rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | reply to Slidetbone
Re: No surprises
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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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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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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hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH
 ·Time Warner Cable
·buckeye cable
| reply to south1178
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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N3OGH
Bear patrol must be working like a charm
Premium
join:2003-11-11
Philly burbs
·Verizon FIOS
·Verizon Online DSL
| reply to thegoldwater
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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hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH
·Time Warner Cable
·buckeye cable
| reply to Jigsaw
Yes in Fremont, Ohio too. My cell phone from ATTWS lost signal for about 5 minutes but then was working again when the backup power was in use.
Good thing i had my cell too at the time for work when it happened..the blackout power spike that hit when power was resotred hit so hard it blew a surge protecteor off the floor and then burned it to hell!
Computer was fine though. LOL |
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thegoldwater
Thegoldwater
join:2002-03-10
Parkton, MD
| reply to Marilla
Not necessarily. In rural areas like Northern Baltimore County here in the People's Republic of Maryland, Verizon still has 30 and 40 year old copper feeds running down the back roads. During a good rain (and we have had lots of that), the hollow core of the feed gets filled with water in the low parts between poles... the only way for them to fix this is to roll a truck with an air tank they connect to blow the water out.
It was the main reason I ditched the landline.
Besides, phones suck anyway. Too many jackasses in this country feel that my having a phone number gives them the right to bother me. |
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Ben67
join:2000-07-08
Monroe, GA
| reply to LordMalak
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.
--
P4 2.4c@3.4,P4P800,512meg hyperx pc3500,256megPNY FX5600,SBlive,2x36G WD Raptors raid0,18.1" Sunmicrosytems LCD, yada,yada |
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xirian
Premium
join:2003-01-26
Beacon, NY
| 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
Too bad I got "All circuits are busy" when trying to use mine. Got through on my cell phone fine though, --
Pier-44 IRC Net |
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Marilla
I Am My Own Arbiter
Premium
join:2002-12-06
Belpre, OH | reply to Sly
AC hum can still be spoken over... say, if you need to dial 911.
Telemarketer calls twice a week? Man.. how did you survive it? |
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Marilla
I Am My Own Arbiter
Premium
join:2002-12-06
Belpre, OH
| reply to sporkme
said by sporkme :
Funny thing is from at least 8:30 p.m. last night until at least 2:30 a.m. this morning, my Verizon POTS line was unavailbable via T-Mobile, Sprint, and VZ in Philly. Two rings then a fast busy.
Had to use my Vonage line to get through...
One question: Did you, during this time, have to make a 911 call by chance? hehe.. of course you didn't... but I'd lay odds that if you had, it would have gone through (assuming you had a dial-tone at all... it sounds to me like it wasn't really a problem with your phone line, per se)
--
Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD - just use the right tool for the right job... end the OS Politics!
Real politics is much more interesting! www.georgewbush.com |
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john262
join:2003-09-26
Elko, NV
·Wireless Beehive
| reply to Marilla
My land line has been out several times in the past year. Last January we had a big wind storm and my land line was down for several hours. My cell phone still worked on that occasion, but on other occasions my cell phone has been down too.
So as someone already said, no system can be 100% reliable all the time. |
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jdmurray
Premium
join:2001-03-02
Huntington Beach, CA
clubs:
·DSL EXTREME
| reply to Sly
said by Sly :
I don't know of any phone service that is 100% reliable.
In the USA you will get a dial-tone from a POTS line 99.999% of the time. That's the highest reliability rate of any phone system in the world. This gives people very high expectations from voice services regardless fo how they are implemented.
Cell phones are less reliable than POTS, but you can shift your physical location to try and improve the signal strength. With VOIP you can only sit there and wait for the service to come back up. People may accept this occasional down-time for their web browsing activities, but not for their telephone-like voice services. |
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