Broadband phone service anyone...

Seems the terms and conditions are a big tilt in their favour.
 
Lee said:
Seems the terms and conditions are a big tilt in their favour.


That goes without saying. All terms and conditions will be in their favor. No different than otherss I have read,IE: cable co., and land line ph co.
 
I don't really know, I have considered it with RoadRunner to cut down my phone bill, but the big problem for me is, no caller ID, no three way calling, and no call waiting. No if you don't need anything more than a phone with no real features I think that might be the way to go, but other than that I would wait till they get some more services.

edit: I guess I should look at the article before posting a reply :nervous: . It seems that they have most of those features now, so........ it is toss up. One thing I did think of was make sure they a fallback incase your net connection dies.
 
Has been a bit on the news here lately about VOIP companys having issues with 911 (your #/address don't show up - so if you can't speak your out of luck). Some of the bigger companys (ie. Vonage) are working on it now though.
 
Problems:
-Only as reliable as your broadband. (God help the Charter people.)
-Not much price advantage if you have DSL. You still have to pay for phone line.
-Poor ping is a problem, it needs to be under 100 msec or you talk over each other.
-Useless on dial up connections. You can't get incoming calls.
-Packet loss can get ugly with information drop outs.
-Some rural phopne companies have been caught blocking the service.
-It's no cheaper than using a 3 cent a minute AT&T long distance card from SAM's unless you talk from US to Canada a lot.

Advantages:
-?
 
I see this from LeeJend's perspective.

1. I've only had a problem with my land-line phone maybe twice in 31 years. I've had problems with my cable company through which I get my broadband connection more times that I care to count in the last 4-5 years in terms of my broadband itself. I've had problems with the cable TV far far more times than I can count in the time I've used it over the last... 20+ years.
2. If you lose power you don't lose your land-line phone connection unless all your phones are portable phones that require power. If you use VOIP and your power goes out so does your computer unless you have a backup power supply. No power = No computer access or VOIP.
3. We are still in an evolutionary process with both broadband and VOIP. The concept is great but it needs time to mature more and broadband to remain more reliable. At this point I am unwilling to get rid of my land-line and move to just using a cell phone or VOIP or a combination of both because they just aren't as mature and stable.
4. On the plus side with VOIP you don't currently have all the taxes and overhead that a land-line runs you. I pay approximately $35 for my phone line even when I don't make a single call during a month. That's without call waiting, etc. I use 10-10-987 for all of my long-distance calls especially international calls. So, for use within the US the VOIP would be cheaper for me but that one plus doesn't outweigh the negatives.

rotjong
 
Oh yeah I forgot. You can kiss those low rates good bye before too long.

VOIP is cutting into tax revenue from regular phone service so they will have to start charging taxes on VOIP soon or as the GAO report recommended, charge more for regular phone service. But if they raise regular phone taxes people will be driven to VOIP so they will end up charging taxes on that too. VOIP is probably going to end up as a small niche market, taxed to death by the governments.

Want to know where your phone taxes go?
-911 service (wtf, emergency calls used to be free. Dial 0 and scream.)
-cost of paying the government regulators who keep your rates low????
-cost of you to buy free phone service for poor people. ?I never got free phone service when I was out of work for 3 years?
 
If you wanted to be real bleeding edge and stabliity wasn't your #1 concern you could do something like Skpe to both call and recieve calls. It has most of the negatives of VOIP but is cheaper I believe.
 
I've been using Vonage for the past year and I have had wonderful service. Wonderful customer service and excellent quality. The only feature that I wish they had was Call Blocking. Other than that, pretty good.

I can also understand the power issue. However, I have my cable modem and adapter on a 1500 VA UPS system (provides a few hours during power outages) and if the power and UPS goes out, calls are routed to my cell.
 
I've used Tele2 IP telephony since July, and it's working fairly well, unless my net goes down. ;) The advantage is mainly the absense of monthly fee (compared to the usual ~$20). It's free. The call taxes are the same as regular phone companies here. Sound quality is good and caller ID works.

911 (112 here) is still a problem I believe, or at least will be if I move (since I will still have the same area code wherever I go).
 
LeeJend said:
Oh yeah I forgot. You can kiss those low rates good bye before too long.

VOIP is cutting into tax revenue from regular phone service so they will have to start charging taxes on VOIP soon or as the GAO report recommended, charge more for regular phone service. But if they raise regular phone taxes people will be driven to VOIP so they will end up charging taxes on that too. VOIP is probably going to end up as a small niche market, taxed to death by the governments.

Want to know where your phone taxes go?
-911 service (wtf, emergency calls used to be free. Dial 0 and scream.)
-cost of paying the government regulators who keep your rates low????
-cost of you to buy free phone service for poor people. ?I never got free phone service when I was out of work for 3 years?

Not entriely true... to enforce any taxation, the FCC who obviously controls the comms here in the states, has to show they VOIP companies are infringing on someone elses technology or "rights" already. Its all about the $ but hey what isnt? As for someone who mentioned rural phone companies are blocking VOIP? HRMPH I would like to see them do it... how do you suppose some mom and pop phone company who hasnt even entered the digital age going to do so? They dont even have packet sniffers on the line, how the hell are they going to stop a voip call when they probably only see it as someone on a data line anyway? As far as I know only those phone companies with new more robust PBX's wil be able to tell if someone is using a VOIP phone and they are MUCH more likely to charge you a convenience fee LOOONG before they just block all VOIP calls.

I havent been too pleased with the quality of VOIP calls yet, except for here on base where our QOS allows for decent quality.... when commercial VOIP companies guarantee uptime so long as your cable is up then Im on-board.
 
Zedric said:
I've used Tele2 IP telephony since July, and it's working fairly well, unless my net goes down. ;)
Isn't Sweden getting (or already has) 10Mbit/s connections for everyone?
 
I used to have the neighborhood plan with mci. the costs for that each month with all the taxes was around 70.00 a month. i know have vonage with all the same features i had with mci, and only pay with taxes 28.00 a month. screw ma bell i'll keep the extra 40.00 or so a month in my pocket.
 
Xie said:
Isn't Sweden getting (or already has) 10Mbit/s connections for everyone?
No, but many in the cities do. My new apartment only has 8/1 cable though. :(
 
Zedric said:
No, but many in the cities do. My new apartment only has 8/1 cable though. :(
/me laughs @ "only" :classic:
 
The cost is better. The advantage is better. The service is better. I am thinking about getting vonage myself, $24.99 a month for all the features is hard to beat, the service I have now from Verizon is costing me 90.00 a month. I know a lot of people who have it and they say it works pretty good. The only downside is like stated. If the internet goes down, so does the phone service. but on the other hand, with having dsl, I can have a regular phone line and all the calls routed to that is the service does die .. Things to think about ,,
 

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