The real tip off is the dog goes nuts when those switchers turn on
in the UPS. Evidently he can hear the 25kz or so.

When my UPS switches to battery power it clicks a relay and turns on a
fan. So it's easy to tell when it's running off the battery.

It's annoying when the power blips on and off quickly, such as when a
branch is on a powerline or something. Click-click-click-click....

As for phones, they will pry my POTS line and my Western Electric
phone out of my cold dead hands. It always works.

I couldn't wait to ditch our POTS line. They charged $100 a month,
everywhere was a long distance fee, and we had zero features (caller ID,
call blocking, etc.).

I switched to VOIP for $20 a month, free long distance, and a full array
of features. I haven't regretted it for a minute.

My AOL dial up line always works too. I am not going to be streaming
Netflix but I can get out an Email. Actually the DSL is almost as solid
as the POTS.

Dial-up was my only option until Comcast brought their lines out. We
can't get DSL, the forest blocks satellite signals, and our hilly terrain
and distance blocks wireless signals. We can barely even get cell signals
here.

Of course, my only dial-up option back then was long distance, so it got
really expensive.

Cable? ... not so much. I had to fire Comcast because they were down
so often and out so long when they went.

Our Comcast service has been very reliable. We've probably had fewer than
5 outages in the last 10 years, and most of those have lasted less than
30 minutes. Our longest outage was about 4-6 hours.

That said, I did have issues with weak signals when I was splitting the
signal to my cable modem and TV tuners. Comcast tried boosting the signal
slightly, but said it was within "recommended specs". The TV's would
often drop out, my computer tuners would lose the signal and stop
recording, and my cable modem would drop out frequently. Thankfully,
once I dropped cable TV and just use Comcast for internet, I haven't had
any issues. The cable line now runs directly to my cable modem, that's
it.

Anthony Watson
www.watsondiy.com
www.mountainsoftware.com