I need help and your opinions by this coming Saturday 8/11/07.

I'm thinking of switching my phone service from AT&T land line to Digital Phone service packaged together with my Time Warner cable TV and Internet connection.

I have to make my decision by this Saturday which is when the switch over is to take place.

I have been with Pacific Bell then SBC and now AT&T land line phone services for a hundred years and their prices are outrageous in my opinion.

I will get all the features I have now, plus many more, for $29.95 per month for the first year, then $39.95 a month after one year vs AT&T's $89.95 to $95.00 PLUS fees for basics and long distance anywhere in the USA, Canada and Mexico.

Has anyone had good, bad or indifferent experiences with VOIP?

The only two negatives that I'm aware of are that if you loose power to the house - no phone service.
I can live with that and use our cell phones.

The second negative is that when calling 911 they can't trace back to where you live, so you must give them your address.
Again, no big deal.


What experiences have you had?

Appreciate any help before I take the plunge.



Joe.

We've had the time warner bundle for several years now and haven't had any issues. We are actually thinking of switching to the new AT&T uverse for the cable because they offer more HD channels for less. If we do that we are just going to cancel the house phone all together and just use our cell phones. We don't really use the home phone that much.

It is pretty reliable. Many of my friends and some family use the service. Every once in a while there are complaints of echo's and there had been issues when someone in the neighborhood gets cable service.

I personally do not have it because I have just a basic line. We use cell phones due to everyone we know are “in” our network.

VoIP technology has been around for about a decade. It's pretty bulletproof other than the losing power thing. Most people have phones that plug in the wall anyway so when the power goes out, they don't have phone service anyway. If you buy a battery backup and plug your phone and cable modem into it, it won't go out when the power is out.

I run my entire company on VoIP. I'm a believer. It saves us a TON of money every year.

I also have Time Warner's triple play plan. The phone service is giving us a little trouble but other than that, it is a great service.

I am not using a VOIP system at home because I really do not need any extra features and rarely call long distance however, I am an IT professional and have a great deal of experience with the technology.

All of the previous post are correct, this is a proven technology and most that have it, really enjoy it. 911 service is in place in our area (including location information) and Time Warner (TWTC)use to supply a UPS (not sure if they still do).

The biggest drawback is not the technology, but the reliability of the cable company. TWTC in the milwaukee market experiences a (much) greater number of "service disruptions" then AT&T. When on vaction a few weeks ago I experience a 6.5 hour cable outage during the day. I have never had an outage with AT&T last for more then a few minutes (unless it is a business circuit :eek: )

I run my entire company on VoIP. I'm a believer. It saves us a TON of money every year.

Yes I do to. We have about 600 phones and 400 users spread out across 15 sites. VOIP is great, the providres are not always. Traditional circuits are much more reliable then newer "highbread" circuts.

Just a few observations... First, I use DSL (phone line) for internet access, so VOIP wouldn't be a big cost-saver for me. Second, our local cable company is utterly unreliable.

But third -- and this is the biggie -- during the past several hurricanes (including Katrina), we did not lose our land-line phone. Sure, the circuits were clogged a lot, but the land-line remained functional. This is because the only section of phone line between me & the local telco central office switch is about 20 yards running into my house. It was 10 days before we had electricity & another couple of weeks before the analog side of the cable was restored. In fact, the cable company continued to bill us for digital & premium channels, refused to issue a credit, and subsequently lost our business for anything other than "basic cable."

VoIP service, both business and residential, comes down to a compromise between quality of service and dollars. If dollars saved are worth some inconvenience, then it may be worth it to you. To set up VoIP properly so that QoS is a minimal issue requires spending more money than you'll save. So it comes down to what's more important to you and/or your business, dollars, or quality of service. These days, the standard QoS for many is cellphone service. If that is your standard, then by all means go VoIP as soon as you can.

Yes I do to. We have about 600 phones and 400 users spread out across 15 sites. VOIP is great, the providres are not always. Traditional circuits are much more reliable then newer "highbread" circuts.


We don't have as many phones but many more locations. We run 4 phone servers in 4 different metro areas with 4 PRI's. All 4 are linked together. Each server has between 10-15 remote locations. We utilize a least cost routing scheme for long distance so every phone call we make to outside lines is essentially local even if it is in a different state.

The only problem we encounter is a latency issue between servers every once in a while due to a piece of equipment somewhere in Reston Virginia owned by AOL which causes an echo.

The wonderful part about the whole system is that we essentially act as our own phone company since we control the servers. I can change phone numbers, assign new phone numbers, call routing, etc. all from the convenience of my home or office. :)

i've been running vonage for about three years. . . .no problems really. for $9 or whatever it is (its cheap) i can't complain. voice quality is ok, no complaints there. i have cable at home 10Mb/1Mb service thats its hooked into.

to comment on chris' message. . . .if you have businesses spread out and make lots of calls between branches. . . .building a WAN and using VOIP services between them is the only way to go. would save a good chunk of money.

We don't have as many phones but many more locations. We run 4 phone servers in 4 different metro areas with 4 PRI's. All 4 are linked together. Each server has between 10-15 remote locations. We utilize a least cost routing scheme for long distance so every phone call we make to outside lines is essentially local even if it is in a different state.

The only problem we encounter is a latency issue between servers every once in a while due to a piece of equipment somewhere in Reston Virginia owned by AOL which causes an echo.

The wonderful part about the whole system is that we essentially act as our own phone company since we control the servers. I can change phone numbers, assign new phone numbers, call routing, etc. all from the convenience of my home or office. :)

Yes acting as ones own telco is great (and challenging at times). It is intersting your comment about VOIP servers be in differnt geographic locations... As we were planning out our new data center, one large issue was related to our call manager servers (2). We wanted to keep one (subscriber) at our old data center which was to become a "big" network closet and the other (publisher) at our new data center. The benifits being obvious. Cisco had always recommended a 100MB link min between call managers servers, and that was the real issue. They have since moved requirements down to 10MB, but we still implamented a 100MB Metro Ethernet connection to be safe.

On a related side note regarding provider issues, our 100MB WAN connection has been down for half of the day and still waiting for the fiber to be restored by TWTC. The backup circuit for this is in place, but the routers have not been configured to take advantage of this yet (next weekend was the planned time). Our network engineer and department are not having a good time right now.

Sorry I didn't mean to get this thread so off topic (my part anyway). I guess though this supports my point about reliability and uptime. Cable providers are very "green" as far as telcos are concerned and even though this could happen to anyone, the fact is is that if we were serviced by AT&T redundancy would likely have made this a non or smaller issue. Instead, we have an almost exclusive fiber run. A redundant fiber run will come next year at a cost that we will pay. I guess we started paying for that today. :(

As a "old school" telco guy I have had some concerns with VoIP. It is not about the technology but rather as others have alluded to the providers.

In the traditional telco world we are required to provide a level of redundancy and survivability out to 99.999 percent or as we call it "five nines". In the VoIP provider world they are quite often "nine to five" with a total disregard for redundancy and survivability of the network.

Many state regulators do not hold cable or internet providers to the same standards as the traditional telco carriers. After all missing a movie is not the same as losing a E911 call... The regulators just don't realize, or at least acknowledge, that the cable company is now a phone company or that the phone company is now selling movies!

If you are willing to tolerate outages, without the recourses you have with a regulated company such as Verizon / SBC / AT+T, you will save money.... After all they spent less installing the infrastruture...:rolleyes:

On a technical note keep in mind that if you have anything that uses a traditional modem such as ADT or similar alarm monitoring system or in my wife's case a remote monitoring unit for her pacemaker, it may not work over a cable modem. Check that out before signing up....

VoIP and SIP are the future technologies and are neither the cure all or devil they can be made out to be by marketing types.... The service provider you select will determine your personal experience...

Thanks everyone for all the replies and great information.

Your experiences and info helped me make an informed descision.

My two phone lines, house and fax are now switched to VoIP and are working perfectly.

Thanks again to all .


Joe.