Keeping my copper landline and DSL (don't really have many choices). Watch 4K US Football with no buffering) but just my wife and me. System is not taxed with five users. If Starlink comes down in price I may try it.
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They are turning off landlines in 2025!
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DonR
Major Contributor
Shut off fuel, run gen dry, drain the fuel from the tank and adding transmission fluid in the carb via the fuel line should keep the varnish from forming is what I do. Takes a few pulls the first time to blow out the ATF but after that it works fine. Fuel stabilisers can fail after 8 months so I would rather drain the tank. I only use the gen in winter when the storms knock out power so I store it dry. Some years I only test start it at the beginning of the season.
I've winterized and put into storage several 4 and 2 stroke devices and I always drained the float bowl by running the engines till they run out of fuel. I've never had a issue after doing this.
Here's a little trick I learned with my the pull start gas lawn mower that sits for months. When fuel lines are drained or go dry, put a little gas in a small spray bottle and spay your air cleaner a few spritzes, then pull the rope once rather than dislocating your shoulder.
What @Blumlein 88 said... Mostly rural areas count on cell towers or satellite. 5G, operating at much higher frequency, is going to be an interesting rollout as it will require many more towers or at least repeater cells. We have cable service, which provides TV and internet, but storms and animals tend to take it out about once a month or so. Usually short glitches, but sometimes for hours to a day or more. It's gotten to where I will wait a day to call as they inevitably say they see nothing wrong and want to send out a tech, then it magically fixes itself later. Since we do not have fiber, and are a long way from the CO, phone internet would be painfully slow.
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“Don’t let them drop us!” Landline users protest AT&T copper retirement plan
California hears protests as AT&T seeks end to Carrier of Last Resort obligation.
arstechnica.com
People in California don't want to lose their copper landlines either.
In my lifetime I remember when most didn't have a phone, then when we finally did it was a party line to no longer having a landline myself for over a decade.
mjgraves
Member
Alas, copper is doomed. It's just aging out. If you insist on keeping it for the last mile connection to your property, you can be certain that the gear it connects to in the local CO has been upgraded. TDM networks have been and/or are being replaced by IP networks.
If you can still order T-1 circuit, for a PBX for example, know that it's fiber or coax to the premises, with a local a device that offers a T-1 interface for the convenience of connecting to your legacy gear.
Cellular towers are typically back-hauled by fiber, or ocassionally point-to-point wireless links.
Also, not all 5G is at higher frequencies as someone else stated. Different carriers have different frequency inventories. Some have 5G deplyed at low frequencies. This is great for coverage distance, and penetration in buildings, but terrible for bandwidth. To offer the impressive bandwidth requires wider channels that are only available at higher frequencies.
But we shoud be clear. IP network does not mean "The Internet." Private IP networks can be just as relaible as TDM networks once were.
IP networks are simply cheaper to install and maintain. As old age and weather kills off copper this transition is unavoidable.
If you can still order T-1 circuit, for a PBX for example, know that it's fiber or coax to the premises, with a local a device that offers a T-1 interface for the convenience of connecting to your legacy gear.
Cellular towers are typically back-hauled by fiber, or ocassionally point-to-point wireless links.
Also, not all 5G is at higher frequencies as someone else stated. Different carriers have different frequency inventories. Some have 5G deplyed at low frequencies. This is great for coverage distance, and penetration in buildings, but terrible for bandwidth. To offer the impressive bandwidth requires wider channels that are only available at higher frequencies.
But we shoud be clear. IP network does not mean "The Internet." Private IP networks can be just as relaible as TDM networks once were.
IP networks are simply cheaper to install and maintain. As old age and weather kills off copper this transition is unavoidable.
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So, lots of responses (I didn't read them all) that are variations of "I haven't used land lines in, like, forever."
Well, neither have I, for incoming calls. But when I make outgoing calls, about 15% of the time the cell phone is unable to connect. Why? I live in a hilly, rural area and cell service is strictly line-of-sight and hilly areas require lots of towers. At last analysis in our area, we needed 24 new towers in an area now served by 7. Internet by cellular service is sometimes stunningly good at maybe 10 down and 0.4 up, but often it's much worse than that (like, zero down and zero up).
Frankly, I don't care if my routine calls get dumped to voice mail from time to time.
But when the out-of-control drunk visitor of a neighbor was trying to smash through the glass door into our kitchen at 3AM a couple of years ago, and I dialed 911 to call the cops, that was NOT the time for the cell service to be spotty. I used the land line. Five nines is what we need only sometimes, but when we need it, we really need it.
And I keep a hard-wired, POTS-powered telephone plugged into a jack at all times. When the power goes out, so does the internet and the cordless phones, but how can I call the power company to report the outage? The POTS system is designed to survive most area power outages.
It's not that I don't like digital or VOIP in the backbone--the backbones are designed with high reliability. It's that last mile that nobody, least of all the providers, wants to upgrade. We have two twisted pairs from Verizon to our house, and as bad as that is, that's the only linear infrastructure feeding communication to our house, and the only service that is even available to us. Our house is 1000 feet from the road. Our internet is cellular as a backup to terrestrial microwave that relays off a neighbor's house to get line of sight to the provider's tower. That service is expensive and it provides all of 8 down and 2 up. When the power is out in the area, so is that service, because the relay point has no battery backup. That is the state of the art in this area, a mere 25-40 miles from the center of the internet and a vast number of large data centers.
We have been told we will have fiber next year. We've been told that since about 2008. Now they are saying that even when the service along the road is built, it will take 2-3 more years for them to build all the laterals. I'm not holding my breath.
When we moved here, dial-up internet was the only service offered to residential users, and most business felt lucky to get a ISDN. T1 was the business state of the art--1.5 kilobits/second down. But that was never available out here.
Starlink is so overbooked in this area the only way I can get it is using the RV service, which provides only intermittent access (though it's good when you fire it up). That means I get to pay yet another hefty monthly bill to get yet another service that is not reliable enough to allow me to stop paying for the other unreliable services I already have. Uh, no.
And I have to have some significant level of expertise to keep what we have now maintained and operational. None of this get fiber to the house and a standard router from the provider out here.
Maybe the UK is small enough that they can provide universal cell service and hard-wired data service, but that is certainly not the case in the U.S.
Rick "probably restating what's already been said in this thread" Denney
Well, neither have I, for incoming calls. But when I make outgoing calls, about 15% of the time the cell phone is unable to connect. Why? I live in a hilly, rural area and cell service is strictly line-of-sight and hilly areas require lots of towers. At last analysis in our area, we needed 24 new towers in an area now served by 7. Internet by cellular service is sometimes stunningly good at maybe 10 down and 0.4 up, but often it's much worse than that (like, zero down and zero up).
Frankly, I don't care if my routine calls get dumped to voice mail from time to time.
But when the out-of-control drunk visitor of a neighbor was trying to smash through the glass door into our kitchen at 3AM a couple of years ago, and I dialed 911 to call the cops, that was NOT the time for the cell service to be spotty. I used the land line. Five nines is what we need only sometimes, but when we need it, we really need it.
And I keep a hard-wired, POTS-powered telephone plugged into a jack at all times. When the power goes out, so does the internet and the cordless phones, but how can I call the power company to report the outage? The POTS system is designed to survive most area power outages.
It's not that I don't like digital or VOIP in the backbone--the backbones are designed with high reliability. It's that last mile that nobody, least of all the providers, wants to upgrade. We have two twisted pairs from Verizon to our house, and as bad as that is, that's the only linear infrastructure feeding communication to our house, and the only service that is even available to us. Our house is 1000 feet from the road. Our internet is cellular as a backup to terrestrial microwave that relays off a neighbor's house to get line of sight to the provider's tower. That service is expensive and it provides all of 8 down and 2 up. When the power is out in the area, so is that service, because the relay point has no battery backup. That is the state of the art in this area, a mere 25-40 miles from the center of the internet and a vast number of large data centers.
We have been told we will have fiber next year. We've been told that since about 2008. Now they are saying that even when the service along the road is built, it will take 2-3 more years for them to build all the laterals. I'm not holding my breath.
When we moved here, dial-up internet was the only service offered to residential users, and most business felt lucky to get a ISDN. T1 was the business state of the art--1.5 kilobits/second down. But that was never available out here.
Starlink is so overbooked in this area the only way I can get it is using the RV service, which provides only intermittent access (though it's good when you fire it up). That means I get to pay yet another hefty monthly bill to get yet another service that is not reliable enough to allow me to stop paying for the other unreliable services I already have. Uh, no.
And I have to have some significant level of expertise to keep what we have now maintained and operational. None of this get fiber to the house and a standard router from the provider out here.
Maybe the UK is small enough that they can provide universal cell service and hard-wired data service, but that is certainly not the case in the U.S.
Rick "probably restating what's already been said in this thread" Denney
Anton D
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In the US, interesting trivia.
Our land lines are powered separately from our electrical lines, so even when the power goes out, our landlines are often still live.
They make "phone jack" chargers for your cell phone so, if you lose power, that is a potential great way to stay charged!
They can even give enough power for a small night light to give a little illumination.
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Our land lines are powered separately from our electrical lines, so even when the power goes out, our landlines are often still live.
They make "phone jack" chargers for your cell phone so, if you lose power, that is a potential great way to stay charged!
They can even give enough power for a small night light to give a little illumination.
.
Just be aware the voltage varies a lot, from something like 130 V max (near a central office (CO) relay and phone on-hook and ringing) to <12 V for a typical line away from the CO with the phone off-hook (in hand). I think it is typically around 48 V on-hook and 12 V off-hook but I have measured 80 V or so when ringing fairly often through the years. Current is also pretty low, ~100 mA IIRC.
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We used AT&T DSL/Uverse for internet and VoIP service for years, until it was clear they never intended to make good on their promise to upgrade our area from a max of 50 mbps service to fiber. They were charging a bit more than $100 per month for the cheapest basic internet + VoIP service, so I switched to Xfinity's cheapest service here, 80 mpbs for just $20 per month, kind of shockingly low as Comcast/Xfinity were at least as expensive as AT&T for many years here.
No hardware rental fees after I picked up a $40 Motorola modem capable of up to 600 mpbs, then bought an Ooma kit for around $100 that incurs only $7/month fees. Worth it to keep the number we've had for 35 years that friends, family, medical providers etc. can call when it doesn't matter if they speak to me or my wife. We also live in a spot that has iffy cell coverage. My home office is in the basement so that makes it even worse.
That $20 for 80 mbps initial deal ran out this month, and the cheapest alternative was 200 mbps for $40 that consistently provides 230 mbps. I made the switch online, and after a modem reboot initialized by Xfinity about 10 minutes after I clicked the button to finalize the change, everything was reset. I didn't even have to deal with a call center. Amazing!
For decades, AT&T was always behind in our area due to upgrade cycles. We were always at the end of those, and a neighbor who worked for them admitted they never installed enough underground copper in our area in the early 1980s. For years they would add multiplexers to allow each pair to serve 4 voice lines. There were 3 of those zip tied to a lilac bush next to the AT&T post in the easement in our backyard for years. Back in the day of dialup, you'd have your 56 kbps service suddenly turn into 14.4 kbps service when someone down the block decided to work from home and added a fax line. Nice!!!
No hardware rental fees after I picked up a $40 Motorola modem capable of up to 600 mpbs, then bought an Ooma kit for around $100 that incurs only $7/month fees. Worth it to keep the number we've had for 35 years that friends, family, medical providers etc. can call when it doesn't matter if they speak to me or my wife. We also live in a spot that has iffy cell coverage. My home office is in the basement so that makes it even worse.
That $20 for 80 mbps initial deal ran out this month, and the cheapest alternative was 200 mbps for $40 that consistently provides 230 mbps. I made the switch online, and after a modem reboot initialized by Xfinity about 10 minutes after I clicked the button to finalize the change, everything was reset. I didn't even have to deal with a call center. Amazing!
For decades, AT&T was always behind in our area due to upgrade cycles. We were always at the end of those, and a neighbor who worked for them admitted they never installed enough underground copper in our area in the early 1980s. For years they would add multiplexers to allow each pair to serve 4 voice lines. There were 3 of those zip tied to a lilac bush next to the AT&T post in the easement in our backyard for years. Back in the day of dialup, you'd have your 56 kbps service suddenly turn into 14.4 kbps service when someone down the block decided to work from home and added a fax line. Nice!!!
Yep, but but ....
"Private IP networks can be just as relaible as TDM networks once were." :
1) what does "private" mean in this context? as eg opposed to public? why is just private networks more reliable? The access IP network may be called public, but the transport and core networks ..... aren't those private?
2) analog telephones, aka POTS, were not TDM (time division multiplex). consequently, access networks were not all TDM. Some access networks were TDM, like ISDN and GSM, but ISDN was not much of a success (apart from Germany and Japan).
3) "reliable" is rather blunt. Circuit Switched (CS) networks are deterministic which IP networks are not; CS networks also has a given bandwidth which IP doesn't. Thus, with VoIP (Voice over IP) you may get connected, but maybe only with a unusuable bandwidth. Thus the user may regard bandwidth as a part of reliability.
"As old age and weather kills off copper this transition is unavoidable."
Agree that the transition is unavoidable, but in what way does weather and old age kill copper?
One can argue that cables exposed to weather (UV, wind, rain) lives a hard life, but this is the same for exposed fibers. The killer is a) costs (copper is expensive), b) transition to digital and c) low bandwidth (copper compared to eg fibre). Added to this is the general transition in telecom, where the old networks does not get the same maintenance as before (which admittedly is a kind of age issue).
A bit of nitpicking maybe, as I do agrre with ~95% of your post.
I am currently on day four of a power outage and have 7 hours of power from yesterday on my PowerWall and it is darker and raining now. Hope to get some sun this afternoon to recharge it. Neighbors have lost their cell phones but my landline and DSL have been alive and well so I type this and send this message. I will keep my land line as long as I can.
DonR
Major Contributor
Another individual who avoided disaster by being prepared. Well done and good luck.
mjgraves
Member
Background. I spent the first half of my career in broadcast media production and technology. The second half in networking and IP telephony.
ISDN was widely deployed in the US in speciality applications, where real-time assured bandwidth was required. For example, studio-to-transmitter links for radio stations, or links to remote voice over studios. US & Canadian Telcos didn't really have any interest in selling it. So they let it languish.
ISDN is still in service in much of Europe. I have friends in the UK who still have it.
GSM is most of thought of as one maner of delivering 2G generation wireless mobile service. GSM is also a legacy audio codec, once common in VoIP, but long supplanted by newer technologies.
No network is perfect. Gear fails. The big thing about TDM networks is that they were designed to deliver assured performance. A T-1 link provides an assured 1.54 Mbps link. It's not shared, so not oversubscribed. It's not subject to congestion.
For many years a partner and I had a podcast on all things voip. One of our frequent contributors noted that a TDM link did not require packetization. Nor did TDM switches perform much buffering. They were designed for hard real-time applications. Thus it was possible for TDM to deliver lower latency than similar IP connections.
The public internet is "best effort." If a peering point has a bad day, the resulting network congestion may be felt by any traffic transiting that peer.
Network providers have long offered IP based networks that were wholly separate from the public internet. Enterprises typically use these when they need high reliability, defined performance links between sites. Of course, they pay for this.
From the time that the Pubic Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) went digital (1950s & 60s) it was based upon TDM trunks. A POTS line is the analog manifestation of one 56k bearer channel. That's half an ISDN connection (2B+D) Or 1/24th of a T-1.
ISDN was widely deployed in the US in speciality applications, where real-time assured bandwidth was required. For example, studio-to-transmitter links for radio stations, or links to remote voice over studios. US & Canadian Telcos didn't really have any interest in selling it. So they let it languish.
ISDN is still in service in much of Europe. I have friends in the UK who still have it.
GSM is most of thought of as one maner of delivering 2G generation wireless mobile service. GSM is also a legacy audio codec, once common in VoIP, but long supplanted by newer technologies.
No network is perfect. Gear fails. The big thing about TDM networks is that they were designed to deliver assured performance. A T-1 link provides an assured 1.54 Mbps link. It's not shared, so not oversubscribed. It's not subject to congestion.
For many years a partner and I had a podcast on all things voip. One of our frequent contributors noted that a TDM link did not require packetization. Nor did TDM switches perform much buffering. They were designed for hard real-time applications. Thus it was possible for TDM to deliver lower latency than similar IP connections.
The public internet is "best effort." If a peering point has a bad day, the resulting network congestion may be felt by any traffic transiting that peer.
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Of course, “packetization” happens at multiple levels in the protocol stack, so it’s hard to avoid. But the main reason to packetize is to enable packet-switched routing, where each link is devoted to the packet it is presently serving. That allows each packet to find its own way, provide its own error correction, and be reassembled in the proper order (and all of that is done by other protocol layers). That’s a lot of overhead, so the raw capacity has to be sufficient to accommodate the presented packet traffic. Packet-switched networks become stochastic like the road networks we drive on (which is what I do for a living).
But at the data-link layer, even circuit-switching is packetized into frames. The difference is that the demand-capacity relationship is deterministic, and that’s what guarantees throughput. And the overhead doesn’t need to include the end-to-end error correction and packet reassembly used for IP-based traffic. Endpoint VOIP packetizes for IP networks and therefore requires all that TCP/IP overhead. And some people protect their internet access via VPNs, which adds a whole raft of overhead at the application layer.
My internet comes via two tin cans and a string, so everything that adds overhead gets consideration. So many of these services assume many tens of megabits/second of reliable capacity, but that is not the lived reality for many even in the first world.
Rick “still uses satellite for TV service” Denney
But at the data-link layer, even circuit-switching is packetized into frames. The difference is that the demand-capacity relationship is deterministic, and that’s what guarantees throughput. And the overhead doesn’t need to include the end-to-end error correction and packet reassembly used for IP-based traffic. Endpoint VOIP packetizes for IP networks and therefore requires all that TCP/IP overhead. And some people protect their internet access via VPNs, which adds a whole raft of overhead at the application layer.
My internet comes via two tin cans and a string, so everything that adds overhead gets consideration. So many of these services assume many tens of megabits/second of reliable capacity, but that is not the lived reality for many even in the first world.
Rick “still uses satellite for TV service” Denney
I just ordered Starlink and it is supposed to be delivered next week. It wasn't available here in Southeast Oklahoma the last time I checked and now it is.
The best available internet here is 25mb DSL from Windstream. The local cable company's version of "high speed" internet is 512kb.
I've had landline service since 1980 and still have it because it was required for DSL service. I will actually be saving money going to Starlink's $120 per month plan. My Windstream service had gradually increased to $125 a month.
So much faster internet and I save $5 a month. Sounds great to me.
The best available internet here is 25mb DSL from Windstream. The local cable company's version of "high speed" internet is 512kb.
I've had landline service since 1980 and still have it because it was required for DSL service. I will actually be saving money going to Starlink's $120 per month plan. My Windstream service had gradually increased to $125 a month.
So much faster internet and I save $5 a month. Sounds great to me.
Those were the days...
The Article That Inspired Steve Jobs: “Secrets of the Little Blue Box”
In 1971, Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article for Esquire about a loose confederation of proto-hackers who built devices—little blue boxes—th ...
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I have this repeating problem in my rural cabin. When the internet is down, I have to drive quite a few miles to get any cell signal and report it. They are always like "OK, can you tell me what your router lights are doing?'....No matter how many times I explain that if I'm talking to them when I don't have service, I'm miles away from home, they want to take me through the crtl-alt-del playbook.
Furthermore, their snooperware that can allegedly see if my gateway is connected is giving false results. Or they are just saying yes for the heck of it.
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