Our phone line is rather unique. As mentioned in past posts, we have an old POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) line to the house. When we first moved here, cell service was rather spotty and having a landline was useful. We still use the line, although in the winter months we often lose service due to the wind and rain, or we sometimes get unusual music playing across the line.
Play the video below to hear what I mean.
While it’s still is nice to have the extra line, and we have done quite a bit to simplify the disaster of wires under the house and removed the forty-odd RJ11 jacks once embedded in our walls, we still have conduit running out to the gate that contains the now-unusable line that once controlled our main gate, and until last summer we had a very fat cable that hung just ten feet or so above the west pasture. That was until one day when our phone said to “Check Tel Line.” I did and there it was, laying on the ground in the middle of the west pasture. Now an excavator moving through that field with an auger attached may or may not have been involved–no one can say for sure–but the huge 8-pair line that had a ginormous splice in the middle of it was no longer in service.
So I called AT&T, and a week later they sent out a truck and a couple of techs who ran a nice thin 2-pair line across the pasture and over to the pole outside my office and service was restored. Fun fact: we have five utility poles on the property, two of which are rather tilty. But more on those in a future post.