My family has Time Warner Cable Service in Staten Island. We have cable TV and internet services. My mother wants to add internet/cable phone service. We already have land phone service from AT&T and she already has a cell phone. Pros and Cons of Internet Phones?
They are transparent. You wont even notice the difference. The disconnect your normal phone line from the pole, within that little box either outside or in your basement. Then they attach a special cable modem up, which then plugs into one of your home phone jacks. Then your phones work as normal. The only difference is how it's connected. But you wont personally notice any difference. Make sure you get the cable modem with the battery, mine can use a battery but didn't come with one, so if the power goes out, i'm without a phone unless i grab my emergency battery+inverter. I have one from charter, but i plan on replacing mine with that magic jack thing.
The pro is that you can pay the Internet phone at a flat rate. The con: if you lose your Internet connection or there's a blackout in your house, you lose the Internet phone too. Conventional phones still work because they are fed with voltage through the same physical line.
I tried to tell my mother that there may be blackouts or loss of Internet service and I'm not sure if she will keep her land phone service. What about hackers?
In order to be able to do that your connection setup would need to meet some very specific and rare conditions. Let's say, for example, that the FXS device is connected through a wifi router to a wifi modem and that connection is unsecure (weak password and/or no MAC address filtering). In that case, someone would be able to catch your signal and provided that he decodes the password, sniff for VOIP (Voice Over IP) packets. I say this only to state that though it is theoretically possible to catch VOIP conversations in reality there are very few scenarios where it's posible. So for regular users this is no concern.
My rents switched to Internet/Digital Phone a couple of months back but my mom immediately switched back because whenever she called long distance it would echo or lag behind (not sure what the problem was) after she switched back it was gone hmm.
911 service is done differently as well. From what I understand it can be potentially rather confusing as to how that portion would get set up. And, based on the random cable outages we get with TWC I would rather not have my phone through them though that might be different for your area. Really, if you already have AT&T and are looking at cell service as well, you could save money that way too through some sort of bundle as in either situation you'd save money.
It's cheaper and far better than phone service. Other than not being able to use it if the internet goes does it's the exact same. So if you're not having issues with your internet service then get it. Hell, we actually had more issues with our old land line service than we do our internet/Vonage service now. And as far as being able to use it in a blackout... yea, you can't do that, but you can't do that with cordless phones either. In all seriousness, if you have a cell phone (that is active) get VoIP. You won't regret it. Not sure about the echo problem that UZ7 stated, but that could be because of bad weather, assuming it uses satellites to relay the signal, or because of the other person's phone. I've done a few long distance calls, to Taiwan, and it's been FAR better than my cell phone. Still can't really hear my GF very well, but it's solely because of her phone. Service, both cell and internet, are pretty crappy for her. At her house there it bounces between 0-1 bar, YAY, or between no signal and poor for her laptop.
Over here the cable phone deals are really cheap. I dont have to pay any extra costs when calling someone in my country. (exept m.obiles) Many nights i call friends, put them on the speaker, and leave it on for hours. This is a really big advantage , although i would wish it could handle more conversations at the time The only thing that worries me , is when the internet drops, i wont have a phone too. with the normal phone lines i never had any. Im not thinking only of myself here, but if someone has a vo-ip phone and the internet drops, i wont be able to reach them in case of any problems. (not everyone has, or knows how to hande a mobile phone) Still for me its the best option, it came with my 20mbit adsl2 internet line.
It's a flat rate, for all the one I've seen anyway, so how does it cost a fair bit? I do live in the US btw. Not sure where you are from. All local calls are one flat rate, along with about a dozen extra phone features. Calls to places like Canada, Mexico, and several other countries are < $.02 a minute.
Well using my internet phone to call landlines(none internet) cost like 20p a min that i thought was expensive but meh i don't have a good call plan due to the fact i don't use the phone at all i actually don't have any phones anymore part from my mobile.
Ours is great. You get a whole bunch of nice add ons such as call waiting and caller ID for free. Its basically the same quality of a land line. Sometimes there is a little fuzz, but thats normally rare. If you are worried about poweroutages and stuff, just get a battery backup to control the modem and voip box. If you have a corded phone, it should work. Thats how I hooked ours up anyway.
The only real complaint I have with my Vonage VOIP phone service (other than those listed above like power outages) is the crappy hardware they make you use. I just got done spending a few days trying to get the phone service to work again after I reconfigured most of my home network. The ******** VT2542 is the router they make me use and it's a complete piece of crap. Vonage tech support is less than stellar too, but that's pretty normal for almost any large company sadly. Everything else about the service is great. Lots of features and the price is much better than all the alternatives where I live. Once I got it to work properly, the sound quality was great. I don't know anything about other VOIP phone services, but if you need a phone service, it's certainly worth investigating/trying out.
I use Comcast for phone service. It is really nice & inexpensive. The only problem I had is one time my internet service went out & it could not call them to let them know...lol.
Why are you forced to use that router? We use our own and it works just fine. And I have the phone device set-up off the router, and not straight off the modem like they want it to be.
We pay like £22 a month for all our stuff: £11.50 line rental £6.50 phone package (free calls evening and weekend) £4 for anytime calls (makes it free calls 24/7 instead of just evening and weekend) £0 internet That gets us: Line rental Free calls 24/7 to all UK landlines and landlines in like 55 other countries. 8 meg internet, but can get adsl2+ upto 24meg for £4 extra month.
My internet phone service is great. Free unlimited long distance and lots of free features. I have a battery pack or some type of back up that lasts around 24 hours I believe if the cable goes out so no problems in that regard unless we get hit with a hurricane which knocks out power for a couple of days (of which I'll just use my cell phone).
