Cogeco → Re: Locked in Modem

There's a law that says they have to put a lock on a cable that can be cut with a dull butter knife?

That's funny.

Mike

(You wouldn't happen to have a link to that law by any chance would you?)

I believe they just need to make a minimal amount of effort to secure the modem to the cable to make moving it from one location to another more difficult than just unscrewing the cable. That's it.

»www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/INFO_ ··· 1035.htm

Cogeco is offering phone service as "Traditional wireline telephone 9-1-1 service" and must offer the service from a fixed address. On top of that, occasionally people die from incorrect 911 information. So while there's no direct law that says that the eMTA must be locked in place, it's certainly prudent to do so

No law. A lock. To mitigate liability.

Despite whatever marketing jargon they conjure up, they do NOT offer traditional wireline phone service (aka POTS) nor traditional 911 (which is only available on POTS).

Cogeco is VoIP and e911. Hence the disclaimer in the Terms of Service.

Mike

For all intents and purposes, it is the same "traditional" 911 you're used to and works the exact same way. You dial 911, the call is routed to the dispatch centre associated with the rate centre assigned to your phone service and the dispatcher than receives the call with all the same ANI information they would receive if you were calling from a POTS phone. You, the 911 dispatcher and anyone else involved won't know one lick of difference.

This is why they don't want you moving the modem, because they tie ANI information to your account and if you move the modem somewhere else the information 911 receives won't be correct. Furthermore, if you move it to an entirely different city (or, in most cases in Ontario, region) you'll call the 911 centre associated with your region even though you may be physically in an area that uses a different centre.

You might want to brush up on your definition of e911, because e911 is used equally on POTS landlines just as much as it is used on cell phones, VoIP phones and whatever else is out there. e911 is the method of routing a call and delivering the information. Those green or blue address posts outside of homes in rural areas is part of the e911 project, and those numbers sometimes differ from a physical address and are used strictly for emergency service location. It has nothing to do with VoIP, cell phones or anything like that. The only reason there is no disclaimer with POTS is because there is a physical copper pair assigned to each address and there's no way to disconnect that pair and move it to another home. If there was, they'd be subject to the same caveats as anything else. Just because the copper line is fixed does not make the 911 service any more reliable.

Furthermore, it is also worth pointing out that cable phone services are no more "VoIP" than Bell. The call is handled on a private IP network that doesn't touch the Internet. It may interest you to know that Bell does the exact same thing with calls that leave your local switch. If you have a 905-688 number in St. Catharines based out of the King Street CO and call a 905-937 number which is based out of the Linwell CO, that call is converted to IP transit between King Street and Linwell. "VoIP" is with us everywhere using every method of communication, and there is zero way around it.

That lock does not make the phone service non-nomadic. Its nomadic. It can be moved. Period.

In traditional 911 only the caller's phone number is passed with the call, everything else is done via PSAP lookup. In E911, the address is provided with the call. Required for VoIP. Required for Cogeco.

All that said?

The devil is in the power failure. POTS = no 4 hour battery required.

There is nothing traditional about Cogeco's phone offering. It's VoIP, despite the semantics.

We can agree to disagree on this if you insist.

Mike

I never said it was traditional. I said for all intents and purposes it functioned no differently than a traditional phone service.

If you consider Cogeco to be "VoIP" than Bell is, too. To claim one is and the other isn't is an exercise in hypocrisy, and not something I will agree to disagree on.

To say they "work the same for all intents and purposes" is just plain ridiculous, and totally misleading.

Bell = POTS.
Cogeco = VoIP.

It's not hypocrisy. It's reality.

That's why OP is inquiring about the lock on his device - which I would recommend he NOT tamper with as it may actually damage the, you know, VoIP ATA / Modem.



Mike

No, it's not. Like I said, if you continue to say that Cogeco is VoIP while Bell is not, you're engaging in nothing short of hypocrisy for no reason other than failing to understand what each of these things are.

Both services involve copper, and both involve IP transit (most likely using carrier-grade G.711) on a private non-Internet network. The only difference is that the copper involved in most, but not all, Bell's services is longer.

Furthermore, I fully expect you to call Bell's service in fibre-fed neighbourhoods (like new developments in Thorold) a VoIP service as well, since it functions identically to Cogeco's, including a conversion to IP transit on the customer's premises rather than at the switch and a battery backup. So I'm assuming that you're going to say that those customers have no choice but to use VoIP and would never get reliable 911, right?

Cogeco and Bell do work the same way - user picks up phone, which is connected to copper, which is then converted to IP and sent over a private network which is then converted back to copper which is connected to the other end. Where and how they achieve that and how much copper is involved is irrelevant. Stop fooling yourself that there's anything special about POTS. There isn't.

And all of this is helping the OP how?

So that the OP knows that no matter what kind of service he has - be it POTS or cable - he doesn't need to worry about his house burning down because 911 is somehow less reliable, and the lock on the modem is a product of that.

That good enough?