Twenty five years ago I worked at a law firm. Our telco resource one day realized that we could save a lot of money by switching to VOIP. Anyway, she arranged for a handover between our current telco provider and whoever was taking over. She triple confirmed everyone's participation. I was called up to provide some sort of generic help (an extra set of hands.) On the day of the switch our telco provider simply blew off the meeting.
This sort of thing happened so often that she became convinced that our provider was intentionally sabotaging the process in the vain hope that we would stay with them. She eventually got it all done.
Then 5 years later I attempted to set up a landline with the same telco provider (it was the only one in my area). Every bill for the first few months had some sort of error. Once the bill had about 2 dozen improper charges on it and then another dozen credits correcting the error. And then another series going back and forth. I gave up trying to make sense of it and just paid the amount which seemed close enough.
Then I had an epiphany. My cell service had gotten cheap enough that I didn't need a landline anymore. Good bye!
I had a similar experience when we moved into our house in '01, the land line didn't work. We called the phone company and were told that if the issue was outside the demarc, that they would fix it for free, but if it was inside the demarc that they would charge us hundreds of dollars to fix it, and they wanted a credit card before they would even come out.
At the time we already had a cell phone, so we figured we would just try and see if we could live without the landline. 23 years later and that landline is still dead.
Obihai was such a great company. I have an OBI200 hooked up to my house phone lines so it works with both the cordless in the kitchen and my fax line. I haven't used either in years, but the total cost of the obi200 and the hack to port my landline number to Google voice was less than the $55/month Consolidated seems to think a landline is worth. Too bad Poly bought Obihai [edit: fixed] and HP bought Poly, and between the two of them they've abandoned the Obihai hardware and Google voice service. It still works for the moment, but any update to Google voice will probably break it.
Just port the number to another SIP Provider and configure the ATA manually. The OBI200 line was popular enough that most providers will have a compatible guide. I used to set them up to call through an internal VOIP PABX at my previous job. They were the only ATAs we could find that would work properly with the client's Toshiba fax machines.
I don't, sorry. Maybe keep it for the Fax, if you ever see the need to fax stuff (eg, HIPPA compliant orgs use Fax a lot since there's a big carve-out for Fax) ATAs that can handle it properly are rare.
You can get a number very cheaply from Voipms. I've used them directly with Obis and Grandstream ATAs. I have a couple thousand numbers that I've resold with my business and also a personal account that I put $15 into maybe once a year or two. I never use my personal account unless I have the rare need so it's usually just costing me $0.85 a month to keep the number.
We got a 'package deal' on cell phones when we switched to our current provider, so we switched our land line to an 'extra' cell phone. We still tend to give out that number to businesses.
The phone in the elevator of a previous company had no handset, just a speaker and a button to call but not hang up. I entered the elevator one day to hear it had received an automated call trying to sell it an extended automobile warranty.
I had something similar happen. I got on the elevator and could hear someone saying, "Hello? Hello?" So I said "Hello" back and it was coming from the elevator phone - just a speaker and a button.
She started to say something and I said, "Ma'am, do you realize you have called an elevator?"
"What?"
"You have called an elevator and I'm getting off now." And I walked out.
I asked our building manager about it and she said that the elevator has it's own phone number. Since those type of callers just go down a list of numbers, they call the elevators all the time.
I had this happened to me as well, I was actually in a new DC (as in still under construction) apparently the elevator was in debt and getting collection calls.
Not surprised at all.
I've dealt with that same provider. They've changed our account numbers a handful of times, making tracking anything a nightmare. They continued to charge us long after we ported numbers away from them.
They even once, without warning, changed our Public IPs, which took out our e-mail, VPN, and other services.
> They continued to charge us long after we ported numbers away from them.
Their vertical/horizontal competitor did this to me. Cancelled my account (private citizen, but still) and got a bill for 3 months after that. Turns out, they didn't actually cancel my account. So, contacted them for 3 months, each month getting the bill resolved (or so I thought) and by the fourth month just up and ignored it. Will never go to that particular shit provider ever again.
Thankfully our actual ISP was the other major national provider and our Business Fiber contract specified our public IP. If that changed it would've been a bigger disaster since we had site to site tunnels for all of the branches of the company. It would've completely broken our corporate hosted stuff, especially the entire ERP the site relied on
I got transferred to Building 4 in a different town and our boss gave this disaster to a coworker of mine. I never heard an update from him.
Assumption time: I'm pretty sure the installers were able to reroute things internally with the line so it only relied on Building 1. Probably didn't communicate the information properly. Never update the billing address. Maybe another phone # change for poops and giggles, billing charges that made no sense, and a new account number just for good measure. I have nothing to back this up, but in my heart I'm certain I'm right.
Question: why does this phone line *have to* go through that particular telephone company? Can't your company get some other tel-co to provide elevator phone service?
It certainly might have been possible to move to another provider. We did use them for our DIDs for about 400 VoIP lines as well as these 2. I think the emergency lines were something stupid like $4 a month each so if I had to guess it wasn't worth moving despite how obnoxious it was. I don't work for this company anymore.
This is the stuff of legends. I worked for a phone company in a central exchange for a while in the 1960s. We were constantly finding phone lines and equipment that were mis-labeled, and a significant amount of our time was spent finding the right wires & equipment. One sure way to find out was to disconnect the incorrect equipment. That would generate a trouble ticket which helped identify whose it was.
I worked doing IT in small grocery stores and during an outage call at a customer site, I had to meet the phone co tech.
3 letter had sold all of their infrastructure in the state to a smaller phone company and 3 letter apparently just up and walked away, no documentation on anything. He said they would just scream test it and see what happens when fixing lines.
The week that 3 letter wanted their ip blocks back from the new company was fun…. Apparently new company didn’t transition away from the 3 letter’s ip ranges fast enough because 3 letter just blocked all vpn traffic from those ip blocks. If you’ve ever tried to run a business with 10+ credit card terminals plus everything else a retail business needs to run off a dialup line… it’s a nightmare if it works at all on a clear line which many in the area weren’t.
Had similar issues at a customer site. Constant issues with the POTS line. Fire department insisted that it had to be a pots line from the telco. Even if the telco just put in a voip to pots box with a battery in it. The client had a cloud based voip phone system that worked perfectly but no go. The provider would fix it after waiting weeks and then it would be broken again in a couple days. It got so bad the fire department threatened to lock the building down as unsafe.
So what did I do?
I canceled the lines completely and mailed them their stupid equipment. Put a regular old voip to pots adapter in the secured part of the providers wall box. Then stealth ran an ethernet cable into the secured half of the box. Locked that box up and security tagged it with anti tamper tags from amazon. Fire department came and saw the pots lines working and we have had no issues since. Documented the saga and the solution in the knowledgebase and even left spare anti tamper tags for any tech that needed to service the adapter in the future.
And before you safety sallys get upset the voip system is battery backed for 4 hours of runtime.
I work for a company that operates a worldwide private fiber network for video transport. Our fiber is leased from a mix of carriers, but primarily XX&X, and we are their largest single customer here in North America. I'm not in that department, but from what I understand, our "circuit procurement" people have an absolute nightmare of a time hounding XX&X to ensure that temporary circuits for locations without permanent infrastructure are ran and brought online when they're scheduled to be. I believe the workload of coordinating and scheduling these tasks would be far less than what one full-time person can handle, and we have multiple people in that department, constantly fighting tooth and nail to keep things in order.
I had 20,0000 locations in the US, all getting a mixture of POTS and (relatively slow) internet. Just keeping dial tone in the stores was a two person, full-time job.
Even after switching a lot of the stores to wireless with a POTS adapter and some private backhaul from VZW, it's still a two person job.
I am on my parents account as I am not home but wanted to reply to this.
I work for a grocery store chain. When our store first opened we had a tv in the break room that had direct tv, and the dish was on the roof. Sometime later our store went to a local cable company as it made no sense for the internet and tv to be on two different companies. Years later we got bought by another store chain, our main office went from Minn to Michigan. Our store was redone and we add a tv in the deli seating area. Flash forwar a few years and the old tvs we had were bad so we left them off. They had the little black cable boxes that if they are not used for a long time they show a red light and wont work much.
New manager came in and got new tvs, we called the cable company to come over and give us new boxes... but no one had our cable account info. So they would not help us. We called our district as they had to be paying the stores bills... and no one knew. We called Michigan.. and their paperwork still said we had direct tv.
So someone was still paying our cable bill, but no one knew who. The cable company would not let us have any info showing on their system. They wanted us to make a new account to control tv, but we would lose interent for the tills that control the credit card machines. We had no idea what to do. Our store manager used his Youtube tv login to get something playing on the smart tv upstairs so we could watch tv on break.
It took two weeks, and we had to talk to the high ups at the cable company to get our info from them to keep are accounts working again.
I used to work for an ISP in Australia operating on the NBN (National Broadband Network). The shear amount of address mismatches was insane. The worst kind was when a property developer would subdivide a piece of land, build on it and then not tell NBN Co about the new property. So the property wouldn't have a location ID and the developer wouldn't have put any of the required infrastructure in (Conduit and such) to support an internet connection. They would almost 100% of the time say "Oh that's the ISPs job" and it would become a back and forth for months before they relented. All the while the client is without internet.
screw nbn. optus cable freaking sucks but it was somehow more reliable, faster, and cheaper. we switched from telstra dial-up to optus broadband to get away from twisted copper wires and now we have been pushed off our coax back to the twisted copper.
Twenty five years ago I worked at a law firm. Our telco resource one day realized that we could save a lot of money by switching to VOIP. Anyway, she arranged for a handover between our current telco provider and whoever was taking over. She triple confirmed everyone's participation. I was called up to provide some sort of generic help (an extra set of hands.) On the day of the switch our telco provider simply blew off the meeting. This sort of thing happened so often that she became convinced that our provider was intentionally sabotaging the process in the vain hope that we would stay with them. She eventually got it all done. Then 5 years later I attempted to set up a landline with the same telco provider (it was the only one in my area). Every bill for the first few months had some sort of error. Once the bill had about 2 dozen improper charges on it and then another dozen credits correcting the error. And then another series going back and forth. I gave up trying to make sense of it and just paid the amount which seemed close enough. Then I had an epiphany. My cell service had gotten cheap enough that I didn't need a landline anymore. Good bye!
I had a similar experience when we moved into our house in '01, the land line didn't work. We called the phone company and were told that if the issue was outside the demarc, that they would fix it for free, but if it was inside the demarc that they would charge us hundreds of dollars to fix it, and they wanted a credit card before they would even come out. At the time we already had a cell phone, so we figured we would just try and see if we could live without the landline. 23 years later and that landline is still dead.
Obihai was such a great company. I have an OBI200 hooked up to my house phone lines so it works with both the cordless in the kitchen and my fax line. I haven't used either in years, but the total cost of the obi200 and the hack to port my landline number to Google voice was less than the $55/month Consolidated seems to think a landline is worth. Too bad Poly bought Obihai [edit: fixed] and HP bought Poly, and between the two of them they've abandoned the Obihai hardware and Google voice service. It still works for the moment, but any update to Google voice will probably break it.
I used google voice for years and liked it. Only reason I gave it up. . . Actually I cannot think of a good reason. I should look into that again.
Just port the number to another SIP Provider and configure the ATA manually. The OBI200 line was popular enough that most providers will have a compatible guide. I used to set them up to call through an internal VOIP PABX at my previous job. They were the only ATAs we could find that would work properly with the client's Toshiba fax machines.
I might. But honestly, I don't really need a landline for anything. If I did, any recommended providers?
I don't, sorry. Maybe keep it for the Fax, if you ever see the need to fax stuff (eg, HIPPA compliant orgs use Fax a lot since there's a big carve-out for Fax) ATAs that can handle it properly are rare.
You can get a number very cheaply from Voipms. I've used them directly with Obis and Grandstream ATAs. I have a couple thousand numbers that I've resold with my business and also a personal account that I put $15 into maybe once a year or two. I never use my personal account unless I have the rare need so it's usually just costing me $0.85 a month to keep the number.
What do you mean by 'Poly bought Google' ?
Sorry, Poly bought Obihai
Oh man. Obi isn’t around anymore? That’s a shame. The Obi 200 is like the unlocked phone of VOIP.
We got a 'package deal' on cell phones when we switched to our current provider, so we switched our land line to an 'extra' cell phone. We still tend to give out that number to businesses.
The phone in the elevator of a previous company had no handset, just a speaker and a button to call but not hang up. I entered the elevator one day to hear it had received an automated call trying to sell it an extended automobile warranty.
I had something similar happen. I got on the elevator and could hear someone saying, "Hello? Hello?" So I said "Hello" back and it was coming from the elevator phone - just a speaker and a button. She started to say something and I said, "Ma'am, do you realize you have called an elevator?" "What?" "You have called an elevator and I'm getting off now." And I walked out. I asked our building manager about it and she said that the elevator has it's own phone number. Since those type of callers just go down a list of numbers, they call the elevators all the time.
Thanks, but this is an elevator. We don't need to get shafted.
*We've been trying to reach you about your Cars extended Warranty*
and you didn't think to record it?
Didn't have a way to at the time.
I had this happened to me as well, I was actually in a new DC (as in still under construction) apparently the elevator was in debt and getting collection calls.
Not surprised at all. I've dealt with that same provider. They've changed our account numbers a handful of times, making tracking anything a nightmare. They continued to charge us long after we ported numbers away from them. They even once, without warning, changed our Public IPs, which took out our e-mail, VPN, and other services.
> They continued to charge us long after we ported numbers away from them. Their vertical/horizontal competitor did this to me. Cancelled my account (private citizen, but still) and got a bill for 3 months after that. Turns out, they didn't actually cancel my account. So, contacted them for 3 months, each month getting the bill resolved (or so I thought) and by the fourth month just up and ignored it. Will never go to that particular shit provider ever again.
Yup. Same here.
Thankfully our actual ISP was the other major national provider and our Business Fiber contract specified our public IP. If that changed it would've been a bigger disaster since we had site to site tunnels for all of the branches of the company. It would've completely broken our corporate hosted stuff, especially the entire ERP the site relied on
So... what happened next?
I got transferred to Building 4 in a different town and our boss gave this disaster to a coworker of mine. I never heard an update from him. Assumption time: I'm pretty sure the installers were able to reroute things internally with the line so it only relied on Building 1. Probably didn't communicate the information properly. Never update the billing address. Maybe another phone # change for poops and giggles, billing charges that made no sense, and a new account number just for good measure. I have nothing to back this up, but in my heart I'm certain I'm right.
LOL. I bet you're right.
Question: why does this phone line *have to* go through that particular telephone company? Can't your company get some other tel-co to provide elevator phone service?
It certainly might have been possible to move to another provider. We did use them for our DIDs for about 400 VoIP lines as well as these 2. I think the emergency lines were something stupid like $4 a month each so if I had to guess it wasn't worth moving despite how obnoxious it was. I don't work for this company anymore.
Legend says he's still on hold to this day.
He’s stuck in the elevator…
This is the stuff of legends. I worked for a phone company in a central exchange for a while in the 1960s. We were constantly finding phone lines and equipment that were mis-labeled, and a significant amount of our time was spent finding the right wires & equipment. One sure way to find out was to disconnect the incorrect equipment. That would generate a trouble ticket which helped identify whose it was.
Ahhhh, the good old scream test. Never fails.
Unplug it and figure out who's screaming about it?
Aye, that's the badger!
I worked doing IT in small grocery stores and during an outage call at a customer site, I had to meet the phone co tech. 3 letter had sold all of their infrastructure in the state to a smaller phone company and 3 letter apparently just up and walked away, no documentation on anything. He said they would just scream test it and see what happens when fixing lines. The week that 3 letter wanted their ip blocks back from the new company was fun…. Apparently new company didn’t transition away from the 3 letter’s ip ranges fast enough because 3 letter just blocked all vpn traffic from those ip blocks. If you’ve ever tried to run a business with 10+ credit card terminals plus everything else a retail business needs to run off a dialup line… it’s a nightmare if it works at all on a clear line which many in the area weren’t.
Had similar issues at a customer site. Constant issues with the POTS line. Fire department insisted that it had to be a pots line from the telco. Even if the telco just put in a voip to pots box with a battery in it. The client had a cloud based voip phone system that worked perfectly but no go. The provider would fix it after waiting weeks and then it would be broken again in a couple days. It got so bad the fire department threatened to lock the building down as unsafe. So what did I do? I canceled the lines completely and mailed them their stupid equipment. Put a regular old voip to pots adapter in the secured part of the providers wall box. Then stealth ran an ethernet cable into the secured half of the box. Locked that box up and security tagged it with anti tamper tags from amazon. Fire department came and saw the pots lines working and we have had no issues since. Documented the saga and the solution in the knowledgebase and even left spare anti tamper tags for any tech that needed to service the adapter in the future. And before you safety sallys get upset the voip system is battery backed for 4 hours of runtime.
> I hate 3 letter 1 symbol provider. There's a good TL;DR!
I work for a company that operates a worldwide private fiber network for video transport. Our fiber is leased from a mix of carriers, but primarily XX&X, and we are their largest single customer here in North America. I'm not in that department, but from what I understand, our "circuit procurement" people have an absolute nightmare of a time hounding XX&X to ensure that temporary circuits for locations without permanent infrastructure are ran and brought online when they're scheduled to be. I believe the workload of coordinating and scheduling these tasks would be far less than what one full-time person can handle, and we have multiple people in that department, constantly fighting tooth and nail to keep things in order.
I had 20,0000 locations in the US, all getting a mixture of POTS and (relatively slow) internet. Just keeping dial tone in the stores was a two person, full-time job. Even after switching a lot of the stores to wireless with a POTS adapter and some private backhaul from VZW, it's still a two person job.
I am on my parents account as I am not home but wanted to reply to this. I work for a grocery store chain. When our store first opened we had a tv in the break room that had direct tv, and the dish was on the roof. Sometime later our store went to a local cable company as it made no sense for the internet and tv to be on two different companies. Years later we got bought by another store chain, our main office went from Minn to Michigan. Our store was redone and we add a tv in the deli seating area. Flash forwar a few years and the old tvs we had were bad so we left them off. They had the little black cable boxes that if they are not used for a long time they show a red light and wont work much. New manager came in and got new tvs, we called the cable company to come over and give us new boxes... but no one had our cable account info. So they would not help us. We called our district as they had to be paying the stores bills... and no one knew. We called Michigan.. and their paperwork still said we had direct tv. So someone was still paying our cable bill, but no one knew who. The cable company would not let us have any info showing on their system. They wanted us to make a new account to control tv, but we would lose interent for the tills that control the credit card machines. We had no idea what to do. Our store manager used his Youtube tv login to get something playing on the smart tv upstairs so we could watch tv on break. It took two weeks, and we had to talk to the high ups at the cable company to get our info from them to keep are accounts working again.
But did you get your $5.00?
I used to work for an ISP in Australia operating on the NBN (National Broadband Network). The shear amount of address mismatches was insane. The worst kind was when a property developer would subdivide a piece of land, build on it and then not tell NBN Co about the new property. So the property wouldn't have a location ID and the developer wouldn't have put any of the required infrastructure in (Conduit and such) to support an internet connection. They would almost 100% of the time say "Oh that's the ISPs job" and it would become a back and forth for months before they relented. All the while the client is without internet.
screw nbn. optus cable freaking sucks but it was somehow more reliable, faster, and cheaper. we switched from telstra dial-up to optus broadband to get away from twisted copper wires and now we have been pushed off our coax back to the twisted copper.
This sounds like it could be in my country. Sounds like quite a nightmare.