No digital telephone for us.

[Jon P. Inghram]

The cable guys’ just left, it seems they can't install without a modern telephone network interface box on the back of our apartment. It's a WW2 aircraft factory housing quadplex; the phone setup in the basement is best described as "frightening." Since we have cable internet it was really gonna save us some money over SWB, but oh well.

[Gurm]

I considered that here.

But, judging by how often the cable TV and modem are out, I would in NO WAY want my phone to be that unreliable.

Additionally, Verizon now offers a service here called "Veriations", which gets me unlimited calls anywhere in the US, Canada, and Mexico... for one set monthly fee. $50/mo. and I'm DONE. Period. Finito. Finished. That's IT.

- Gurm

[Jon P. Inghram]

I went down and closely studied the nightmarish pile of jumbled wires.

No fancy interface boxes here, just the phone trunks coming out of a hole in the in the wall of the basement from an underground cable, going to a metal box with lots of thumbscrew terminals, each individual wire going to a terminal in said box, and then a couple wires from each phoneline in the apartment also attaching to said terminals. The only way they could make it more primitive/simple would be if the wires from the trunk were directly attached to the phonelines with twist on connectors. And of course no labels or indications as to which apartment each line goes to, and since the basement is only under the middle of the center two apartments, I'd have to crawl though a rather unpleasant looking crawlspace to see which one is mine. Heck, when we first moved in and had the phone service activated our lines were crosswired with our neighbors, and the poor phone repair guy had a terrible time getting it straightened out.

[Technoid]

well, yeah that resembles some of the mess I've seen

[Kurt]

they don't like using labels here either...much better waste time with their own equipment to find out which line they're looking for...

[Greebe]

Kurt it's always preferable to get it right the first time and ring the lines out. Better that than trusting a label being correct and screwing the pooch.

To "ring" the lines out you would need something like the industry standard, Progressive's Toner (M#77M, ~$40) and Progressive's Inductive Amplifier (Probe) (M#200EP, 200B etc, ~<$75) and a decient Buttset (~>$200)

Tho prefered, ADSL Buttsets are extremely expensive starting at ~$1500!

Shame I don't live closer Jon or I'd slap in a new termination block and splitter in a couple 3 hours for cheap (being a MURCer does have it's privledges

[Jon P. Inghram]

We went over to Cox today and tried to talk to a tech or an installer, but they WOULDN'T LET US! At least we had the pleasure of watching them go "Uhh... err..." uncomfortably when we told them to cancel the cable modem account too. Switching to the cable telephone service (it uses VoIP tech) would have saved us $20 compared to keeping SBC telephone service and Cox HSI, but I guess they didn't want the business.

[Dr Mordrid]

We have Comcast telephone service and it's been great. In fact it's out far less often than SWB/Ameritech's service ever was (basically about every hard rain) and costs about 2/3 as much

Dr. Mordrid

[Kurt]

Originally posted by Greebe
Kurt it's always preferable to get it right the first time and ring the lines out. Better that than trusting a label being correct and screwing the pooch.

To "ring" the lines out you would need something like the industry standard, Progressive's Toner (M#77M, ~$40) and Progressive's Inductive Amplifier (Probe) (M#200EP, 200B etc, ~<$75) and a decient Buttset (~>$200)

Tho prefered, ADSL Buttsets are extremely expensive starting at ~$1500!

Shame I don't live closer Jon or I'd slap in a new termination block and splitter in a couple 3 hours for cheap (being a MURCer does have it's privledges

Sure thing but it does help the ones not equipped...in this case, the actual owner of said line

The other problems would be that 1/ you can't trust your average telco technician with labeling things right, 2/ funny ppl changing the labels. (you could add 3/ labels fall by themselves or rot or...)