| From Someone who knows 1) If you dont pay $10 or more for long distance on your landline every month this won't be a value. The attractive part of the service is really the unlimited local and long distance.
2) The phone companies expend alot of money and effort to have what is known as 'six nines' reliability (services working 99.9999%) of the time. There is no way that your cable company is going to be able to match that, but so long as you expect it to be approximately reliable as your Internet service you can get a good product. One of the problems is no independent power supply, and yes Greensboro is moving to modems with built-in UPS, but still.
3) The advantage of service that TWC will be able to offer you over vonage or other 'pure' VOIP solutions is two-fold.
a) Separate bandwidth. Your vonage box rides on top of the 3Mb bandwidth cap or whatever you cable provider provides. If the cable company provides the VOIP service its going to have its own dedicated chunk of bandwidth. Which means you can do heavy gaming and it wont make your phone calls get 'clippy'
b) Infrastructure. Its something others have hit on already. TWC owns the infrastructure that the service rides on all the way to the end. If there is network congestion, its a TWC problem, its its signal noise, its a TWC problem, if its a modem problem, its a TWC problem, if its a phone service problem, its a TWC problem. The only thing that might be your problem is the phones in your house. With vonage or any other service they are only going to take ownership of the service problems, and even then you'll hafta prove its a service problem and none of the others. On the flip side your ISP is gonna say , "hey you can browse the web"
4) Do think about 'minor services' like call tracing, 3-way calling, etc that the phone companies offer. TWC is new to this, they are going to only offer the services they say up front they are offering.
5) Its a brand spanking new service. There are going to be some growing pains. Early adopters should always be aware.
Now weather or not its worth the price their offering it at *shrug* thats really a consumer decision. Vote with your dollars. If its not, and people dont subscribe they will change the price. |
