Twelve days ago I asked the question, “Do I cut the landline cord and move my new home phone number into the cloud?“, and the responses have been great to read. Today, I can write the answer…
No, I will NOT cut the cord.
Around noon today my landline in Keene should be installed by Fairpoint Communications (who recently bought all of Verizon’s landline business in Maine, NH and Vermont).
Why did I finally give in and get a landline installed? Four reasons:
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FAX – Unbelievably to me, perhaps the primary reason for keeping a landline is an old archaic technology that I absolutely can’t stand… fax. This was brought home to me during the process of closing on the purchase of our Keene home and the sale of our Burlington home. As much as we may hate it, there are still some transactions that require fax. There were documents that had to be faxed to the bank. Documents that had to be faxed to lawyers. Documents that had to be faxed to real estate agents. To contractors.
To a techie like me, it was unbelievably annoying not to be able to simply use email. But in many cases, it came down to this:
Documents required our signatures.
Because we still haven’t come up with an agreed upon “digital signature”, we as a society rely on good old hand-written signatures.
Now in some cases I was able to scan in those documents and email them off. But not everyone would accept those documents by email. Some of the folks I had to interact with needed them by fax. There were also times when fax was admittedly faster than scanning in the doc and attaching it to an email message (and perhaps I need a better scanning solution). Just put the pages in the document feeder, punch in the number and hit send.
Now I know there are solutions like eFax (which I use for inbound faxes) but I haven’t yet found one that works in the way I need it. I’ve also seen that fax over VoIP lines doesn’t always work well. So for the few times a year when I need fax, I seem to need a landline. (And the problem is that typically when I need to fax something, I really need to fax it for some critical reason.)
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911 – As was mentioned in the comments to my original post, “guaranteed” access to 911 is certainly a consideration. Not as much for my wife and I as for our daughter or visitors/guests. My wife and I can pick up our cell phones and dial 911. But if something were ever to happen to one of us, I want our daughter, or anyone else visiting us, to be able to simply pick up a phone and dial 911 and have the emergency services come.
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DSL – My choices for Internet access in Keene basically come down to Time Warner Cable or DSL. Since I’ve been using them since the early 1990’s back in the dialup / uucp ages, I’m going to be going back to using local ISP MV Communications (who is even now still handling all my personal email) for DSL access. The thing is that getting DSL is easier with a landline. The MV folks said they can do a “standalone” install without an actual phone line that I’m paying for (as I understand it, they would basically have the link they need installed) and if the reasons above didn’t enter the picture I’d probably pursue it.
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The Cloud isn’t quite ready – After writing my last post, I spent a good chunk of time trying to figure out how I could get this to work. How could I build my “abstraction layer”? Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my last post, the only service I could find today that gets you most of the way there is GrandCentral, but it still has problems. For instance, I have this perhaps archaic desire to have an area code 603 phone number and GC doesn’t have any. I also don’t want to have to press “1” to accept a call on a given phone. I just want to answer.
So it seems like I would have to build my own. Now the pieces are certainly there. I can get phone numbers from any number of SIP providers (although perhaps not my desired 603). I can get call-in numbers for services like Skype or Yahoo (or AIM or MSN or Gizmo). Heck, I can build much of the abstraction layer using Voxeo’s app platform (and I probably will as an experiment). Write some CCXML scripts and away we go.
But the question is – in the midst of everything else I am trying to do – do I really want to be building and *maintaining* a phone number abstraction layer for my home phone? (And the equally important corollary: do I really want to be responsible for it when it inevitably breaks when I’m off on a business trip and suddenly my wife can’t get calls at home?)
No, I don’t.
Now maybe there are other services out there that I don’t know about (feel free to pitch me in the comments if you offer one), but for the moment I think I’ll let the cloud evolve a bit more. We’ll see… maybe in six months or a year there will be better options out there.
So that’s the scoop. For the moment, I’ve got a landline. We’re paying the extremely basic rate plan (where if I make any long distance calls on it they are at 12 cents a minute!) and we’ll see how it goes.
Fun, fun, fun…
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phones, phone numbers, voip, sip, telephony, telecommunications, grandcentral, google
i do not believe the following to have any legal truth; but it has been told to me over and over by many very educated professionals: ‘a fax is a legally binding document; an email is not(even when signed and scanned into a document file).’ even at a large very modern company that i work there are many daily situations where faxes are used and emails would be considered out of the question.
“Because we still haven’t come up with an agreed upon “digital signature”, we as a society rely on good old hand-written signatures. “…
.. I’d argue that we HAVE agreed upon a ‘digital signature standard’ – the standard is a legal standard called the Federal ESIGN Act.
ESIGN gives the same weight to a properly executed electronic signaure as a pen/paper ‘wet ink’ signature. ESIGN goes as far as to say that one cannot deny a contract just because it is in an electronic form, as long as the process used complies with ESIGN. Several options exist in the market for this, the largest being DocuSign. Using DocuSign you can send any document that you might have otherwise printed for signature to anyone in the world using only a browser.
Compared to FAX, DocuSign provides a much more ‘green’ solution, staying digital end-end, and it is much much more secure.
I’d take the need to ‘sign’ off your list of reasons why you can’t cut the cord. I have not had a fax machine OR EVEN A PRINTER at home for years. And no home phone either…
@Tgonser – Oh, I will NOT argue with you that there *are* electronic signature options out there. There certainly are – and thanks for the info about DocuSign. However, as a wider *society*, those electronic signatures are not yet widely distributed. In my communication with multiple banks, multiple real estate agents, title agents, builders and architects, all of them required signatures – but NONE were equipped to work with electronic signatures. I look forward to the day when they are, but right now, I’m not seeing many yet.
Thanks for your comments,
Dan
Over the past few months PamFax (www.pamfax.biz), which accepts both scanned and PC-based documents, has become my choice for faxing. PamFax’s cost and my usage level would not justify a phone line’s cost. On the other had, for you Dan, PamConsult would have to create a Mac version. (Since PamFax is largely browser based, the major issue would be to create a Mac “printer”.)
As for the more general availability of a landline, I have just cut the monthly costs of my home phone by 50% by switching from Bell Canada to Rogers Home Phone with additional services (especially for handling voice mail).
This is a timely discussion for many people, I expect. We’re in the process of moving from GA to FL, and although I’ve been in the FL house for almost two months now, we haven’t yet splurged on the land line. It is astonishing how fax rears its head, just when you think you’ll NEVER use it, isn’t it? Closing on the house purchase, it was very useful; I can only imagine it would be a nice idea when (hopefully) closing on the associated and necessary house sale! But I am also wondering about long-distance charges and “local” calls. Yeah, yeah, everybody has a plan that makes the area codes moot… but I guess I am superstitious, and I wonder if others are equally as superstitious – in other words, will they hesitate to call, because my area code is different than the expected number?
Very interesting and I agree. I am about to move too and will be ordering a land line too. Thanks.
But I think there is needs to be more discussion about the Internet.
DSL or Cable.
They are about the same price, but DSL is “up to 1.5 Mbps” downloads and cable is “up to 4 Mbps” downloads. So on the surface cable wins. However, I cam across one post that suggested the jitter factor on DSL is far superior for VoIP. I intend to have several VoIP circuits at home, so does anyone have any data if DSL is preferred over cable?
Wow 12 cents a minute… pretty steep when the wholesale prices is closer to 1 cent or less.
Dan – that reminds me of a 1996 article by Harry Newton in CTI Magazine. Harry noted that telephone minutes is the only commodity that you can buy for 2 cents or for 2 dollars and get the same product!
That article got me interested in VoIP and here I am today!
A lot of people are starting to cut the cord in the UK.
It is estimated that 10% of households now do not have a landline. These are switching to mobiles and in the past few months to mobile 3g internet connection.
This ws first predicted by Hutchinson in around 1989. At the time I couldn’t see it, but it looks like it is finally starting to happen.
Why not just paste your signature (gif) onto the document instead of printing the doc (e.g., contract), signing with ink, scanning, and then e-mailing as attachment?
I only handsign a doc if it’s not available as an e-file. Otherwise, I just paste my signature then send that document by fax (i.e., to the company’s fax machine). That satisfies that company’s need to receive the document, with my signature, by fax. If you already have efax, why not do that? I too have an electronic fax service (Faxaway) which I use to both receive and send documents. My occasional need for fax (once or twice a month) doesn’t warrant paying over CAD$26 to maintain a landline since I pay Faxaway under CAD$2 to receive/send faxes per month.
In my last place, I had cable internet and decided to not get a phone line. I got a SIP adapter and used a VoIP service, a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) arrangement.
Now, generally it worked OK. The calls were super cheap. But every now and then the quality would go bad. I would spend time troubleshooting. For me, it was an adventure. For my girlfriend, it was just really annoying.
For my new place, I decided to get DSL — mostly because I could get it for much cheaper than cable. I could have gotten ‘naked’ DSL — but at a higher cost. I would pay $5 more a month. I got the really basic (“message rate”) service, where I get up to 75 outgoing calls a month and anything over that is 10 cents a call (I’ve never approached that). For long distance I have bigredwire.com, which uses Qwest. They don’t charge a monthly fee or a minimum, just what I use. And it’s like 2.6 cents per minute in the states. That’s twice what the SIP provider charged, but still pretty cheap. My local phone service (because it’s bare bones — no caller ID or any added features), is about $12 a month.
For now, I really like this setup. I was getting tired of being the household ‘phone man’. I work in IT and do plenty of ‘fixing’ at work. Unless you do a *lot* of long distance calling, VoIP for the household seems like a wash. If I were running a small business, I’d utilize VoIP — but I would keep a landline as a backup.
As much as I love playing with the newest thing, sometimes an older technology is the best solution. Incidentally, I have played around with VoIP in the new place, and the quality seems a lot more consistent under DSL.
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