Ever read one of those tech support stories and go, WTF that cannot be true? This story has to be made up? Nobody could possible be *that* stupid?

Well, I generally get to hear at least one of those stories once a day as my g/f does tech support for a major cable company in the area. Figured I'd share the latest one she told me recently. Her company provides everything ranging from TV, internet access and phone service. The phone service basically is a VOIP line.

So the other day a customer calls in with connection problems. Apparently the customer was using a dial-up modem hooked up to the voip line to connect to AOL...

 

I believe there was a fair amount of utility value in "UUCP-over-IP" when the major nodes stopped using the PSTN to talk to each other. Seventies... meet nineties. :)

They probably didn't know it was VOIP, and didn't pay for the cable internet service because they wanted to use AOL. Paying for the cable-co's phone line was probably cheaper than their old analogue line, and they never read anything saying that they couldn't use dial-up over it.

In the UK I'm pretty sure AOL say that you need a BT phone line, which means it won't work on a cable-co-provided phone line.

One of the requirements for VOIP is that it should detect fax and modem call and switch to PCM mode without compression.

alegr:

One of the requirements for VOIP is that it should detect fax and modem call and switch to PCM mode without compression.

Yeah, except no.

Back when I had AT&T's voip service as a business line, it supported no such thing.

Thief^:

In the UK I'm pretty sure AOL say that you need a BT phone line, which means it won't work on a cable-co-provided phone line.

 

Nope, I used to use it on an NTL (ex Cable and Wireless) line quite happily.