On Wed, 25 Jul 2007 11:12:49 -0700, Jim Stewart
wrote:

Bruce L. Bergman wrote:

Thanks for the warning - if they ever try this on us, I get it in
writing that they leave us one line coming in on good old Copper, and
going straight back to the C.O. with no pair gain in the middle that
doesn't have permanently installed generator backup.

You might get them to agree to leave the
copper in to the curb, but probably not to the
central office. A dirty little secret is
that some central offices don't have enough
copper to some neighborhoods to leave unused
lines connected.

My neighborhood connects to the CO through
some sort of a mux a couple blocks from my
house. Not only is a "dry pair" to the CO
not available, dialup modems can't go faster
than about 22k baud through the mux.

Hook your FAX machine to that line, and when the faxes start failing
to go through you can scream bloody murder about it, and get some real
results. They'll either find you some copper back to the CO, or
connect you with an /integrated/ pair-gain that doesn't do multiple
conversions and goes to a digital port on the CO Switch.

That's the only thing that will get the State PUC on your side of a
service complaint. The Telco could care less about your data
connection speeds, since they want to sell you DSL or ISDN and make
more money (or a Fractional or Full T-1/DS1 line and make Lots Of
Money) - but a FAX machine is expected to work on any decent phone
line. And it won't work if you are on pair-gain or have more than one
A-D - D-A conversion between the two ends of the call.

If they add an A-D at the pair-gain in the field and a D-A at the
switchroom end of the pair-gain before the A-D into the digital phone
network switching equipment, or they try to cheap out on the pair-gain
equipment with too low a bit-rate (restricted audio bandwidth) on the
backhaul, that will kill both data and FAX.

Gee, I guess my time spent splicing *copper* and *lead* phone cables
and installing the *steel* switchroom structure, *lead* storage
batteries and *copper* -48V power busbars counts as 'metalworking', if
you close one eye and squint... ;-)

-- Bruce --