N3OGH
Bear patrol must be working like a charm
Premium
join:2003-11-11
Philly burbs
 ·Verizon FIOS
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| reply to thegoldwater
Re: No surprises
said by thegoldwater  :
Besides, phones suck anyway. Too many jackasses in this country feel that my having a phone number gives them the right to bother me.
AMEN!!!! |
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Sly
Premium
join:2004-02-20
Johnson City, TN
clubs:
 ·Packet8
·Callcentric
 ·Comcast Formerly ..
| reply to Marilla
It was the same call. It was Sprint calling me 2 times every week to try to sell me new features on my land line. I got so tired of their crap. I used my cell for long distance...
When I switched over to P8, I called Sprint to cancel. When they asked me why, I told them that I had all the features they charge extra for plus unlimited calling US/Canada for $20.55 including taxes. The operator did not believe me and still tried to sell me long distance service. The only long distance I want from them is me, being physically distant from the entire Sprint racket.
 There, I can roll my eyes too... |
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WhyADuck
Premium
join:2003-03-05
2 edits | reply to Marilla
He's not talking about CO's, he's talking about remote terminals (well, actually he wasn't - a previous post was) - basically, the point at which a fiber optic feed from the central office is broken out into copper pairs to serve a small community or a neighborhood. These remote terminals are powered by commercial power and usually have backup batteries, but not generators (if they really need to they can hook up a portable generator, but they don't really have enough of those to go around in a major outage).
We have one of these in our neighborhood and a few years ago we had a prolonged power outage. The phones did stay up during the outage, but the next night the whole village lost phone service. Turned out that whatever caused the power outage (and I really don't remember at this point) not only tripped a circuit breaker inside the remote terminal, preventing the commercial power from being re-applied, but also damaged the charging circuit, so after a day or so the batteries were completely run down and everyone lost dial tone. So, because it was close to getting dark, the phone company guys drove a few miles to another remote terminal, swiped the charging circuity out of it, and installed it in the remote terminal with the dead batteries. They then left the whole mess for the daytime crew to clean up the next day. Anyway I'd say were were without service for around six to eight hours, and somehow we all survived.
Interestingly, there was one pay phone in the village (that I know of) that still worked, presumably because they had left that on one of the original copper pairs coming direct from the C.O. It got a lot of use that night as everyone was coming to call repair service - at one point when we had repair on the line, we were just handing off the phone from one person to the next, so that each in turn could report their specific outage (since we did not at that point know what the problem was). |
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SquareSlinky
Premium
join:2004-05-25
Tampa, FL
·Verizon FIOS
·ViaTalk
| reply to Marilla
They have an option with Vonage. If your internet fails there is a auto forward feature to another number. I have mine go to my cell. This is the first outage I have had with them in a 1.5 years. It drizzles here and my landline cuts out do to a short someplace in the line. Now I have to have Wire waste of money Maintenance on it, so they will fix it when it happens. |
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icecold976
join:2002-07-20
Orlando, FL
 ·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| reply to Marilla
You want to hear something funny. Back in 99 when we were doing a CO office upgrade, the ENTIRE phone switched crashed. We were able to get 1/2 of the switch operating again within 15 minutes, but being that the CO was the central hub for E911, and the half of the switch that was down was the part that handled the E911 calls, it was a nightmare.
E911 service was down for 48 hours. Plain 911 service was down for the same amount of time. All I can say was the fine involved was huge. It was a software flaw that caused the cascading outage.
Some people didn't have phone service the entire 48 hrs either.
SO nothing is perfect. The batteries in the phone office only last so long, and the diesel fuel will only hold out so long.
VOIP isn't a full telecom service yet, so its going to have issues. I remember Packet8 having numerous outages lasting entire weekends, I have an outage lasting a few hours with Vonage and its big news... LOL
-Ice |
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Phil
Rojo Sol
Premium
join:2001-06-11
Camarillo, CA
·Verizon FIOS
| reply to Sly
said by Sly :
Yea, I used to bend over and take it from Sprint. With the constant AC hum and telemarketer calls twice a week, I had a land line.
No, they are not 100% reliable. In fact, they suck ass.
No there about 99.99% reliable. I base this on about 5 years of landline service. As a matter of fact, I can't remember a single time I was unable to use my landline in those 5 years. I took away 0.01% because nothing is perfect.
--
fRiTz+Nomad+ |
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sirsloop
Premium
join:2004-02-18
New York, NY | reply to Sly
When was the last time your cell phone or internet connection dropped for 2 hours? Probably a lot more often then 18 months! |
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south1178
Buckeye Stangs
Premium
join:2001-12-17
Cleveland, OH
clubs:
·WOW Internet and C..
·AT&T Midwest
| reply to Jigsaw
said by Jigsaw :
said by Sly :
Take it with a grain of salt. My cell phone is a lot more problematic than my VoIP line. Some people freak out when they don't have phone service for a minute. I don't know of any phone service that is 100% reliable.
The Blackout last year in Cleveland Killed our power for almost a day.Yet land line Phones were still working
Yea and My cell phone still worked as well...Verizon
--
"Proud to be American" |
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hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH
·Time Warner Cable
·buckeye cable
| When it happened one of my former employees called meabout 20 minutes after the spike and said "we just got our phone service back and we have a problem, one surge is fried black" i laughed and said okay no big deal as long as computers worked..and still talked on the cell phone...
office lost phone service during any thunder/lighting storm or like that for long periods of time due to the phone system was on a digital line from SBC. T1 didnt drop though LOL.
And cell worked great. |
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tyscoj
join:2002-06-17
Fort Pierce, FL
| reply to Ben67
said by Ben67 :
said by LordMalak :
Ever heard of LANDLINE??
Ever hear of Alltel? At my prior address my Alltel landline service went down quite often for a while(the SLC/RT would crash leaving the whole area without service). This usually happened on the weekend so they wouldn't fix it till Monday and if Monday was a holiday it would be Tuesday. When I asked them what someone w/o a cellphone should do in an emergency they said they would have to use someone Else's phone that worked. How nice.
You should have documented this and taken it to the PUC. There are certain requirements that have to be met by the telephone company, otherwise they start getting fined. In most areas a phone should be fixed within 24 hours...but others may be more lax.
Now that I think of it...Comcast really didnt meet alot of thier MTTR's there either...it was a pain to try to get them to fix a customers phone. |
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maxxxpower
@optonline.net | reply to Marilla
I've had vonage since they started. Never had an outage that Im aware of. LOL damn. Now I just jinxed myself |
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rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | reply to Slidetbone
People used to say green-screens were the "old reliable". Ask how many people still think green-screen terminals are the cat's meow. |
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