Ditching your Landline Just Got Easier

QuePasaCalabaza writes "The FCC has approved a bill 5-0 that allows consumers to take their land line phone numbers and carry them over to thier wireless phones. USA Today has one of the first scoops on this ruling. The official news release [Word|PDF] is there."

Re:Getting rid of land lines...

[3.5 stripes]

No, you just need a physical line, connected to a dslam on one side, and a dsl modem on the other.

Re:No land line is great

[otterboy]

Seen this? [thehightechstore.com]

You can't.

[Shivetya]

A few articles have detailed the problem, and it all revolves around area codes. Without expressed limits what would stop some idiot from New York wanting to transfer his line to his new California home?

Perhaps if the phone system could ditch area codes as geographical representation. It should not be too hard, in Atlanta we have 4 area codes all covering the same LARGE area (largest free calling zone in US)

404,770,678, and 470

Re:But...My TiVo.

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Well, a simple Google search finds this product [9thtee.com], (blurb from site: "The TurboNETTM Ethernet Adapter Card allows you to hook your TiVo up to your network. This allows daily updates over broadband instead of the telephone, easier hacking, TiVoWEB, etc.") although I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish the task of avoiding the need for a phone line.

No land line is great-Land line go boom.

[Anonymous Coward]

Half truth. I dropped my landline a couple years ago. Plug a phone into that jack, nothing. Have to have someone physically hook me back up. You are correct about the cell phone though.

Re:I have DSL

[Stephen Maturin]

Someone needs to just run fiber to everyone's house/business and put all these bozos out of business.
... And then we can deal with the "Evil fiber optic companies."
Sorry. Already got it. [clearworks.com] Quirky internet service, frequent outages, crappy tv reception, and an incompetent customer service department that thinks it should work banker's hours. I thought this was going to be great when I moved into my new home, and after about 6 months ditched them and went with Time Warner. Thank Cthulu I never let them handle my phone lines as well. They may not be the best, but they're better than ClearWorks.

Re:But...My TiVo.

[kennylives]

You still have to make the initial call over a phone line. I'm positive.

Nope.

With the 1st gen units, if you've used the 9th Tee card and have the right revision of the SW (1.3), using ethernet is as simple as providing the right prefix for dialing (something like *#401) and it'll do the rest.

With series 2 machines, the USB-ethernet adaptor is recognised, and you're good to go. No hacks needed. I've never had my TiVo connected to a land-line.

The only time you need a landline for a TiVo any more is a virgin 1.2 unit, which should be quite rare these days..

Number portability is powered by Verisign

[Animats]

What's really happening is that control of the phone number database is moving to Verisign. [verisign.com] Verisign runs the largest SS7 network, which handles routing and billing data for US telcos. As with the Internet, lookup and switching are now separated. Phone number lookup now works much like DNS. Verisign doesn't quite have the lock on this they have on ".com", etc., but they're getting there. Number portability will help Verisign, because if both the gaining and losing telco use Verisign, the transfer works better.

Verisign also handles wiretapping. [verisign.com] If your phone is being wiretapped, Verisign reroutes all your calls (in and out) to a wiretapping center by altering the routing database. From the wiretapping center, the call is then routed to the destination. This allows both interception and, potentially, man-in-the-middle crypto attacks.

You can't. - yet

[kevinT]

Another proposal in front of the FCC is to allow someone to take his/her phone Number from New York to California. It has either been approved and waiting for implementation, or will be approved soon (assuming the telco's don't bribe the FCC).