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Right. Forget about that whole thing about landline phones being governed by laws that regulate how they are run, how long they're permitted to be down, etc for

Right. Forget about that whole thing about landline phones being governed by laws that regulate how they are run, how long they're permitted to be down, etc for people's safety and ability to contact emergency services and force everyone to switch to VOIP which is run as an information service with basically no regulation so your home phone line can go down for days at a time and you can't do anything about it.

mindslight 12y ago
And don't forget unbundling. CLEC provided DSL is one of the few remaining competitive options. - happy customer of Omsoft/Sonic.net
- JohnTHaller 12y ago
  Unfortunately, you're at the mercy of the end provider for technical expertise, in my case Verizon. I tried DSL from another provider a while back. Of my 30 day trial, it was down for 7 days because a Verizon tech randomly unplugged something in our neighborhood box.
  - mindslight 12y ago
    Well not all levels, just the line itself. So you do escape the gimmicky billing / traffic restrictions / artificially-constrained connection rates / horrible support. But yeah, you mainly have to hope things just work and the telco is able to leave the circuit alone. (and that they aren't still petty about having to open up their lines. although if that's a problem, why would you want to encourage it by giving in?) I've got this problem that seemingly every 4-6 months, lots of line errors/disconnects develop (consistent over days). Call up the ISP, and when they run a test, the line goes back to normal. Last time they even sent an ATT (nee SBC) lineman out anyway, but of course his test looked great too. Apparently you can pay Sis Bell $1k or so for "line conditioning". If it gets worse, my plan is to just get the ISP to provision a second circuit and then cancel the first. But overall, it's certainly much less stress than dealing with the cable company or telco directly.
deleted 12y ago
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mindslight 12y ago

And don't forget unbundling. CLEC provided DSL is one of the few remaining competitive options. - happy customer of Omsoft/Sonic.net

JohnTHaller 12y ago
Unfortunately, you're at the mercy of the end provider for technical expertise, in my case Verizon. I tried DSL from another provider a while back. Of my 30 day trial, it was down for 7 days because a Verizon tech randomly unplugged something in our neighborhood box.
- mindslight 12y ago
  Well not all levels, just the line itself. So you do escape the gimmicky billing / traffic restrictions / artificially-constrained connection rates / horrible support. But yeah, you mainly have to hope things just work and the telco is able to leave the circuit alone. (and that they aren't still petty about having to open up their lines. although if that's a problem, why would you want to encourage it by giving in?) I've got this problem that seemingly every 4-6 months, lots of line errors/disconnects develop (consistent over days). Call up the ISP, and when they run a test, the line goes back to normal. Last time they even sent an ATT (nee SBC) lineman out anyway, but of course his test looked great too. Apparently you can pay Sis Bell $1k or so for "line conditioning". If it gets worse, my plan is to just get the ISP to provision a second circuit and then cancel the first. But overall, it's certainly much less stress than dealing with the cable company or telco directly.

deleted 12y ago

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