Landline Phone Down? Good Luck

[verporchting]

…Even harder to repair than a landline, though…

I don’t know, when the performance drops you wrap the cleaned and salted breast in bacon and put in the oven for an hour at 250 degrees and it all seems to work out okay. Win/win situation and the cable company isn’t invited for dinner. Paired with a nice wine and an post-prandial pipe it’s a winner.

Edit: please note this is for corn fed country pigeons; nobody would eat one of those disgusting winged rats from NYC, lol.

 

[bullet08]

The idea was to get rid of human tech years ago. Automated systems, online support informations.. Then realized Fortune 500 companies still wanted human on the other end that can do "yes, sir. No, sir. You can go fuck yourself, sir." Guess what that means? Crappier crop of the techs will men the station for the "end users". It will only get worse. Tech support was my career. Spent 25 years watching it going down hill.

 

[Python 357]

back in 1992 we had a blizzard, Phone lines were down but still had electricity, The snow was bad and getting worse. I wanted to let my parents know I was ok, as I know they were worried. I had a ham radio,so I got on 40 meter CW (morse code)and found a guy who was about a thousand miles away. I gave him my parents phone number and asked him to call them to let them know I was allright,which he did. Pretty neat I thought

 

[smudgersmissingleg]

He can't respond right away. I have to print this out and mail it to him.

Hahahaha! That made me laugh

 

[woodsroad]

Those old copper phone lines are typically the last thing to go. Cable can go out with a strong breeze, but we could have trees toppled over on houses but that phone line with a non-power requiring phone will still work.

Ah....no.
At least not 'round here (SE PA)

Verizon has pretty much stopped maintaining the legacy copper phone infrastructure. I've seen trees laying on phone cables for YEARS without any sign of attempted cleanup and repair. And the aerial cable that Comcast is using is even stronger than the electric primary wire. We had a large tree come down across the electric primary that ran down our driveway. Snapped the hot and neutral, but the cable wouldn't break. Pulled it down to the ground and cracked the utility pole, but the cable held.

 

[fireground_piper]

Ah....no.
At least not 'round here (SE PA)

Verizon has pretty much stopped maintaining the legacy copper phone infrastructure. I've seen trees laying on phone cables for YEARS without any sign of attempted cleanup and repair. And the aerial cable that Comcast is using is even stronger than the electric primary wire. We had a large tree come down across the electric primary that ran down our driveway. Snapped the hot and neutral, but the cable wouldn't break. Pulled it down to the ground and cracked the utility pole, but the cable held.

. I have dealt with significant storm events in my town and trees falling onto my house. Most cases, the phone line still works in northern NJ. In an emergency, you can even take a non-powered phone and plug it into the auxiliary port on the outside of the house and make a phone call.

 

[kcghost]

They're getting our landlines removed and moving us kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

 

[guylesss]

@mso489, you need to START with your state regulator. To be brief, when phone lines were regulated as a utility, you enjoyed a number of actual legal rights. At least some of these continued after deregulation--in some states after very long legal battles ending in "consent decrees"--that still require companies with "copper wire" networks to maintain them in good repair. Most now do their all to persuade you to "migrate" to their unregulated cell service (or alternatives like fiber optic). A formal compaint may not solve your problem but it will escalate you to a very elite and attentive customer service representative who will personally respond and likely do whatever can be done.


As for actually getting copper network maintenance or repair--it will be a local question. Some places stonewall, stall, or simply refuse. Others will apparently do the necessary work. But bottom line is they really want to shed their landline customers as quickly and completely as possible.

 

[Briar Lee]

In Missouri all our phone lines have been underground forever, it seems. I’m 65 in April and I think I was five or six when the phone lines were buried.

Land lines here are 100% reliable. Which is good, because cell phones are not.

Here’s a new cell phone tower near Bug Tussle, by Tinker Cemetery.



Before that I was blessed at my farm with bad cell phone reception and could find relief from the storms of life, when I was there.

Now the dad blasted things work as well as a land line, even in Spout Spring Hollow.

 

[Python 357]

Ah....no.
At least not 'round here (SE PA)

Verizon has pretty much stopped maintaining the legacy copper phone infrastructure. I've seen trees laying on phone cables for YEARS without any sign of attempted cleanup and repair. And the aerial cable that Comcast is using is even stronger than the electric primary wire. We had a large tree come down across the electric primary that ran down our driveway. Snapped the hot and neutral, but the cable wouldn't break. Pulled it down to the ground and cracked the utility pole, but the cable held.

your exactly right. I live in SE Pa. also. Trees will be laying on wires ,threatening to bring them down,and they will do NOTHING to cut the trees.I`ve even seen trees on wires starting to burn

 

[Trainpipeman]

back in 1992 we had a blizzard, Phone lines were down but still had electricity, The snow was bad and getting worse. I wanted to let my parents know I was ok, as I know they were worried. I had a ham radio,so I got on 40 meter CW (morse code)and found a guy who was about a thousand miles away. I gave him my parents phone number and asked him to call them to let them know I was allright,which he did. Pretty neat I thought

That is a great story! Thank you for sharing that.

 

[fireground_piper]

your exactly right. I live in SE Pa. also. Trees will be laying on wires ,threatening to bring them down,and they will do NOTHING to cut the trees.I`ve even seen trees on wires starting to burn

I don’t know how it works in PA, but thats the power company problem, not a telephone company problem.

 

[woodsroad]

your exactly right. I live in SE Pa. also. Trees will be laying on wires ,threatening to bring them down,and they will do NOTHING to cut the trees.I`ve even seen trees on wires starting to burn

Must have been some pretty hot conversations on those smokin' phone lines!
Seriously, phone lines will never smoke. They were raised better than that.

 

[greysmoke]

I keep a landline active to make it easier and more convenient for telemarketers to call.

 

[lochinvar]

That's what I did....and now the cell service is getting worse and worse here. I'm taking a class in smoke signals and looking for pigeons......and maybe that thing Crocodile Dundee used.