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OT: What happens after ditching long distance?

J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
T said:
Yes they can. They can just set the COS on the line to no LD/PIC access.
It'll either jump to reorder or play a message that LD access on the
line is disabled, to dial 101+ or what have you.

Isn't a jump to reorder without my authorization called slamming? Maybe
it needs a registered mail letter to tell them never to do that.

Interesting. That's going over a VoIP gateway somewhere I'm sure. Vonage
also has other plans that cover more of Europe for a relatively small
fee per month of unlimited usage.

I completely forgot about that.


I sure doesn't sound like VoIP. Those long packet latencies don't show up.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joe said:
David said:
So, what happens after I cancel all long distance service? What if a
client accidentally picks up the phone and dials out to New Jersey or
to Asia? Local long distance? Can that result in a humongous bill or
will the phone just refuse to dial out?
If you cancel, there's no account to run up.

I use USAdatanet.com service; no min, no monthly charge. It's <5c/min,
which sounds high; but I use $25 per year so the lack of fixed charges
is crucial.

You call a local # [I use a speed dialer.] and then your #.
We use 1019898, it's 10c for the first minute to connect, then 2c or so to
many places in Europe. No monthly charge. Intra-US it's roughly the same
AFAIK but I don't know because there we use CostCo phone cards. Sprint,
Verizon, whatever is the best deal.

The audio quality is excellent, definitely not VoIP. I wonder how they do
that for 2c/min. Sometimes they have specials to Southern Europe for
0.5c/min. Blows me away.

It could be VoIP. If they have good BW, good QoS and a SLA to back it up.
Most likely though is they buy the minutes wholesale or from a wholesaler.
These guys will buy a million minutes from a LD provider. Pennies and
fraction of pennies add up when you are dealing with millions. Plus
their overhead can be real low so they dont have to make much on a per
minute basis.

Sure, but they still have to pay something to Missy Bell because that's
where how the bill comes and is collected.
 
K

krw

Jan 1, 1970
0
Ok, guys, got another AT&T bill and I just had it. Charged a minimum fee
for under-usage, plus this, that and the other "recovery fee". IOW
almost $20 for long distance while no long distance calls where made.
None! Let's see, how much is that per minute? $20 divided by zero ...

Not much money but this stinks. We use 1019898 + number anyhow, gets 2c
to many EU countries and so on. No idea whether it'll last but I bet if
not there will be others.

So, what happens after I cancel all long distance service? What if a
client accidentally picks up the phone and dials out to New Jersey or to
Asia? Local long distance? Can that result in a humongous bill or will
the phone just refuse to dial out?

We packed in the land line and long distance charges years ago. Two
cell phones cost us about the same as just the local charges on the
land line did.
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
krw said:
We packed in the land line and long distance charges years ago. Two
cell phones cost us about the same as just the local charges on the
land line did.

Out here you wouldn't really want to do that. A friend who did has to go
into his front yard every hour or so to see if someone left a message.
Inside the signal strength is between zero and one "bars". No fun when
it's cold or rainy.
 
DD-WRT, FreeRadius, phpMyPrepaid...?

[added alt.internet.wireless]

I wish I had seen that article when I was first learning to set it up.
That's close to what I'm doing. DD-WRT MySQL and FreeRadius (on an
internet connected server). I didn't know about phpMyPrepaid and will
certainly try it out quite soon. Looks like the author has gone into
business providing remote authentication:
<http://swarmhotspots.com>

However, that's not the tricks I was referring to. Briefly:

1. Use a short DHCP expire interval. 1 hour is about right. The
problem is that passerbys and transient users rapidly fill up the MAC
address table with junk. After about 256 entries, things start to
break.

2. In DD-WRT, there's a check box somewhere that controls whether the
DHCP lease table is saved to NVRAM. Don't check it. The lease table
fills up fast and can also get cluttered with stale entries. Power
cycling should be able to clear the table and start over. If it were
saved, the garbage becomes almost permanent.

3. Keep the TX power low. Far too many freeloaders in the parking
lot.

4. Put the router or access points where the customers can see the
flashing lights. If they can see the traffic moving, they don't ask
the staff questions like "is the internet down".

5. Setup a reset button that cycles the power to the DSL modem,
router, and wireless. X10 controllers are tolerable. So is a common
AC power strip. The idea is to make it easy for the staff to cycle
the power and not force them to unplug wall warts and such.

I hope this helps.

--
Jeff Liebermann [email protected]
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558



Ah, thanks. I wasn't aware of (1) and (2).

For (5), since you're using a Linux box, does it matter if it's
powered down properly or not? 'shutdown -h now' and all that...?

Michael
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Michael said:
Tell him to build a passive repeater out of a pair of Yagi antennas
and some coax.

That would require some major prep work with the chain saw and log
splitter, plus he'd have to sit precisely in one spot.
 

neon

Oct 21, 2006
1,325
Joined
Oct 21, 2006
Messages
1,325
GET SMART. Go to magicjack.com $50 to buy it and use USB to talk to anywhere in the world for free all you want anytime you want. you get voice mail by calling your # . drawback little must use your pc TO call. ATT was renting phones forever at ridiculous prices i paid so did everyone else but no more .
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jeff said:
I've setup outside antennas for such situations. I can usually
install a suitable antenna in a tree or on the roof. I do better with
the 800MHz antennas than with the 1900MHz variety. Biquad seems to
work well. Yagi's are a pain in the posterior, but they can be bought
commerically. Put something on the roof, run LMR-400 coax to an N
connector. From there, a pigtail adapter to the cell phone or docking
station. For a really cool installation, some docking stations have
an RJ-11 phone jack, where an ordinary POTS phone can be used. Plug
in a cordless phone, and he'll have "cellular" service around the
house. The newer adapters use BlueGoof to simulate a headset, so
there's no need for a custom cable.
<http://www.phonelabs.com/prd05.asp>

The catch is that many of todays cell phones do not have an external
antenna jack. For those, I've done tolerably well with a loop pickup,
or a nearby patch antenna. It has to be close and in the near field
or it becomes a "passive repeater" with the accompanying loss issues.
I've also played with ceramic patch antennas, which are much smaller,
with fair results.

The best such antenna coupler I've built was a resonant cavity with a
loop pickup inside. Almost all of the RF from the xmitter went to the
coax connector (as measured by my spectrum analyzer). However, the
customer wanted to see the display on the phone, which was difficult
to do. Tuning stability was also an issue as the cavity required
retuning for each style of phone. Great idea technically, but
useless.

There are also in building repeaters:
<http://www.wilsonelectronics.com////Products.php?Type=B>
<http://www.wilsonelectronics.com/ListProducts.php?Type=7>

If all else fails, have him install a flagpole or tower. Attach a
long cord to the phone for power and headset audio. Place inside a
plastic Tupperware tub, and hoist it to the top of the tower. Instant
extended range. It's much easier to run DC and audio than RF. If he
needs to go anywhere, just lower the package to ground level. If
environmental issues are a problem, just make sure he has a good
warranty on the phone. (Note: the average lifetime of a cell phone is
about 18 months). Hmmm.... I should patent this idea.

I've read about many of those techniques in the past. Some legal, some
borderline, some outright illegal such as booster amps. But at the end
of the day you have just turned an untethered cell phone into a really,
really expensive POTS device. Plus maybe a royal back pain from climbing
that old pine tree, sap that won't come out of the clothes anymore, a
rash from the poison oak at its bottom, and so on.

What I recommended to my friend was to get a real telephone. I think
Walmart has them for ten bucks and you never get a low battery warning
or overage because of too many lengthy local calls on those ;-)
 
There are two types of RADIUS servers that I'm tinkering with. One is
a local RADIUS server at the coffee shop location. It doesn't have a
keyboard on which to type the proper shutdown incantation. All admin
is done with SSH or HTML. I make sure that write caching to the hard
disk is disabled. EXT3 is a journaling filesystem, which recovers
nicely from unexpected power failures. I'm currently using a PC104
SBC (single board computah) for the RADIUS server, running from a 2GB
CF (compact flash) card. I twice managed to trash some syslog junk
that I was storing locally, but otherwise, it seems reliable. One
location has utility power problems and I get about 5 reboots per
week. Good enough, but with only one live system, it's really too
soon to tell.

So far, I haven't lost any "sectors" on the CF cards. In anticipation
of a CF card drive failure, I have 2 spares sitting next to each
machine. When all else fails, or I can't login remotely, I have them
swap CF cards. That causes lots of problems with dropped connections
and authentication failures, so I save that for special occasions.

I'm also working on a mini-ITX version, as my supply of cheap PC-104
boards has hit zero.
<http://www.mini-itx.com>


How much do those PC-104 boards / systems cost?

Disable write-caching, use ext3... I'll keep that in mind.

Thanks,

Michael
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jeff said:
Legal will cost you extra. I usually look for the FCC type
certification sticker, but even those are being counterfeited.

Yet anther wireless "extender".
<http://www.wi-ex.com>
I checked the FCC ID grantee search and found nothing under Wi-Ex or
zBoost. Oh-oh.

However, I did find various products made by Digital Antenna that do
have FCC ID numbers and are listed on the FCC ID web mess.
(Prefix=PZO):
<http://www.digitalantenna.com/prods/cellbooster_4KMR-10A_vehiclerepeater.html>

Sure, but that seems to be a lot of trouble just to get to the
performance POTS already had almost a century ago ;-)

Not really. Unlike buying a monthly service, like POTS, cellular, or
VoIP, adding an outside antenna is a one time capital expense, with a
rather long service life, and can be amortized over the service life
of many cell phones. Think of it as an investment. As for the
cordless phone, those are commodity hardware found at any big box
store for next to nothing. I don't see the expense. Incidentally,
the purpose of my suggestions was to turn the cell phone into a POTS
device.

Monthly service on POTS is under $20. Our friends who went cell pay
$40-50 per month. Except me and my cell which is pre-pay. That's only
about $5/mo but not if I'd use it for all the local calls. Those don't
cost extra on POTS.

I haven't climbed a tree or phone pole for perhaps 15 years and have
no intention of doing so again. (Don't ask about tower climbing and
rooftop installs). Anyway, I pay the certified tower climbers and
insured tree climbers to risk their lives these days. It takes less
time for me to recover from the financial pains, than from a fall.

Same here. My back ain't too great anymore. I don't want to get stuck up
there and suddenly can't move.

Like I suggested previously, VoIP is often cheaper.

Speaking of internet connected cell phones, there are also Femto
Cellular:
<http://www.femtoforum.org>
Install a cell site in your house.

That would require that you are either at a home, in a Starbucks or near
a home with unsecured WLAN (which in and of itself is legally iffy).
 
C

Charlie E.

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim said:
What do you mean "local". It's long distance... not the
multi-area-code Californicated crap. We have 4 area codes in the
Phoenix metro area, but they're free of charge, no "1" required.

That's very different out here. IIRC only a 12-mile radius is free, give
or take. Our area code 530 spreads much wider plus some numbers are
assigned to Davis, clear across on the other side of Sacramento and its
916 area code. That and much of our area will be toll calls.

[...]
Hi Jeorge,
Well, we went for the 'all in one' plan, that includes all you want
domestic long distance on the line. Easier to budget that way. Plus,
we have a second line on Vonage that includes our 877 number. Since
we got off cable modem and went to DSL, the Vonage line has been fine!

BTW, IIRC you HAVE to designate a long distance carrier. It just
doesn't HAVE to be ATT...
 
J

Joerg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Charlie said:
Jim said:
On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:01:08 -0700, Joerg

Jim Thompson wrote:
On Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:30:46 -0700, Joerg

Ok, guys, got another AT&T bill and I just had it. Charged a minimum fee
for under-usage, plus this, that and the other "recovery fee". IOW
almost $20 for long distance while no long distance calls where made.
How much of that is Californication taxes?

About half.


I have AT&T and average about $5-$6/month.

Only local? Even that's a lot more here.
What do you mean "local". It's long distance... not the
multi-area-code Californicated crap. We have 4 area codes in the
Phoenix metro area, but they're free of charge, no "1" required.
That's very different out here. IIRC only a 12-mile radius is free, give
or take. Our area code 530 spreads much wider plus some numbers are
assigned to Davis, clear across on the other side of Sacramento and its
916 area code. That and much of our area will be toll calls.

[...]
Hi Jeorge,
Well, we went for the 'all in one' plan, that includes all you want
domestic long distance on the line. Easier to budget that way. Plus,
we have a second line on Vonage that includes our 877 number. Since
we got off cable modem and went to DSL, the Vonage line has been fine!

BTW, IIRC you HAVE to designate a long distance carrier. It just
doesn't HAVE to be ATT...


Nope, don't have to. I just cancelled long distance for this here phone.
Had to call two different (!) AT&T companies, one to cancel LD and the
other to cancel the plans we had. No idea why they don't talk to each other.

They charged a fee of $3.98 for the privilege to cancel!! Does anyone
monitor monopolies these days?

Anyhow, now we will be using a 10-10 number for LD. About 2c/minute to
places like Europe. Why on earth can nobody offer that just as a
designated long distance provider so you don't have to pre-dial a 10-190
number? If the 10-10 guys can that means there must be enough bandwidth
available at the matching wholesale price level.

BTW, one guy at AT&T asked me if I was unhappy. I said yes, because of
being slapped a min charge but that this ain't the main reason. "Oh, and
do you have another opportunity to call long distance?" ... "Yes" ...
"Well, we could offer you a better rate at xx/min plus x Dollars
monthly, can I interest you in this" ... "Thanks, but not right now, we
pay no monthly fee and $0.02 to Europe" ..... *THUD*. That really
floored him.
 
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