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My landline here near Seattle is around $60/mo. I don't know why... back when I first set up a land line here, it was $25/mo. The quality of the line has deteri

My landline here near Seattle is around $60/mo. I don't know why... back when I first set up a land line here, it was $25/mo. The quality of the line has deteriorated so bad, there's noise on it, they won't bother to fix it. A few years ago the line had a physical break somewhere between my house and the DSLAM. They switched me to another pair of copper. I have 3 pairs of copper coming into my house, but now one is totally dead, and I will never be able to use it again. Apparently our street is at full capacity and they have no plans to repair or add more lines. The other problem with land lines is the amount of robocalls you get on them. The phone companies offer no way to truly block them. Every blocking service they offer relies on Caller ID, and with the robocallers spoofing Caller ID and randomizing numbers, the blocking is totally ineffective. I literally get 5-8 calls a day. They used to offer a call blocking service, where a machine would answer, and tell you to hang up, or press 1 if you wanted to connect. This service no longer exists, and the other call (ineffective) blocking services (they offer at least 3 or 4) each cost about $6/mo each. My belief is that they are making tons of money allowing unauthenticated calls into their network, that they have no desire to actually block any calls. Also the relatively small number of landlines left leaves a rather small audience of people to complain. So most people don't even know this is a problem.

BuckRogers 5y ago
>My belief is that they are making tons of money allowing unauthenticated calls into their network, that they have no desire to actually block any calls. I've been waiting for that to happen on cell and landline numbers. Authentication for the party calling. At this point, there's no other option than legislation. Just mandate how common voice services like landline and cellular operate their business. It needs to happen otherwise the only solution is to give them up and only do our own outbound calling, never to actually receive any calls at all. Other options like blocking all calls from non-contacts is risky because a call from a delivery driver or babysitter in an emergency will be missed. It's about the only option though for enduser today.

BuckRogers 5y ago

>My belief is that they are making tons of money allowing unauthenticated calls into their network, that they have no desire to actually block any calls. I've been waiting for that to happen on cell and landline numbers. Authentication for the party calling. At this point, there's no other option than legislation. Just mandate how common voice services like landline and cellular operate their business. It needs to happen otherwise the only solution is to give them up and only do our own outbound calling, never to actually receive any calls at all. Other options like blocking all calls from non-contacts is risky because a call from a delivery driver or babysitter in an emergency will be missed. It's about the only option though for enduser today.