I want to turn off my POTS line
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 18 Aug 2004 05:01:44 GMT
I want to dump my analog phone line at home. I’m just not sure if I can.
This has been building for a while. I’ve been using Asterisk for over 4 months. At this point, my home POTS line is both the most expensive and least reliable part of the whole system. It’s currently costing me over $33/month, and that’s just for incoming calls and outgoing local calls. I’ve been sending long distance calls to NuFone for over 4 months, and they’ve only charged me $10 for the privilege. That’s less then my average monthly long-distance bill used to be.
According to Asterisk’s logs, I average around 400 minutes of incoming and outgoing local phone service per month. At $0.02/minute, that’s only $8/month. I’m paying that much just for Caller ID on my POTS line. If I could drop the POTS line, then I could save around $25/month. That’d be a nice addition to my DSL speed, or it’d cover cellular data usage with a Treo on most networks.
Besides simple cost, I’m just generally unhappy with telcos. Today’s big point came from Telepocalypse. Plan on phone line charges going up another $4/month in the near future. That, coupled with my Verizon DSL upgrade saga, really makes me want to dump Verizon altogether. See TeleTruth’s “dirty phone bill” for another quick take on what’s hiding in a typical phone bill.
Unfortunately, I just don’t see how I can do it for a reasonable cost. I’m in Comcast cable-modem territory, but they want $50/month for service for non-subscribers, and they don’t offer static addresses with residential service. They might offer them with business services, but those start at $95 and go up. I’d be amazed if I could get a static address (and the ability to run servers) out of them for under $150/month. I don’t seem to have any alternatives for home broadband; it’s either Verizon DSL or Comcast cable modem. Or a T1, but that’s way more then I’m willing to spend.
There does seem to be one way out–I could move the mail and web server out of the house and into a colo server. Several providers advertise dedicated P4 boxes with reasonable amounts of RAM, disk, and network connectivity for around $50/month. I could conceivably drop the DSL and POTS line and move to a $50 server and $50 cable modem, and come out slightly ahead, but I don’t see it being worth the trouble, even if I’d have 4x the bandwidth.
Finally, even ignoring all of the connectivity problems, I’m still left with one problem–how do I dial 911 without a POTS line? 90% of the time, we have a cell phone handy, but they’re never really handy in emergencies. I haven’t seen anyone discuss how to dial 911 is a pure roll-your-own VoIP system. Do you just redirect it to some local phone number? Or do you just leave the POTS line plugged in and trust that they’ll leave it live for 911?
I’m pretty sure that the landline is required to be left live for 911 purposes, and I keep a phone plugged in, just in case of a major emergency.
My main service, though, goes through Vonage, and I have dialed 911 through it. It routes to the local “we don’t know exactly where you are” emergency number, which manually connects us to the people we need.
Garrett–According to Google, you’re in downtown Bothell, around 20 blocks south of us. Who are you using for connectivity at home? Comcast?
I need to ask more of my neighbors what they’re using. There has to be a choice other then Verizon and Comcast.
Thanks for the 911 info. It shouldn’t be too hard to call the local public safety non-emergency number and ask them what to do. That’s the usual recommendation on the Asterisk mailing list, even though it doesn’t come up very often.
There are several VOIP services that are planning to roll out real 911 service soon. (e.g. Vonage as said they are doing this soon) So its very likely that sometime in the next 6 to 12 months you will have the choice of several different VOIP services that can both port your existing phone number to VOIP, and provide real 911 (we know where you are) service.
In the meantime, some locales have special tariffs for minimal POTS service at a low cost. It will probably be a reasonable amount of work to extract information about this from your phone company.
If your POTS line is active, you can set up a Asterisk or a smart ATA like a Sipura 3000 so that it automatically routes all normal calls via VOIP and 911 calls out the POTS line.
At this point, I’m less interested in packaged VoIP services (Vonage, VoicePulse, Packet8, BroadVoice, AT&T CallVantage, etc) then in services that will sell me “raw” VoIP connectivity, like NuFone, VoicePulse Connect, and a score of others. I doubt that any of them will do e911 handling for me, but basic 911 service isn’t that hard to wire up. It should be possible to just forward the call to a 10-digit number at the local public safety answering point. In addition, even if I turn off my analog line, it should still be “live enough” to take 911 emergency calls (as well as 611 ordering calls).
In general, the current 911 system doesn’t work well with VoIP. It’s a known problem, but I haven’t seen any real solutions proposed. Odds are we’ll eventually see a VoIP interface directly into the 911 system where you have to provide your own location information, but it’ll take years to get there. For now, most providers (like Vonage) are just routing 911 to the 10-digit number of your local PSAP.
Dropping services from my POTS line is a possibility, but I doubt it’ll save me more then a few bucks–the basic line is currently only $10. I’m paying $11 for extra services, but everything else is “tax”. I put tax in quotes, because most of it actually goes straight into Verizon’s pockets. Given the pending price increases, I doubt that I can save more then $5 or so while still keeping a semi-live POTS line.
Sometimes, it’s hard to be ahead of the curve.
Sorry, missed the followup there. Yes, I use Comcast - your basic broadband-with-cable subscription.
On one hand, I want to be scared about how easy it was for you to find my location. On the other hand, I can think of at least two web pages I maintain that have my address on them, so what am I whining about? :-)
Yeah, Google is like that sometimes. Just try searching for
“Garrett Fitzgerald” bothell
And your address shows up as the first link, plus there are a couple pages in the list with your name and address. The basic problem these days is that Google is so good that you have to be either a complete privacy nut or expect Google to make your life an open book. Fortunately, things have been heading this way for long enough that it’s not really surprising–when DejaNews first fired up, it dredged up a lot of stuff that people would have preferred to have hidden.
For the 911 issue I wonder if its possible to get a Fully Qualified phone number (ie ###-###-####) for your local emergency center. Then simply program Asterisk to dial that number when you dial 911.
However two important issues remain:
For the 911 issue I wonder if its possible to get a Fully Qualified phone number (ie ###-###-####) for your local emergency center. Then simply program Asterisk to dial that number when you dial 911.
However two important issues remain:
I believe there is a law that states any phoneline with no service can still call 911.
I know a cellphone without a service provider can still call 911 (remember from a drive for battered women in my area awhile back).
I know this is atleast true for the state of Washington, anyway.
It depends on where you live, a disconnected land line in Arizona does not have a dial tone (its still live it has power). You might be able to save some money by switching to a metered land line. I don’t use my land line that much but I can’t let it go for 911 reasons, I don’t have any features active either.