My VoIP keeps working when the local power goes out, so long as my UPS holds
up my networking equipment.
I am registered with E911 as well, and they called me back since my street
address does not map well and they confirmed my physical home's location
beyond my satisfaction (although thankfully I've never had to use the
service yet, knock wood).
So what else was missing or less-than-optimal with "normal" VoIP? I have a
strong distaste for comcast's sideband implementation -- obviously it is a
good engineering choice for them, and also serves the vast majority of the
userland market... but I wanted a VoIP service I could use flexibly,
re-route and reconfigure as I saw fit.... as a geek. I *also* wanted
something I could use out of the box, something reliable and not subject to
the mere whims of my late-night software reconfigurations.
I have only had two or three minor instances of call quality degradation
over the two years of service I've gotten, and my provider [ViaTalk] is also
asterisk-friendly and will allow flexible end-user options like ring-through
to a soft-phone while traveling, and so forth. I'd love to get a referral
if anyone is going to sign up with ViaTalk, please contact me off-list.
They have a free year deal for new customers which is quite a bargain. They
ship a LinkSys Phone adaptor pre-configured, so you only need plug it into
your LAN and your POTS phone when it arrives :)
There are a lot of other providers out there, and most of my info is about 2
years old since dropped my qworst line then, and have beenb happily humming
along ever since.
I do remember seeing a fairly volatile VoIP market then, and suspect that a
big risk with any of many smaller providers is *still* whether they'll be
staying in business... so, points for Comcast and Skype there...
Skype makes all the people I've suggested it to very happy, although it
seems a bit inter-webby to me; however I've read a few interesting bits
about plugins and re-routing of calls -- looks much easier than even the
bootable gui'ed pbx/telephony distros, although 'doze-centric on the
extensibility end when I had looked (~2 yrs ago?).
For a lot of ("most") computer desktop users, the type of folks who have a
cellphone and either miss their home phone or want to ditch it, I think
Skype with the $25/yr SkypeOut service is a good fit for the low-end... they
can call out to save their cell-plan minutes and/or for discounted
international, and if they can learn to travel with a thumb drive and
headset (I also plug portable firefox a lot).
~ben
On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:38 PM, marbux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 10:47 AM, wes morgan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I have had the phone/internet/cable bundle for about 2 1/2 years and no
> > problems.
> >
>
> Ditto for approximately the same amount of time, although I recall
> some minor glitches when their Eugene area phone service was new. It
> seems to be pretty stable now.
>
> The big advantages of Comcast telephony or a traditional POTS over
> VOIP telephony are that that service (hopefully) doesn't go down when
> the local electrical power system goes out and the 911 service is way
> better, e.g., an open line can be quickly traced to a street address.
>
> As I understand the situation, VOIP can still leave you in the lurch
> when you need it most, a deciding factor for one who has reached the
> stage of his life when the ability to rapidly summon ambulance service
> at any time is an important consideration.
>
> I've tried Skype, but found it frustrating because of fluctuating
> volume and rapid decay of audio when a friend in Germany I frequently
> need to work with is patched into a 3-way or larger number of
> participating nodes. I have no idea whether such problems are common
> to VOIP in general, but I decided that email or chat were far less
> frustrating to me for such purposes. .
>
> Best regards,
>
> Marbux
> _______________________________________________
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> euglug@euglug.org
> http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
>
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