Phone Line Hell

Posted by: Dave Passmore

I needed to migrate my business phone line from an office location to my home residence.  How hard could that be?

After 13 years (and under 3 different company names) working out of the same office park in Sterling, Virginia, it was time to move. We at Burton Group decided to close our Sterling office because all the local analysts in the DC metro area -- including me -- preferred to avoid the traffic and work out of our homes, as virtually all of our other analysts in other geographies do.

For nearly the past decade at this location we’ve used DSL.net (formerly TalkingNets) to provide an IP Centrex service with Cisco 7960 Ethernet phones, bundled with DSL.net’s T1-line Internet service.  We were very early adopters of voice over IP (VoIP), and were generally pleased with the service.  But with the office closing, it was time to install a new business line to my house and port my Sterling office phone number to that location.

No More Copper
The first complication started a month ago when I decided to migrate my home (non-business) phone, Internet access, and television service to Verizon FiOS --replacing a Verizon POTS line, Cox cable broadband, and DirecTV satellite services.  This “triple play” service would not only save money, but provide a better-looking high-def TV picture, and had the potential of unlimited Internet speeds made possible by fiber optics run all the way to my house.  Sounds like a no-brainer, right?

But I told the Verizon salesperson (who actually visited my house) that I would also need to add a business phone line, and wanted to use the existing copper twisted pair wiring for that service, billed separately.  Deep in the woods where I live we’ve had multiple power outages because of trees falling on powerlines, and our copper phone lines continue to work even after loss of electrical service.  In contrast, FiOS voice lines depend on battery backup when the power fails (since optical fiber can’t conduct electricity like copper phone lines), with only 8 hours of service – an important consideration when we’ve experienced power outages that lasted for days.  Our cellphone coverage back in the woods is marginal, so landlines are a necessity for emergencies.  I also have an issue of the phone lines entering the opposite end of my house from where the co-axial cable (and now optical fiber) enter, making it much easier to install a copper phone connection.  When this was all described to the visiting Verizon rep, I was told “No problem – get the FiOS installed first, and then order a business line to use the copper.”

FiOS is now up and running to my house, and has thus far met service expectations.  So last week I called the Verizon business office to order a business phone line.  As soon as they found out I lived in a “FiOS service area,” they redirected my call to a different customer service agent.  First they checked to see if I could port my pre-existing phone number (which I gave them).  After a few minutes of waiting while they checked their database, the answer was  “Yes.”  So far, so good.

But you can imagine what happened next when I requested they use my pre-existing copper circuits for phone line installation: “I’m sorry, but we can’t do that.  If we place an order for a business line in your service area, the installers only know how to provision a new phone line over fiber.  There’s nobody left who knows how to install copper phone lines in your area.”  What?!!! “I’m afraid you should have had us install the business line first (using copper), and THEN installed FiOS for your residential service – then we would have left your copper business line untouched.” I pleaded with the agent to for a copper line, but he claimed to be powerless to change the situation.

The unspoken reality was that Verizon is discontinuing use of copper twisted pair wiring to keep competitors from offering local phone service.  FiOS gives Verizon the perfect vehicle to stifle competition from other carriers who might offer telecom services (e.g., voice, DSL) based on resold copper phone lines.

Foreign Service
After I came to the realization that I’d have to put up with battery backup and considerable in-house rewiring to get a 2nd phone line installed via FiOS, I called Verizon back to place the order. This time I got a different FiOS-area customer service agent, who again had to put me on hold while she checked Verizon’s number portability database.  When she came back, she offered both good and bad news: The good news was that my office number could be ported to my home.  The bad news was that it would cost an extra $154 per month -- every month!! – for my old office number to ring a phone at home.

Here’s why:  My home in Great Falls (about 6 miles from the Sterling office we’re closing) is served by a Verizon central office in Herndon, VA.  The office phone number I was trying to port was a SIP-based VoIP line from DSL.net and hence wasn’t actually handled from any phone company central office.  However, if it were actually served by a Verizon central office, then based on the 3-digit “742” phone exchange, it would be associated with Verizon’s Fairfax/Vienna CO.

So to port my number to my home address (served by the Herndon CO), Verizon would charge me an extra $154/month for an FX (foreign exchange) line.  In the old days, this would have paid for my rental of an actual physical phone circuit between the Herndon and Fairfax/Vienna central offices. All inbound phone calls would have first been routed to Fairfax/Vienna CO based on the first 3 digits of my phone number, and then (using the last 4 digits) forwarded to the Herndon CO for switching to the copper pair serving my house.

Of course phone networks haven’t worked that way for years.  A 30-year-old technical development called Signaling System 7 (SS7) long-ago permitted phone companies to route phone calls by computer via a database lookup, breaking the relationships between COs and phone exchanges.  None of my phone calls would EVER need to be routed to the “foreign” Fairfax/Vienna CO.  SS7-based computers would route inbound calls directly to the Herndon CO, and no phone line would be needed between the two.
So while technology has moved on, unfortunately the TARIFFS by which Verizon (as a regulated local telco) can charge customers, hasn’t.  Verizon can still stick customers with expensive FX line charges, even though they don’t actually provision foreign exchange phone lines between COs anymore.  The carrier has managed to resist efforts by regulators to get rid of this artifact of ancient telephone network architectures.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I told the Verizon rep that I’d have to be nuts to pay that much money for number portability, and she agreed with me.  So much for getting my business number ported to a Verizon phone line…

Juxtaposition
OK, so what else could I do?  Fortunately my local cable company, Cox Communications, was now advertising that it offered residential and business voice phone service.  Where I live, Cox provides this using frequency-division multiplexing of a voice channel over the same coax cable also used for delivery of cable TV channels and cable modem Internet access, i.e., old-fashioned circuit-switching rather than voice over IP.  And…they claimed they could port my business phone number.  How bizarre would that be – getting phone service from the cable company (Cox), while getting cable TV service from the phone company (Verizon with FiOS)?

But then I ran into a snag.  Cox’s phone service comes with most of the value-added services I had become accustomed to at Burton Group’s Sterling office, such as the ability to control the service via a web-based portal (e.g., call forwarding, the ability to send voicemail messages as WAV sound files to your email, etc.).  But the only way Cox lets you access the web-based portal to control your phone line is via their own broadband Internet service.  In other words, unless I signed up for Cox’s Internet access service, I couldn’t control their voice phone service!  Since I already had FiOS Internet access from home, it would be silly to pay for another Internet connection.  So scratch Cox as an alternative…

CallVantage
So if I couldn’t get a facilities-based voice circuit installed to my house with the ability to port my old office number, I was left to consider voice over IP.  I could sign up for one of the many VoIP providers like Vonage, which would permit routing of phone calls over my FiOS Internet connection.  The VoIP provider would ship a media gateway box that would connect via Ethernet to my home network, and provide one or more RJ-11 outlets to which I could plug in an analog phone.  VoIP can work over any broadband Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth, which makes it location-independent, and hence there are many VoIP provider choices.

So being the telecom analyst that I am, I started researching all the VoIP services to see which ones were highly rated by customers.  I’d heard too many “horror stories” from people who had tried these services with poor results.

The consensus reached by many reviewers and users on message boards was that AT&T’s CallVantage has the best VoIP service quality and customer service.  But, I also found out that AT&T had stopped accepting any more new CallVantage customers at the end of August 2008!  No reason for this unusual action has been made public, but it may have something to do with AT&T plans to transition CallVantage customers to it’s U-verse service in the former SBC territories -- but this was just a rumor.  At any rate, I couldn’t sign up for CallVantage.  Bummer.

Verizon offers its own VoIP service called VoiceWing, and interestingly they could port my old business number with that service.  But the customer reviews of VoiceWing service quality were not very encouraging, and I wasn’t crazy about using Verizon after the ridiculous FX fee they tried to charge me earlier.

BroadVoice
So I kept looking, and stumbled on a really interesting VoIP service provider, BroadVoice.  As with other VoIP providers, BroadVoice supplies their customers with media gateway boxes to convert VoIP packets to analog voice to work with regular phones.  But they also have an intriguing option called “BYOD” (bring your own device.) What made BroadVoice’s BYOD service even more attractive is that one of the BYOD devices they support is the Cisco 7960 Ethernet phone running SIP.  As you may recall, this is the VoIP phone I’ve been using for many years, and I really like its high quality speakerphone.

7960s (and other Cisco phones like 7940s) are hard for individual users to install, because they must get their software load from a separate TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) server located somewhere on the IP network.  Whenever the phone is powered up or rebooted, it goes out on the network to grab its software and configuration file from the TFTP server.  This is just fine for large enterprises where the IT department can centrally control all of their phones via TFTP files and enterprise-owned servers.  However, the last thing I wanted to do was to maintain a TFTP server in my house just to be able to use a single Cisco 7960 phone.

So when I learned that BroadVoice supported 7960s, I also found out that they provide the requisite TFTP server as part of their VoIP service.  All you have to do is “point your 7960” to the IP address of BroadVoice’s TFTP server out on the public Internet.  This looked promising.

One hitch was the BroadVoice requires a recent SIP firmware load for 7960s, and our Sterling office 7960s were many years old.  So it took a bit of work to find the right firmware and get it loaded into the phone, figure out the new unlock codes, etc. (a detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this already-too-long blog post).

After this, I took a 7960 phone with the newly-updated firmware home, signed up for BroadVoice’s BYOD service on their website, and configured the 7960 with the required configuration parameters according to directions provided by BroadVoice.

Lo and behold, it worked on the first try!  Not only that, but it works well.  The call quality over Verizon’s FiOS fiber Internet to my home seems to be every bit as good as what I had previously experienced over a T1 line (with QoS turned on at our Cisco router) at the Sterling office.  I’m getting all the goodies, including the ability to simultaneously ring my cellphone (i.e., the simultaneous ring feature), the sending of voicemail messages to my Burton email account as WAV files, caller ID, call waiting, and the message waiting light actually lights up on the phone.  BroadVoice uses the same Broadsoft feature server and hence has a web portal for controlling your voice service that’s nearly identical to what I had been used to with DSL.net.  And the total cost for all these features with unlimited minutes to 35 countries is only $35/month.

So have I finally found voice service nirvana?  Perhaps.  But I’ve got one more step to go.  When I signed up for the BroadVoice service, I “temporarily” established the service using a new phone number, so I could test the service quality and features.  Now I need to see how well BroadVoice’s number portability feature works.  Got my fingers crossed on that one…

- Dave Passmore

Comments

[Unhappy w/Verizon]

Guess What? Please, please stand over the Verizon techs when getting Fios. I asked not to have my copper lines removed and leave them intact. I told the techs not to touch my copper lines at all. They cut them. This was done intentionally. I was livid to say the least.

When I called Verizon, I was given the run around. It is posible to have Fios without cutting or removing your copper lines. You will have to literally stand over the techs and stay in their ear like an annoying little insect.

[Wade]

Dan

I am getting the same bs from Vz regarding foreign exchange charges to keep a 703-318 number in Herndon. I like your solution. Have you since ported your former Sterling number to the VoIP provider? Is it still working well over the FiOS service?

thanks,
- Wade