| Message-ID: <b62Gt20230211184619@telecom-digest.org>
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2023 18:46:19 -0500
From: Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com>
Subject: I'm ditching the cable company - someday
Richard called me on Wednesday morning, and said he'd be right over:
he was at the Central Office, a couple of miles away from my house.
Our dog went crazy a few minutes later, and I told Richard that “He’s
harmless!” while he pulled boxes out of his truck.
I hadn’t been able to figure out where the old drop wire came in: the
fiber drop for the cable modem descends from the pole, runs over my
driveway, and attaches to the eave at the corner on the South side of
the house. There was, however, no sign of a mounting point for a
telephone drop wire.
I showed Richard the downstairs wall where the RG-59 coax feeds come
out of the box - there’s a coaxial TV feed in almost every room,
unused for all the years I've been here, because I’ve never thought
that satellite TV was worth the money, and the two dishes that were
put up to provide it are still attached to the mounts at the front of
my house.. I have a cable modem, that provides me with a limited
Internet connection which, by the good graces of the press contact at
the North Carolina Governor’s office, allows me ssh access to the
Telecom Digest servers. The new owner of the cable tv company cut that
off the day after they took over, and I had to borrow access to a VPN,
which I now pay Alexis Rosen at Panix to keep available.
The VPN allwoed me to publish the Digest, during the week or two that
it took the press contact at the North Carolina Governor’s office to
convince the new cable tv owner to stop blocking port 22. I figured
they would start up again in another few days, which is what Comcast
used to do when I lived near Boston, but port 22 is still open, so I’m
assuming that they don’t think I’m worth the trouble.
No complaint to the Governor’s office goes unpunished, however: my
Callcentric phone number - it’s a VoIP connection - stopped working
back around September. I’ve already posted about that fiasco, and the
VoIP ports are still blocked, after multiple complaints and calls from
oh-so-sincere-and-knowledgeable flacks who told me that the problem
was "CGNAT" and that I should pay for a fixed IP address - only $30
per month extra! - to "cure" the problem. The oh-so-sincere-and-
knowledgeable flacks were, for some reason, unable to give me a reason
why the cable tv company customers who purchase the VoIP phone
offering made by the cable tv company weren’t required to have a fixed
IP address, but they promised to do some research and get back to
me. That was, you guessed it, around September.
The Cisco 303 VoIP instrument has been sititng on the desk in the
spare bedroom, where my wife has her computer, and she plays Solitaire
for hours on end, with a special mouse that I bought so she could
still use the machine. Her hands shake too much for her to dial a cell
phone, but the buttons on the Cisco phone are still big enough for her
to use, and I want her to have a way to call 911 if there’s an
emergency. I had bought it on Ebay when I got my extension from
Hamshack Hotline, which connects me to other ham operators through an
Asterisk PBX in the basement of a ham who lives in Massachusetts. I
got one for my brother, too, since he doesn’t like to talk on his
cellphone, and the model 303 VoIP phone has three lines available, so
I put in the Callcentric service so we’d have a "home" number.
My house is too far down in the hollow for me to see the mountaintops
where Skyrunner has their head ends, so I can’t bypass the cable tv
company with MMDS service. There are no other cable tv companies with
service up here in the hills, even though the fiber connection the
current pirates use was installed at taxpayer expense and is available
to competitors.
That left Frontier Communications, the ILEC for this area, but they
don’t offer any fiber service. I was talking to another Ham Radio
operator who’s in my club, and he was telling me how he got a VPN
going through a linode machine, allowing him to bypass the port blocks
of the cable tv company to provide Echolink service to our club’s
repeater network, and the subject of VoIP came up: I told him that my
brother’s club has VoIP phones they use at emergency deployments,
connected via microwave links to Asterisk boxes at their EOC, so that
the Incident Commanders and politicians at a disaster site can use
the interfaces they’re familiar with. I could, I suppose, figure out
how to get the same VPN going, although I’d have to get a Raspberry Pi
box going to do the routing, unless I chose to just use my Linux box
all the time.
My friend asked if I could get DSL, and I realized that I hadn’t
considered it, even though I used it for years up north. My wife
enjoys Netflix movies when she’s not playing Solitaire, and I hadn’t
known that there are DSL services available with speeds rivaling what
the cable tv company claims to provide.
I called Frontier the next day, and the Service Rep told me that I
could get a home phone bundled with DSL service for less than
Callcentric’s service costs, but her computer didn’t show if she could
sell me ADSL, so she put in “a ticket” to have it checked out, and
promised me a callback.
Frontier rang my cell phone on Monday - it uses a “WIFI” connection
when I'm at home, since the cell towers are too far away - and we
spoke on what is obviously a VoIP connection - funny how companies
with expert lawyers don’t have to worry about port blockage - and I
placed an order for both a landline and ADSL service.
Richard asked to see the electrical panel, and I took him to the back
room next to the furnace, where the Generac switch and the main
electric panel are, and he showed me the “Demarcation Point” box, on
the wall next to the electric panel, with an underground feedline that
apparently runs under my driveway instead of over it. He found the one
“JK” lead that goes to the phone outlet upstairs in my living room,
alongside four or five others which used to be cut down on a
“protection” block that was, surprisingly, on the customer side of the
demarc. We went upstairs, where the cable modem and my Asus router sit
on the shelf over the chairs where we sit and watch the news from the
CBS streaming service. The end of the wire had a four-prong jack on
it, and Richard swapped it out for an RJ-14, and asked if I wanted to
keep the old one. I told Richard that the Smithsonian was looking for
it, and that he should send it in and claim the prize, and we shared a
laugh and he connected the DSL modem along with a low-pass filter for
the POTS line. I plugged in an old “Trimline” type of phone I’ve had
in a box for years, amazed that the dial tone wasn’t just another VoIP
connection, since Frontier charges about $25 less per month for the
phone line when it’a part of the bundle.
Righard told me that the DSL I was getting requires two pairs of wire,
since the speed I had ordered uses two “bonded” DSL connections, and
he went off to arrange for the correct pairs to appear on the cable
that runs under my driveway. I made myself a sandwich, and waited.
After a couple of hours, Richard drove back up our dirt road and
delivered the bad news: the DSL modem wouldn’t sync for more than a
few seconds, and I'm about 13 kilofeet away from the CO, so the
“ticket” the Sales Rep had called in should have come back marked ‘Do
not offer’ instead of ‘OK to provide.’
I felt bad for the guy - he’d done the work, and even laughed at my
jokes and anecdotes about Feature Group A connections back in the bad
old days - so I told him I’d take the telephone line even if I
couldn’t get the DSL service. He deserved to get credit for the
upsale, I figured, and he told me that Frontier will be installing
fiber next year, so in the meantime I can get a phone with really
big buttons and a headset amplifier so that my wife can have a
familiar look and feel.
I changed the Telecom Digest FAQ so that it sort-of shows the new
number if you look hard, and shrugged my shoulders and cancelled the
Callcentric line effectvie at the end of the month. I could have
dropped it last year, but I've had it forwarded to my cell phone,
since I like the way it keeps vendors from sending me text messages on
my ‘landline’ number.
I called the new POTS number from my cellphone - Callcentric is a
non-portable provider, according to Frontier - and it rang once and
tripped and all I heard was crackling. If I picked up the phone
quickly, I could talk on it, with a lot of static, so I realized that
the “protector” on my side of the demarc had probably punched through
years ago, and was now causing ring-trip-idle faults.
Drat. I left a note at the CO, so that Richard won’t get dinged for a
failed install, and I’m hoping that he or one of the other techs will
see it and come by to swap out the carbons for me.
Sigh: I really wanted that DSL line. At least my wife can call 911,
even though the “Trimline” type instrument is so light that it comes
off the desk when she picks up the handset. It’ll work in an
emergency, and in the meantime I’ve been asking around for spare “big
button” desk sets.
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