Best Kept Secret – The Dry Loop

This year has been a quest to improve my health, that included my financial health. So I live in a very rural area, which means that we deal with DSL lines and not fiberoptic like the rest of the world.

For years I believed that we needed to keep our phone lines because firstly, our cell service in our area was pretty pathetic and then because we needed that phone line to keep our internet alive.

After all, online and hooked in is offering more and more ways of saving and liberty than could have been ever imagined 30 years ago. So one night, after looking to change from Bell which has the monopoly on our lines here in Ontario, Canada. My partner and I came upon the words “dry loop”.

At first it sounded painful and made us thirsty, but then we finally got the jest of it. God Bless Wikipedia.

A dry loop is an unconditioned leased pair of telephone line from a telephone company. The pair does not provide dial tone or battery (continuous electric potential), as opposed to a wet pair, a line usually without dial tone but with battery.

Basically it means that you can still have an internet connection with a dead phone line as long as a dry loop is installed by your internet company. So we called and they installed it for us for a small fee, but I hear some will do it for nothing and instead of paying $47 dollars a month for a bogus phone line, we paid an extra $5 dollars to the internet company.

A cell tower had been installed in the area a few years back and our cells now could provide service that was comparable to a phone line.

So in a years time we would save $504.00. Its funny how things add up.

Now I know for a lot of you this doesn’t apply in the world of coaxial cable. However in this case it might help the rest of you hicks (considering I’m the biggest hick of all) to save a few dollars that will feel much better in your bank account or your pocket.