AT&T raising home landline prices .... yadda yadda whine whine...

[Ray Abbitt]

: I just think it's silly for people to complain that a service that
: they consider essential is going up in price. It's going UP to a price
: that is less than you pay most places in the country for basic phone
: service.
The complaint is that they're FORCED to buy a service they do NOT want
(local voice) in order to get a service they do (DSL Internet). They do not
consider it essential, and in many cases don't have a phone hooked up to it
and never use it at all.

But there is at least one good use for said landline phone. It is the phone
number I put on my checks and the phone number I give people that ask for a
phone number (if I really want people to have my phone number I will
voluntarily give them the number of the phone that I actually use). So I
give them a "working" phone number. Most of the time it answers with a
message "memory full". Every now and then I clean the box out.

-ray

[Ray Abbitt]

Post by Ray Abbitt
But there is at least one good use for said landline phone. It is the phone
number I put on my checks and the phone number I give people that ask for a
phone number

Not to mention that landline phones are the best bet to stay
functional in an emergency. If your power is out, so much for
your VoIP connection. And the cell phone system isn't the most
robust communications method. Sure, landlines can get overwhelmed
in an emergency, but they've still got better odds than the others.

The last major communications emergency I can think of in this area
was the Loma Prieta quake. Even though I was in an area that wasn't
really affected, (Pleasanton) landline phones were effectively not
available for at least 3 days (if you knew a certain trick there was
a way to use the phones--but it certainly was not very effective). My
communications were in this order: 2 meter and 450 amateur radio, company
radio (450 MHz), HF radio, company phone system (Chevron--via no longer
existant north-south microwave backbone--I knew how to select outgoing
trunks and could hop off from the south end of the state) and eventually
after power came back (only a few hours) packet radio-both X25 and TCP/IP.

I spent the first night "babysitting" the microwave and trunked radio
systems at the Richmond refinery. Those of us that maintained those
systems were damn proud of the fact that NOTHING failed. (Wonder what
Chevron will do next time since they dismantled the entire backbone).
After things settled down, I played radio operator for the Red Cross
shelter at Oakland Tech High School for the next 3 nights.

-ray