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VCSMaster
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Joined: 25 May 2025
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Location: Southeastern USA
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 Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2026 1:52 am Post subject: Call your local CLECs |
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For anyone interested in phones, you may have noticed that actually getting real phone service is becoming dramatically more difficult in 2025/6 and beyond.
When I moved to my new house here in March 2025, AT&T refused to bring me a landline, even though I have existing wiring (house built in 1947) and live less than 2 miles from the nearest physical exchange. There are still pedestals with bundles in them, even.
AT&T told me time and time again that there was no way to get me POTS, because the service was "Not available in my area." The local utilities board told me that if AT&T said they couldn't, there was nothing they could do, but offered me a VoIP ATA if I signed up with them for internet.
Well, out of options at the time, since I could not find who my local CLEC was or if any even existed, I wound up getting a VoCa line from Spectrum. It works fairly well, and the telephone number lookup services suspiciously report the other end as connected to a DMS-100.
Looking around, I found out that not only does my local CO actually still contain a real DMS-100, but that another company has access to it! A semilocal carrier called Terra Nova Telecom was listed as a competitive carrier.
My jaw dropped when I called them this morning, one of their technicians told me that not only do they have access to the DMS-100, not only will they be willing to bring me a POTS line or two, but that there is a strong chance they would be willing to bring me a real PRI or two!
I have sent them some details about the pedestal nearest my house and the information on my terminating equipment, and they have told me that they will get back to me on the feasibility of running me such service.
Needless to say, I am very excited about the prospect of potentially getting REAL copper lines in 2026 from a REAL switch, including the possibility of real telco PRIs instead of just simulated, home grown ones!
I will be sure to keep everyone updated on this saga, but this is a reminder to enthusiasts out there to seriously look up your local CO and see who all is allowed inside! You might find a company willing to bend the rules and bring you proper service, even today. |
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europa
Gorts
Joined: 16 Aug 2025
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| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2026 3:46 am Post subject: |
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Did they give you a quote on what the service would cost? My understanding is that POTS lines these days, when available, are pretty pricey.
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VCSMaster
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| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2026 4:04 am Post subject: |
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| europa wrote: | | Did they give you a quote on what the service would cost? My understanding is that POTS lines these days, when available, are pretty pricey. |
They did not, I am hoping it will not be horrible. I will update the thread when I find out. |
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europa
Gorts
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| Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2026 7:04 am Post subject: |
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Epic, I await that update eagerly. I'd love to have a POTS line eventually, but pricing is the main limitation for me.
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VCSMaster
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| Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2026 2:34 am Post subject: |
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| europa wrote: | | Epic, I await that update eagerly. I'd love to have a POTS line eventually, but pricing is the main limitation for me. |
Well, if you aren't concerned with being tied to a "real" switch like I want, there are some VoIP setups out there that can give you a pretty good line for phone use, and there are some guides on shoehorning modems into working on them. A decent VoIP service might be single digit dollars monthly depending on your usage.
If you're like me but less able to get real copper, if you have Charter Spectrum cable in your area, they offer a "proper" VoCa line, which ties to a real switch at the other end and just imposes that over your DOCSIS connection. This is good enough to ring real bells in multiple phones, supposed pulse dialing, and it's good enough that I've been able to get decent speeds reasonably stable with my modems in many cases. It's also been successful at processing international faxes (as far as Germany). It's not perfect but it is a good way there.
Oh, and they can provide two lines of that service with their standard modem, and four if you tell them you're starting a business from your house. They're $12/mo each with, as far as I am aware, unlimited local and international calling included. I wasn't charged a dime for several 300dpi multipage faxes to Germany, at least. |
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europa
Gorts
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| Posted: Fri Jan 16, 2026 4:17 am Post subject: |
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That's good to know - I remember I had some success with Mediacom's phone service when it came to modems back when I had that. Granted, though, that was years ago, and I of course had the degradation in speed (I think in my testing I only ever maxed out at around 33kBps when dialing from my ThinkPad's internal modem).
I'm moving in a couple months, so I'll have to see what's available in my new area then. If nothing else I can always go the ATA route, but you do gain some part of the experience when you can plug directly into the wall.
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nick99nack
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| Posted: Mon Jan 19, 2026 9:51 pm Post subject: |
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That is awesome. I don't even know if I have a CLEC in this area, but this is something I'd love to have. I'm very much looking forward to the pricing update, whenever you have one.
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VCSMaster
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| Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2026 8:23 pm Post subject: |
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I mentioned this on the TSP Discord and my own, but I was quoted $550/mo for a PRI. Little out of my price range considering that's half my mortgage!
The particular company I called was VERY happy to try and offer me all kinds of services, even so far as offering N carrier over coax.
Still worth calling around, I think. |
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VCSMaster
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Location: Southeastern USA
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| Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2026 8:26 pm Post subject: |
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| europa wrote: | That's good to know - I remember I had some success with Mediacom's phone service when it came to modems back when I had that. Granted, though, that was years ago, and I of course had the degradation in speed (I think in my testing I only ever maxed out at around 33kBps when dialing from my ThinkPad's internal modem).
I'm moving in a couple months, so I'll have to see what's available in my new area then. If nothing else I can always go the ATA route, but you do gain some part of the experience when you can plug directly into the wall. |
33.6K is absolutely a hard limitation of analog modems if you have certain types of telephone network conditions. You pretty much have to have a perfect route or be doing local calling to get anything faster (there can only be one DA conversion in a call to get hybrid connections, needed for PCM)
I have a friend who is a cable TV installer who was willing to put structured cabling in my house in exchange for pizza and beer, if I bought the materials. So even my Adtran has connections to every room you can just plug into the walls. I recommend avoiding the low cost ATAs for most purposes, do it right and get a TA604 or something at the least. Run your whole house from a PBX! |
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europa
Gorts
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| Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2026 9:08 pm Post subject: |
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Good to know, thanks! Yeah, I've heard stuff about 33.6 being the highest you can go. I think that's the highest I've been able to achieve when I was playing around with dial-up over my parents' cable internet/phone service.
Running my entire house from a PBX would be really neat, even if I (in theory) would really only need it in one or two rooms lol. I'm still looking at options, but I'll have to report back with my setup when I eventually get everything sorted out. I'm moving in with my dad next month, and I think his fiber provider can give phone service, so I might try to convince my dad to add a phone line or two if nothing else.
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VCSMaster
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| Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2026 9:51 pm Post subject: |
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| europa wrote: | | Good to know, thanks! Yeah, I've heard stuff about 33.6 being the highest you can go. I think that's the highest I've been able to achieve when I was playing around with dial-up over my parents' cable internet/phone service. |
It's a technical limitation of the telephone network, or was when modems and their protocols were being designed. By the 90s, AT&T had almost entirely transitioned to a fully digital network, with analog lines only for the "last mile" to a customer's location, so to speak. This meant that customers had a DAC-ADC pair on every line. AT&T's digital network ran on banks of digital channels, called DS0, which are an 8-bit audio channel sampled at 8KHz (hence the 64KBit connection per bearer on ISDN). Simply due to the nature of electronics, AT&T's 8-bit DACs were *much* more accurate than the 8-bit ADCs. If you talk to old phone nerds from the 70s when this system started coming around in big way, you'll hear them say things like "Digital fuzz," noise and approximations of the analog signal that came from the ADCs. AT&T also harshly filtered incoming signals to 4KHz. Both of these severely limited bandwidth.
During the mid 90s when v.34 was being designed, it was found that you could kinda-sorta work around some of the approximation noise if you used a special pattern (called a Trellis code) to space your changes apart over time. Extremely math-y stuff. A later revision of the v.34 spec found a slightly more efficient version of Trellis code which pushed up from 28.8K to 33.6K.
Unfortunately, one thing that there was simply NO way around was the 4KHz filters. No matter what, the network was limited to a 4KHz band pass, usually even less in practice. It was found that the maximum reasonable baud rate was thus 3429. No way around it.
Well... What if you weren't *outside* the Telco network? Computers are digital anyways, why are we doing this ugly analog conversion step? We can't put the customer's computer and modem in the telco CO... But we *can* put the host side! And thus the concept of a hybrid modem connection was born!
USRobotics introduced X2 and Lucent introduced K56Flex very close together, having come to the same conclusion. Both X2 and K56Flex used digital trunks, CT1s or PRIs to directly connect to AT&T's digital telephone network at the digital level. Due to the accuracy of the DACs, the full 8KHz signal could be pushed with a high degree of reliability down the analog side. But only in one direction! The uplink was still limited by the ADC.
Ultimately, K56Flex saw more uptake than X2 and wound up being chosen by the ITU-T to ratify largely unchanged as the v.90 standard (the most popular 56K connection type).
Because of these assumptions about the nature of the phone network as a whole, analog modems are not even designed to attempt a full 56K connection at all, because they "know" they are analog, and if both ends are analog, they will just default down to v.34bis... 33.6K max.
Additionally, if one side is digital, part of the handshake process, the buzzing noise early in the call, which is called ranging, attempts to determine how many analog conversions there are. You see, while a lot of the network was digital, not all of it was. If you weren't placing a local call, you were going through a tandem switch, which might or might not have digital backhauls to the actual location where the answering equipment resides. Again, due to the nature of the analog-to-digital conversion, the conversion must only be in one direction and must only happen once, or the connection cannot be established at full speed! Thus, they will break out of hybrid mode early in the call and negotiate typically down to v.34bis on a clean line. 33.6K again.
"But wait!" I didn't hear anyone say, "You said they run at 8KHz 8-bits! That's 64K! You even said ISDN provides 64K! Why is dial up limited to 56K even on a perfect line?"
Good question, nobody! The problem is that not all telcos had adopted ISDN correctly or fully yet. You could have a digital backhaul over CT1 that *isn't* a PRI! Well, the problem with the original spec for channelized T carrier is that it used in-band RBS: Robbed bit signalling. The Telco will (essentially unpredictably!) rob the least significant bit from a message to be used as internal signalling. The robbed bit is not reconstructed or resent or anything - It is stripped and (I believe) always returned as zero at the other end. Well, if we can't trust an entire bit of our message unpredictably, we ought to not use it. Thus, 7 bits at 8KHz, 56000 bits every second. There's your 56K limitation! Of course, nobody ever saw the full 56K, line quality and length as well as modem types play a HUGE part in what speed you get, most people who could establish a hybrid connection at all only ever saw 48K (still an improvement over v.34bis) but it is entirely possible to have a "perfect" short line with a pair of well matched modems to get... What the heck? 54666 bits? Well, long story short, the digital signal is PCM being blared at essentially maximum power nonstop down the pipes. The FCC didn't want to approve this, and set transmit power limitations, initially limiting connections to 52000 by limiting the period and duty cycle of high amplitude signals. This was later increased allowing 54666, but to my knowledge it was never approved for the full theoretical 56K, sadly.
I've wondered if it would be possible to modify firmware to do this on my own local network, or if it would be possible to modify the firmware on analog modems to force them to attempt a PCM connection to each other without a digital host, but I've never bothered to give this more than just a couple thoughts.
Oh, and to throw yet another bone into this mix, in the early 00s, some enterprising people at the ITU-T figured out that with extremely careful bit placement and some VERY over my head math about noise shaping and a good enough line, you could actually push PCM upstream with 6 bit precision at the full 8KHz. This was ratified as part of v.92 in like 2001 as the aptly named "PCM Upstream" but it was basically not implemented anywhere. I think it exists as an option in ONE firmware version on the Patton Dialfire 2960, as a briefly mentioned option for ONE Cisco router, and as an option for SOME models of Total Control cards.
Anyways, telco ramble over.
| Quote: |
Running my entire house from a PBX would be really neat, even if I (in theory) would really only need it in one or two rooms lol. I'm still looking at options, but I'll have to report back with my setup when I eventually get everything sorted out. I'm moving in with my dad next month, and I think his fiber provider can give phone service, so I might try to convince my dad to add a phone line or two if nothing else. |
I mean, for me, my setup comes down to an Adtran TA924E 3G roleplaying as both the gateway it's supposed to be and pulling double duty as a PBX. It can also be a time server and a SIP server and a DNS server and a DHCP host... These things are handy to have around. Seriously, get one if you plan to do this stuff! They make them from 4 lines up to 24 and the 900 series includes T1/PRIs so you can do 56K stuff at home! |
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europa
Gorts
Joined: 16 Aug 2025
Age: 23
Posts: 64
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 12:21 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for the history lesson! I didn't know all that background stuff, but that does help with understanding the limitations for sure.
An AdTran unit is definitely what I'll be getting eventually, bonus if I get one that can do T1, because I'd love to try playing around with T1 if I ever get the opportunity to do so.
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VCSMaster
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 12:25 am Post subject: |
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| europa wrote: | Thanks for the history lesson! I didn't know all that background stuff, but that does help with understanding the limitations for sure.
An AdTran unit is definitely what I'll be getting eventually, bonus if I get one that can do T1, because I'd love to try playing around with T1 if I ever get the opportunity to do so. |
No prob bob. Helps that posting it here makes the story google-search-able as well, if they ever fix rankings.
Sounds like you probably want a TA900 series then. The first generation ones have 1 NT (NeTwork, i.e. "outputs" a T1) and 1 TE (TErmination, i.e. "input" from your telco). Second generation have two of each, and then the third generation units have 4 ports you can configure to any arrangement of NT/TE.
They won't do E1 though, which is the European standard, so just a heads up on that. |
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europa
Gorts
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| Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2026 12:38 am Post subject: |
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Good to know, thanks! I'll keep that in mind when I go searching for them. 
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