[colug-432] Digital Phone?

[Stephen P. Molnar]

-----Original Message-----
From: colug-432-bounces at colug.net [mailto:colug-432-bounces at colug.net] On
Behalf Of Stephen Potter
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2014 9:02 AM
To: Central OH Linux User Group - 432xx
Subject: Re: [colug-432] Digital Phone?

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
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A brief addition.  After I switched to UVERAE for both internet and VOIP in
2012, VOIP kept dropping and the internet connection soldiered on.  In
addition the VIOIP quality was less than satisfactory.  I'm not too sure
that the first techs that responded to my depand for a service call had any
idea which end of the screwdriver was the handle.

The third tech solved the problem when I followed his suggestion to call
Customer Service(???) and demanded the return of my land line at the same
cost as the VOIP.

Good Luck