[colug-432] Digital Phone?

[Stephen Potter]

On 4/30/2014 4:09 PM, tom wrote:
> I am not familiar with the term "digital phone" I believe she has a land
> line. I have heard from people that have had good and terrible
> experience with att u-verse. I suggested that she put off the
> appointment until I can find out more.

Tom-
Probably enough people have explained to you what digital phone/VoIP is, 
so I'm not going to say anything about that.  The only thing I will say 
is that one of the local businesses I work with recently switched from 
AT&T DSL and AT&T land-line service to AT&T U-verse with Digital Phone 
and they absolutely hate the VoIP call quality.  We've had U-verse out 
to the shop several times to try and improve the call quality, but the 
issues seem to be random, like there's a "shared" bandwidth problem 
somewhere along the line, so they've never been able to do anything 
about it.

I've used VoIP in professional settings for many years - still can't 
convince my wife to go purely digital or purely cellular at home - and 
have never had problems.  Even the question of power outages that some 
people have brought up isn't an issue unless it is an extremely extended 
outage.  Most (although, not U-verse....) cable companies have a battery 
backup built into their phone router which will last for several hours.  
That, and most people I've talked to who are worried about loosing phone 
connectivity in a power outage only have cordless phones to begin with 
and don't have a corded phone anywhere in the house.

-spp