I suppose once you get used to them and their quirks, they work just fine. I just really disliked having to hold the hold button, it seemed counterintuitive. My guess as to why the others stopped working is the dismally low loop current often supplied by fios equipment. I've been doing a lot of testing every chance I get to test loop current with different sources of dial tone. (I scored an older Fluke meter than can read DC mA.) I've found that most sources of "artificial" dial tone hover around 20mA. It's just too low for the mechanical relays on the older line cards. I've seen some older TT pads that really don't like low loop current as well. I really don't know why they do that. How hard would it have been to design it to 27-30 mA? Then it would be almost guaranteed to work with even the most crusty old piece of CPE. I know raising it too high can cause issues, and especially with Voip it can cause echo in an awful hurry, but... I have 2 OBI 200 Voip adapters where the user can CHANGE the loop current to anything between 15 and like 90 mA. I would NEVER set it to anything above 30, but I put mine at 28, and my equipment works like its attached to a real pots line. As much as we see Voip as the enemy sometimes, the fact is it isn't going away, and truth be told, a pots line isn't hard to emulate. You just have to know what the values should be. (The problem is the third world engineers that design this crap have no idea what the numbers should be.) -Sigh-
