multiplexers that allowed increased subscribers out of town without needing a copper pair for each. They have been in for decades and are battery backed up, so they will fail after a while in a prolonged hydro outage. The technology TRAPS are everywhere waiting for just the right time to spring closed!

 

[MossRoad]

Doesn't sound promising...

The old DSL has been totally trouble free and for years was only a $20 add on to are 26 line phone switch.

It is still only $80 now and we run the whole Hospital on it... EXCEPT Imaging which is totally separate and has their own Comcast Deal.

To tell you the truth, that sounds like a really small data pipe for a hospital. :laughing: I remember when we first got internet at my employer. We had a 56.6 data line and it took several minutes to download a crummy <1m photo and we were ecstatic! Then I remember getting a 1.5mbps T1 line. Woo hoo! That was fast and we had 50 servers and 300 PCs and 50 Macs.... and only certain people were allowed to access the internet and man, if someone caught you looking at moving pictures or listening to music, you got reprimanded. DSL... we never had it. We went to bonded T1s then directly to fiber. Now we have gigabit to the desktop. No waiting.

How many users do you support on the DSL? Just curious. I'd think that medical records would be primarily text, but there's got to be a lot of hi-res imaging being transferred around. And lots of database access. Maybe not. What do I know about hospitals? :laughing: