Richard called me on Wednesday morning, and said he'd be right over: he was at the Central Office, a couple of miles away from my house.
Our dog went crazy a few minutes later, and I told Richard that “He’s harmless!” while he pulled boxes out of his truck.
I hadn't been able to figure out where the old drop wire came in: the fiber drop for the cable modem descends from the pole, runs over my driveway, and attaches to the eave at the corner on the South side of the house. There was, however, no sign of a mounting point for a telephone drop wire.
I showed Richard the downstairs wall where the RG-59 coax feeds come out of the box - there's a coaxial TV feed in almost every room, unused for all the years I've been here, because I’ve never thought that satellite TV was worth the money, and the two dishes that were put up to provide it are still attached to the mounts at the front of my house.. I have a cable modem, that provides me with a limited Internet connection which, by the good graces of the press contact at the North Carolina Governor's office, allows me ssh access to the Telecom Digest servers. The new owner of the cable tv company cut that off the day after they took over, and I had to borrow access to a VPN, which I now pay Alexis Rosen at Panix to keep available.
The VPN allwoed me to publish the Digest, during the week or two that it took the press contact at the North Carolina Governor’s office to convince the new cable tv owner to stop blocking port 22. I figured they would start up again in another few days, which is what Comcast used to do when I lived near Boston, but port 22 is still open, so I’m assuming that they don’t think I’m worth the trouble.
No complaint to the Governor’s office goes unpunished, however: my Callcentric phone number - it’s a VoIP connection - stopped working back around September. I’ve already posted about that fiasco, and the VoIP ports are still blocked, after multiple complaints and calls from oh-so-sincere-and-knowledgeable flacks who told me that the problem was "CGNAT" and that I should pay for a fixed IP address - only $30 per month extra! - to "cure" the problem. The oh-so-sincere-and- knowledgeable flacks were, for some reason, unable to give me a reason why the cable tv company customers who purchase the VoIP phone offering made by the cable tv company weren’t required to have a fixed IP address, but they promised to do some research and get back to me. That was, you guessed it, around September.
The Cisco 303 VoIP instrument has been sititng on the desk in the spare bedroom, where my wife has her computer, and she plays Solitaire for hours on end, with a special mouse that I bought so she could still use the machine. Her hands shake too much for her to dial a cell phone, but the buttons on the Cisco phone are still big enough for her to use, and I want her to have a way to call 911 if there’s an emergency. I had bought it on Ebay when I got my extension from Hamshack Hotline, which connects me to other ham operators through an Asterisk PBX in the basement of a ham who lives in Massachusetts. I got one for my brother, too, since he doesn't like to talk on his cellphone, and the model 303 VoIP phone has three lines available, so I put in the Callcentric service so we’d have a "home" number.
My house is too far down in the hollow for me to see the mountaintops where Skyrunner has their head ends, so I can’t bypass the cable tv company with MMDS service. There are no other cable tv companies with service up here in the hills, even though the fiber connection the current pirates use was installed at taxpayer expense and is available to competitors.
That left Frontier Communications, the ILEC for this area, but they don't offer any fiber service. I was talking to another Ham Radio operator who’s in my club, and he was telling me how he got a VPN going through a linode machine, allowing him to bypass the port blocks of the cable tv company to provide Echolink service to our club's repeater network, and the subject of VoIP came up: I told him that my brother’s club has VoIP phones they use at emergency deployments, connected via microwave links to Asterisk boxes at their EOC, so that the Incident Commanders and politicians at a disaster sites can use the interfaces they’re familiar with. I could, I suppose, figure out how to get the same VPN going, although I’d have to get a Raspberry Pi box going to do the routing, unless I chose to just use my Linux box all the time.
My friend asked if I could get DSL, and I realized that I hadn't considered it, even though I used it for years up north. My wife enjoys Netflix movies when she's not playing Solitaire, and I hadn't know that there are DSL services available with speeds rivaling what the cable tv company claims to provide.
I called Frontier the next day, and the Service Rep told me that I could get a home phone bundled with DSL service for less than Callcentric's service costs, but her computer didn't show if she could sell me ADSL, so she put in "a ticket" to have it checked out, and promised me a callback.
Frontier rang my cell phone on Monday - it uses a "WIFI" connection when I'm at home, since the cell towers are too far away - and we spoke on what is obviously a VoIP connection - funny how companies with expert lawyers don’t have to worry about port blockage - and I placed an order for both a landline and ADSL service.
Richard asked to see the electrical panel, and I took him to the back room next to the furnace, where the Generac switch and the main electric panel are, and he showed me the "Demarcation Point" box, on the wall next to the electric panel, with an underground feedline that apparently runs under my driveway instead of over it. He found the one "JK" lead that goes to the phone outlet upstairs in my living room, alongside four or five others which used to be cut down on a "protection" block that was, surprisingly, on the customer side of the demarc. We went upstairs, where the cable modem and my Asus router sit on the shelf over the chairs where we sit and watch the news from the CBS streaming service. The end of the wire had a four-prong jack on it, and Richard swapped it out for an RJ-14, and asked if I wanted to keep the old one. I told Richard that the Smithsonian was looking for it, and that he should send it in and claim the prize, and we shared a laugh and he connected the DSL modem along with a low-pass filter for the POTS line. I plugged in an old "Trimline" type of phone I’ve had in a box for years, amazed that the dial tone wasn't just another VoIP connection, since Frontier charges about $25 less per month for the phone line when it’a part of the bundle.
Righard told me that the DSL I was getting requires two pairs of wire, since the speed I had ordered uses two "bonded" DSL connections, and he went off to arrange for the correct pairs to appear on the cable that runs under my driveway. I made myself a sandwich, and waited.
After a couple of hours, Richard drove back up our dirt road and delivered the bad news: the DSL modem wouldn’t sync for more than a few seconds, and I'm about 13 kilofeet away from the CO, so the "ticket" the Sales Rep had called in should have come back marked “Do not offer” instead of “OK to provide.”
I felt bad for the guy - he’d done the work, and even laughed at my jokes and anecdotes about Feature Group A connections back in the bad old days - so I told him I’d take the telephone line even if I couldn’t get the DSL service. He deserved to get credit for the upsale, I figured, and he told me that Frontier will be installing fiber next year, so in the meantime I can get a phone with *really* big buttons and a headset amplifier so that my wife can have a familiar look and feel.
I changed the Telecom Digest FAQ so that it sort-of shows the new number if you look hard, and shrugged my shoulders and cancelled the Callcentric line effectvie at the end of the month. I could have dropped it last year, but I've had it forwarded to my cell phone, since I like the way it keeps vendors from sending me text messages on my “landline” number.
I called the new POTS number from my cellphone - Callcentric is a non-portable provider, according to Frontier - and it rang once and tripped and all I heard was crackling. If I picked up the phone quickly, I could talk on it, with a lot of static, so I realized that the "protector" on my side of the demarc had probably punched through years ago, and was now causing ring-trip-idle faults.
Drat. I left a note at the CO, so that Richard won’t get dinged for a failed install, and I’m hoping that he or one of the other techs will see it and come by to swap out the carbons for me.
Sigh: I really wanted that DSL line. At least my wife can call 911, even though the "Trimline" type instrument is so light that it comes off the desk when she picks up the handset. It’ll work in an emergency, and in the meantime I’ve been asking around for spare "big button" desk sets.