 bencPremium
join:2007-06-17
Glen Carbon, IL
 ·Charter
| reply to satellite68
Re: how many posts until... said by satellite68:3. You dumbasses, landlines are always better than VOIP I'll take this one.
My experience is that POTS has never gone down, at least for me.
Another concern is 911. So far I haven't needed to call it but if I do, I sure as hell want to be able to.
Plus one very good thing is that if the power goes out, it works anyway. I don't want to hear about the C.O. losing power because they aren't going to construct it in such a flimsy manner.
I use my POTS line with Western Electric 500s. They are simple, tough, reliable devices that run off of the phone line. These phones don't support DTMF, but I don't need touch-tone. There's always another way (usually just staying on the line until a human is on the other end). If I absolutely MUST have DTMF due to some crappy company I'll use a payphone. I suppose I could buy some Cortelco 2500s except I'm cheap. I know you can't get the W.E. 500s new, but they're solid enough you don't need to. They're pretty cheap on E-Bay.
Given what I get, it's worth it. For $70/mo., I get this:
- Unmetered domestic long distance. No per-call or per-minute charges whether I call Arizona, New Jersey, or even my next-door neighbor.
- Caller ID, and some other features I can't remember and don't use (the bundle was cheaper than the L.D. and CID alone).
- The $5/mo. option so International phone calls are cheaper. Such calls are the only ones that cost extra and make my bill go up.
- Never goes down. Though I don't live in Earthquake or Hurricane country (I live in Tornado country).
It's a good deal, because unless it's to another country I never have to think about "Okay, how much is the phone bill going to be next month?"
I think VOIP is a pretty useless and redundant concept, like BPL (unless there's something about BPL that I don't know). I do, however, agree with FTTP for Internet access, since I do see advantages to that. |
