You've Dropped Your Landline — Now What? 635
smurphmeister writes "My wife and I recently moved up to the world of cell phones, after taking our sweet time to make sure this whole newfangled technology was going to stick around. We moved the old landline phone number to her phone, so we're disconnected from the pole. Now the question is, what to do with the copper already in our house? My first thought was an intercom system, but that just seems so old school! So what ideas do you all have for what to do with the 4 little wires running to every room of my house?"
Use the line to pull other lines into your outlets (Score:5, Interesting)
Use it as a guide line for ethernet.
A few ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Connect it to your computer for music everywhere.
Now a real thought. Do you have, or are you going to have kids. At some point you will have to let the communicate, and a cell phone may not be a good option. If this is the case you may wish in just a few years that you had left the phone lines alone.
Nerdkits (Score:5, Interesting)
One wire network (Score:1, Interesting)
You can run a one wire network which uses 2 wires. There is a range of devices you can read information from, http://owfs.org/.
For example you could run a temperature sensors in each room.
Combined with a tool like http://www.cacti.net/ you can log an ongoing temperature graph.
Combined with X10 http://www.linuxha.com/ you now could act on the information you receive. for example if the room reaches a certain temperature you switch on the fan.
racker79
Free Electricity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A few thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
At any rate I'd make sure you're real sure you like being away from your landline. Give that decision a 6 month wait period before you decide to recycle your wires one way or another.
I dropped my land line a few years ago, and haven't missed it at all.
However now that I own my own house* I'm considering trying to get the cheapest land line service possible. The reason is simply that in the past there have been times when a storm would kill cell phone service, even knock out the power, but phone-over-copper was still up. So something like a $5/mo plan with no built-in long distance just as an emergency backup makes has some appeal. Not a ton of appeal, but some.
Either way, I wouldn't pull my copper just because I was sure I personally didn't want a land line. I wouldn't pull it unless either 1) I knew I was going to be living in that house until I died or 2) I knew that everyone else had dumped their landlines too and thus wouldn't balk** at buying a house with no phone lines.
* Of course there's a bank right now laughing its ass of at that statement, but hey.
** I love this word so much. To me it evokes the image of a skeptical chicken.
Music (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Maybe keep the landline? (Score:4, Interesting)
When the blackouts come only the landlines keep working. When the cell tower batteries run down, after 4 hours or so, there goes your phone.
Here in NYC we get a major blackout every decade or so, even if the larger region does not, so I always keep a landline at the cheapest rate.
Redundancy isn't just for hard drives.
Appletalk! (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet you can find those Farallon dongles on ebay for real cheap.
My mother in law still has an appletalk-ethernet gateway on her shelf.
Multidrop RS-485? (Score:2, Interesting)
Good luck, and don't forget to disconnect your phone lines from the telco before playing with them!
Re:AM radio! (Score:4, Interesting)
I've never heard Chomsky or Mother Jones on the AM radio. I also wouldn't consider your examples "fringe".
Moveon is solidly pro-Democratic party, that's probably to the right of the American people. Democrats support corporate bailouts, drug wars, terror wars, etc. The American people do not.
Chomsky and Mother Jones might be a little to the left of the American mainstream, but would fit right with moderate European social democrats. I'd hardly call that fringe.
If you want to give examples of the radical left, check out crimethinc [crimethinc.com], bash back [wordpress.com], or infoshop.org [infoshop.org].
Re:Sir, step away from the wall jack ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah my last home was custom built. I didn't even have a landline only cable hooked to a VOIP box. Most buyers were like WTF you have no phone lines? I had to explain it to the bidders that wanted me to reduce the house price $5000 because, "they needed to install phone lines." I finally offered to prepay the internet & VOIP bill for the year, a whole $480.
The buyer thanked me when they realized what they got, but it did take some explaining.
New product ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wi-Fi (Score:3, Interesting)
Turn your home into a giant wi-fi antenna. You could then either open it up to other to use, or keep it locked down, and brag to your friends that you can connect to the net from halfway accross the city. Or both.
Emergency lighting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sir, step away from the wall jack ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, that actually happened in the eighteen hundreds...
Re:Use the line to pull other lines into your outl (Score:5, Interesting)
In New Zealand it is standard practice to use cat5e or cat6 when wiring new houses for phone. Some sparkies daisy chain but when I wire houses I star it from a central point.
Since 100baseT ethernet only uses pairs 2 and 3 (orange/white and green/white), you could punch down pairs 2 and 3 on an RJ45 jack and pair 1 (blue/white) on a phone jack.
Better would be to just run 2 cat6 cables to each location, then you can use GigE.
Re:Yes: Removing it may cut your house resale $ (Score:4, Interesting)
That's for sure. I use those "ancient" jacks to access high-speed internet. Although not having telephone jacks would not stop me from buying a house, it would drop my offer a few thousand dollars since I have to deal with the hassle of re-installing the lines.
Also I like having old-fashioned phones in my house, because in an electrical outage, they are the only things that still work.
use the copper to connect your VoIP to handsets (Score:1, Interesting)
Leave the wire in the walls and disconnect it from the telco at the d-marc, then plug your magic jack into it.
(the latter may not support historic mechanical bell phones as ringer loads, but it will enable you to use the old land-line phones transparently.)
You'll save far more per year in not paying the Verizon Tax than the copper is worth.
Throw a party now you've entered the 1990s'
Are you sure you're never going back? (Score:3, Interesting)
We have considered changing over to something like magic jack, because it can cut the price on a service we never use, but I have my reservations due to the way they do 911.
Anyway, the odds of this being relevant to you are low, but the point is that whatever plan you go with, try to make it future-proof. Some things to consider are:
FWIW...