Creeping Digital Revolution

Used to be telephones used wires, wires that were dedicated to telephones. They were completely independent of all other systems. Even if the power went out, the telephone would still work. That was then. Now everyone has a cell phone and nobody has any wires. Except me, till now. It started a few years ago when Verizon brought a fiber optic line to our neighborhood. When we signed over our souls to the devil in return for broadband access to the internet, he also took away our telephone wires. Instead he gave us a little box that hangs on the wall in the garage and converts our nice analog telephone signals into digital bits that get dumped in the fiber optic pipe along with everything else. It has worked fine for several years.

Along with the broadband internet access, we also got some TV, and the TV has been a hundred-dollar-a-month thorn-in-my-side ever since. Now Verizon has sold the fiber business to Frontier, and Frontier has just raised their rates by $30 a month, so now I really want to get shut of them, well, as much as possible. Let's cut it down to the bare minimum: internet access only. But that means doing something about the telephone. I could get a cell phone, but I don't have a pocket to put it in. Besides cell phones are expensive. I could get an internet phone service, but that means some kind of funny hardware to connect my existing phones. You can buy it, but it's not cheap. The boxes are like $200.

Then Verizon comes out with a deal. They will give you a box that will connect your old, land line phones to the cell phone network for $20 a month, and they supply the magic box for free. Being as Vonage, the big name in internet phone service wants $25 a month, and they don't supply any hardware, Verizon's offer sounds like a pretty good deal, so I signed up. The box showed up on my doorstep yesterday and today I plugged it in. It may be a week or so before the connection with Frontier goes away and this thing totally becomes my phone, but so far so good. Notice how it is not plugged into the telephone jack. Too bad we have to use two wall warts to power this assemblage.

Update: One day later, and the land line is dead. Just verified that we can get incoming calls through the new box.

Update 2: Error: the magic box hanging on the wall in the garage was only in use for a short while. It was replaced by a new, combination box on the outside of the garage that split the fiber optic into wires for the telephone and coax for the internet and TV. In order to connect the rest of the telephone extensions to the new magic box in the kitchen, I disconnected the phone line from the old magic box and then plugged the new magic box into the telephone wall jack. Now all the old land line phones are connected to the new magic box, and they all seem to work.