[conspire] Wondering about reasons to keep landline phone now that wonderful rawbandwidth's DSL is no longer available at my location.

[Mark Wißler]

> On Jan 31, 2021, at 6:02 PM, Peter Knaggs <peter.knaggs at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I was wondering about reasons to keep my landline phone ($45/month for local access only) now that the wonderful rawbandwidth DSL service provided for many years by Mike Durkin is no longer available at my location. Has VoIP become reliable enough (safe enough) to depend on these days?

I also lament the passing of the wonderful Rawbandwidth DSL service as it was just what I needed and worked so well at home and office for maybe 20 years. Oh, well. But thanks, Rick, for introducing me to it long ago. One reason a person might want to retain the landline is to have reliable emergency service. More on that in a second. Another, for me, is that the landline telephone number has been with our family for over six decades and is known to distant relatives who sometimes dial it.

Since I value my old POTS landline number I will probably port it to a mobile phone so I can keep the number even as I migrate away from ATT VoIP (see below).

I think it advisable to distinguish between the viability of VoIP and the service delivered by Comcast or Verizon. I think VoIP, depending on the implementation, is robust and reliable. However, the underlying transmission services of Comcast and Verizon fall far short of the 99.999 % availability the old POTS delivered (and still delivers). I am now using ATT and there are periodic outages of all TCP/IP service. I’ve had ATT technicians out several times to work on problems with the four conductors ( two pair) coming up the street to my house that supply my U-Verse service.

Another thing: junk calls to the POTS (now VoIP) number. There are so many of these that I leave the ringer off and place an out-going local call about once a month. So, the VoIP service is not worth it to me. Without some software doing screening of calls, I can’t leave the ringer on to accept calls from those relatives who might call. My mobile phone offers me more ways to screen calls than the VoIP service via ATT. (I think I saw a for-pay service offered by ATT that allows call screening but I’m already paying ATT too much.)

Concerning reliability in general, I am on Nextdoor and other community fora and about every two weeks there are outages of TCP/IP (supplying voice, data, video, etc.) reported by neighbors within about 400 meters of my house. I’m in suburbia with single family homes, at least for now. People gripe about the reliability of ATT and Comcast in, from my informal estimation, about equal proportion.

With POTS the power was supplied by the central office so service would work when electrical power was out. Now, with VoIP, you have to have some battery backup in your home to be able to make calls during a power outage. For me and most, a mobile phone is simpler and already paid for.

> The only 200 megabit/s internet access I can purchase at my location is via Comcast, as far as I know (for my purposes around 3 megabits/s is sufficient, but I'm reluctant to trust AT&T's DSL service).

Yes, 3 mb/s was good for me with Rawbandwidth. Very low latency. Several of us in the household could be watching our own Netflix movies simultaneously on computers, not TV, without problem. Now with about 25 mb/s from ATT it generally works but when watching Netflix on a computer it is sometimes clear that ATT throttles the bandwidth as the icons showing movie choices can take up to roughly a minute to fill in whereas with Rawbandwidth it was complete in under two seconds. Others have confirmed that ATT throttles Netflix. Goodness only knows what else they throttle.

So, I have ATT’s DSL service, which they call U-Verse, and am not happy with their pricing or their service. I dislike this damn router that they seemingly force on customers and insist on calling it a modem. They like to play cat and mouse about getting a static IP address and the process for using the static IP is much more complicated than we had under Rawbandwidth.

My neighbors here who are on Comcast, at least some of them, will acquire an ATT hotspot so they can stay on-net while Comcast fixes their problems. This can be especially important now that people are staying home to shelter from the pandemic and work from home. Additionally, with several youngsters stuck at home having connectivity can be even more important.

I’ll probably migrate to Comcast business with a static IP but no VoIP. I make many calls through my mobile phone and increasingly through services like Telegram that support voice calls.

> I tried Comcast's VoIP service for a month (during the trial period) but it had multiple outages and abysmal service so I discontinued it.

That seems consistent with what my neighbors report.
Please report to the list what you decide upon and how you like it.

> I was wondering if anyone could recommend a reliable VoIP service that preferably doesn't require leasing any additional hardware and could perhaps use a personally-owned Netgear C7100V "nighthawk" AC1900 cable modem router (the model might be "CV100V" as that was what was in the documentation, but "C7100V" is what appears in Netgear's web interface for the cable modem router).
>
> Thanks,
> Peter.

—
Mark Weisler “Liberate Hong Kong, Keep Taiwan Free”
mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us
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