Alabama Town Not Excited to Be AT&T's 'IP Transition' Guinea Pig → Change doesn't have to be bad

So long as they continue to provide wireline service most customers won't notice a difference. U-verse internet and phone will be as good or better than what most have already with POTS and DSL.

The issue is in how they implement it. Customers moving to the equivalent new service shouldn't be forced to pay a dime and hopefully the gov't will protect that. The tough situation is if they plan on moving rural customers with no DSL available and only POTS to a wireless based home phone service. You can argue both ways, but if they do that they ought to do some very serious testing to prove they can provide the same quality and reliability as before.

There's nothing wrong with advancing to new technologies so long as the companies doing so treat their customers fairly, not something At&t is always known for.

My family had a traditional landline for over 30 years. It survived hurricanes and blizzards. The one and only time we lost service it was due to an AT&T tech's mistake. In the 3-4 years I've had Cablevision's phone service, I've lost phone service dozens of times. One time it was down for 3-4 days. Any time the internet service goes out, it takes the phone with it.

That's your idea of "better"?

Verizon talked some of my family in a rural wooded area to switch to cell service only at about the same cost to them. The down side now that they are learning is the only tower in the area is over capacity and is going offline alot leaving them with no way to communicate in an emergency. Lucky for them they are on the volunteer rescue squad so they have radio's in an emergency. But I feel sorry for the people that don't.

Until they have a good reliable service I dont think this will work.

Yep some people somehow translated "all IP" to mean "all wireless".

As a person who has installed ATT's Voip I beg to differ. It was often down for DAYS, plagued by activation problems. And surviving that, throw in faulty modems to the mix with bad dial tone and it was absolute trash

Depends. What does your cost/benefit analysis say? Is the savings you're getting every month outweigh the inconvenience of it being down more? If so then yes, it is better.

/M

Actually, the monthly cost for the phone portion of my service is about the same now as it was for the landline.

this is the real problem. POTS has frequently been the sole form of emergency contact for people (particularly during natural disasters), very often working without power or data connectivity. Tunneling it over IP means that internet service issues become potentially life-threatening losses of contact.

Several of the businesses i've done work for recently report that their Comcast phone services are quite unreliable, losing service once every few months or so. Even, sometimes, when internet is still working fine.

Then again. My parents had ATT DSL for 8 years and it went out maybe twice in 8 years to where it required a modem reset, but then again that was on POTS copper.

They can make a 99.9% reliable, but do they want to??? Nope.
They want to focus on cable tv money and voip is just an extra to help sell their cable tv.