A woman asks for a flashlight...

If his place is like mine, the still-working rotary phone is hidden elsewhere, but still plugged in and operating.

And has outlived several subsequent corded and cordless phones on other outlets.

 

phone is free with comcast cable/internet. actually, its a cheaper package than without for some reason.

but having had a house phone all of our lives, its really not a burden. we use it primarily, and cell can be spotty sometimes

 

At least your landline is using a cable coax or optical line. I had kept good old copper cable landline with a corded telephone unit (no power required) until fairly recently in case of emergency when the power goes out. Our cell signal is very weak at best most of the time and often I can't make a call from our house. But when the power goes out, almost always the telephone also went out, so we got rid of the copper line telephone to be replaced by VoIP just last year. Still uses the landline for almost all of the telephone calls.

 

Thank GOD somebody does....otherwise I'd have to go and find honest work!

It's another 'cord' that they don't want you to cut. Somebody in their head-shed thinks that you're less likely to bail on them if you're tied down by a local telephone #
(Actually it's an IP telephone, but there's not much of a diff these days....)

We still have a lot (well....hundreds) of local customers for that very reason. Down on the redneck riviera we're a little more anal about power at remote sites, and folks in town are usually connected by copper to dial tone (POTS) circuits that are powered by the battery in the CO plant.
Probably 30 percent of my job is maintaining the DC plant and standby generators in 7 offices.

I keep trying to tell them that since we already have rectifiers, inverters and batteries that if they put solar cells on the roof that they'd probably save enough money from a reduction of the heat loading on the building to pay for the cells, AND we already HAVE a BIG can to put the amps in - buuuuuut they never listen.
Heck....dot.gov would probably pay them for the solar panels too!



(**) Full disclosure: I myself dumped our copper-fed dial tone line for a VOIP line about a year ago, also free....since we do not have a fax or other reason to hang on to a POTS line.
About a week and a half ago, our home line went out of service and I forwarded the phone to one of our cellular lines.
They still haven't fixed it, (VOIP isn't regulated like copper is) but we haven't missed it enough for me to escalate the trouble or fuss at one of the outside techs.

 

agreed. and we're probably not the typical customers. i don't watch tv, but mrs biscottis is a rabid fan. sports, local shows, chick flicks, hgtv, you name it.

if i cut that cord, id be cutting my own throat

 

40 years ago, when my partner and i met at my house to plan our new business, he couldn't believe we still had a rotary phone. but at the time, i thing a touchtone was an extra dollar a month or something.

after 40 years in business, i taught him a few things about saving a buck, and he taught me a few things about spending one.

 

Yeah, I can understand the reasoning, only if the copper lines are somehow routed differently from the power lines to reach the household. In last 15 years I kept the copper landline telephone, almost every time power went out, most likely due to fallen tree, it also took the copper line along with it, and our telephone line was just as dead. Sometimes it took longer to restore the telephone line than the power line. Fortunately, new cell tower made our signal little easier to get in recent years. I just have to look for the signal at some location around house or a few hundred feet away from the house.

 

Got a 1940's model around somewhere left by the previous home owner. I fully intended to actually use it, if I ever go back to a land line.

 

In three decades in my current home, I can't recall ever having power and POTS line out at the same time. During numerous power outages I've hooked the DSL modem (as cable-TV refuseniks) to a small inverter on backup battery power and gone online with a still-charged laptop to check the utility's outage map and other news. Never during such events have I found a lack of voice or DSL service.

Only fairly recently did I get a smart phone, making it easier to go online.

That is exactly the reason my old desk phone is rotary, not touch tone. It no longer cost them extra to service touch tone lines, but they still charged extra, a real money amount in those days.

 

I love my Petzel headlamp -- and the price was reasonable for $20.
PETZL - TIKKINA Headlamp, 150 Lumens, Standard Lighting

I hate my Black Diamond Storm Headlamp , which replaced another brand, name escapes me.... Cost me $28. WHEN I manage to hit the right combo of buttons and hold them down the proper amount of time, it is fine.....it is just pressing the right combo and holding them down the proper amount of time that I find difficult.

Where I live, cell reception is dicey and power tends to go out for several days at a time, so a landline is preferred. We keep about 10 to 15 gallons of generator gasoline as well as five gallons of saw mix fuel around from the end of October through March.

Non-ethanol, of course.

Tuff Jug containers with ripper spouts beat the CARB alternatives

 

Maybe your telephone line and electric line are not running along? In our neighborhood, both lines are definitely running along side by side from a telephone pole to next telephone pole. So as our coax cable line. If a tree fell and and cut off the electric line, it will also likely to snap the telephone line and coax internet line.

 

Lines to the "house" are on poles, but service from the pole to the house is underground for electric and telecom. The distance from the pole to the house is about 700 yards.

 

Similarly, on my street, all those lines are run on the same poles. But a tree taking down the lines would kill phones only downstream, not upstream, on that single street. Power commonly dies in both directions and on many numerous adjacent streets, covering a substantial area.

On local TV storm coverage, we also see smaller trees and larger branches taking down the power lines just far enough to short out, but not actually breaking. So this blows some breakers upstream, taking down an area, but saves the phone and TV cable lines mounted below.

The power lines have a fair number of manual switch points to reconfigure the local loops and shrink and isolate outages to smaller local patches. But when trees are being blown down by the hundreds, it takes a while for crews to scout out the issues, diagnose, and respond.

 

We had copper until the Comcast deal came along. it was nice in a power outage, but at 60 bucks a month, it was time to retire it

 

No idea about our place, it might be some designer spaghetti, but it gets the signal from the pole to the house.

 

So my wife's home phone is:

• $100/year, annual plan, T-Mobile (~$8.33/month)
• Samsung Galaxy J7 - 'free' trade-in for a previous flip phone
  • Android 7 is reported as its highest, T-Mobile, software update
  • Was failing every other month while the flip phone just worked
    • Passive sitting, it needs periodic memory and storage 'cleaning'
  • Enabling WiFi stops it from answering calls
  • Installed a 32 GB SD card but it won't integrate with the 16 GB built-in flash
  • Finally got "answer only calls on contact list" to work
• Panasonic (KX-TG7624) cell-to-hand units, four, TV room, bedroom, bathroom
  • Speaks the contact name or otherwise phone number which we don't answer
  • We were getting a daily telemarketer call with "V" prefix
    • No telemarketer call, we knew the Galaxy J7 was 'broken'
  • Enabled "Call Block", up to 30 entries
    • Caller IDs changed on the subsequent, daily telemarketer calls

Mine is an iPhone 7, 128 GB, and two, mobile hotspots:

• ~$75/month, T-Mobile, 2 GB high-speed data
• Current IOS 13.2.3
• Added cable tie to case
  • clip on, badge lanyard for easy phone recovery from pocket
  • cable tie a lightning-to-audio jack for noise canceling ear buds

Bob Wilson