Bye Bye NBX, Bye Bye PSTN

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It's been six days. No IP PBX in the basement. No DS-0 in the wall. No IP phones on the counter, on the night stand, or in my home office. We're a DSL and wireless business now. Kinda quiet and uncluttered.

It was really about time. My college-aged daughters are all mobile (and call their mother's mobile for free), my teen-aged sons are all mobile, and my business is all mobile. Verizon was a little annoying since they made me change IP addresses because the residential dialtone service on a static IP DSL loop is on a different network. Arghhh. 

So we made arrangements to get the new loop installed to the house, then once in place in a satisfactory way, call to disconnect the old circuit. Now, this was done only because the Verizon call center people said it was necessary. I really just wanted to cancel the dialtone, but leave the DSL loop.

Well, when my Verizon tech came to install, he just went ahead and cut the wires and set me up with my new dryloop. Of course, he thought it was silly that I had to change everything too. Fortunately, my Internet service was only offline for an hour or so, early in the morning, so it wasn't too painful. I called and canceled the dialtone service.

Note to self: don't make unnecessary changes to the phone company interface! It will hurt.

So, economically, my service fees went from about $151/month (DSL, static IP, dialtone, free calls to Canada, voicemail, LD in USA, call waiting) including tax galore, to $89/month just for the DSL and static IP address. This also freed up bandwidth on our Wireless LAN (since all phones were on the WiFi interface) and significantly reduced the power consumption in our home. Six phones, three wireless bridges all chewed up more than a few Watts.

For inbound calls, people reach my mobile. For outbound calls I can dial with my mobile or use SkypeOut service. I paid $25/year for all the outbound dialing I can eat. With the latest rev for Mac, the client seems to be better quality, although I'm thinking it is time-of-day dependent. Late afternoon East Coast time seems to experience more packet loss and delay.