Switching to cable internet

[Kev Williams]

It seems every website and/or it's designers believes everyone has 50 meg internet speed. I've been on DSL since it came out. And I'm okay with 1.5meg speed, which is what I'm paying for, but I'm rarely if ever connected at that speed. For the past 2 weeks (and right now) I'm connected at 640k up and down. With my grandaughter using her laptop on my wifi, it takes 15 seconds to download a 100k photo. Ridiculous. Whenever going to a website, it just sits there, while in the lower left corner of the screen I read "waiting forthis.com, waiting for that.com, waiting for unlimitedadsforyou.com"...

Part 2, for this blazing internet speed and 2 phone lines, I'm paying an average of $196 a month.

I've tried every other avenue, but there's no fiber optics in our neighborhood, and too many trees for line-of-sight antenna internet. And then there's my favorite commercial, Dish Networks satellite TV service with "speeds as fast as 4G!!!" -- I wish someone would explain to Dish that "4G" isn't a "speed". (4G simply means '4th Generation'). And it's only about the same 1.5meg I have now.

Anyway- Getting 25 meg speed (on a good day, I know) for $30 a month for a year. Then I'm dropping my one phone line, and going with MagicJack or some other Voip thing. Suggestions? (Ooma seems to get rave reviews). I would dump the other phone line but I need a bare-bones line for a fax machine. UNLESS, someone can explain to me a way to make my computer receive faxes...

And with decent internet speed, I might entertain the idea of Netflix or some other such service. Suggestions? FWIW, my son has Netflix, and virtually every time I ask if such&such a show or movie is on Netflix, he says it isn't. That doesn't work for me... ;) Maybe Hulu or Vudu... Anyway, if that happens, I can knock another $50 or so a month off the Dish bill every month.

Then comes the fun of cancelling the current phone and internet service. But I am looking forward to saving nearly $200 a month, AND having reasonably fast internet service. What should I do with all that money? Just saw an ad on TV the other day where you can lease a Dodge Dart for 2 years for $99 a month...

-- maybe I'll get 2 of 'em.. :)

[Rich Engelhardt]

I had cable (Time Warner) for a long time. 1996 to 2006 or 2007.
It started out great, but, as more and more people in the neighborhood got hooked up, my connection speed dropped to a miserable level.

I switched over to a basic DSL line - 768K down, 384K up - and it seemed just as fast as the cable - that's how super saturated the neighborhood was.
I jumped the speed to 1.5Mb in 2012 as part of a bundle deal with AT&T.
The AT&T deal just expired and we switched over to Uverse.

We also got rid of our land line and went with an Ooma.

We had been paying $149.00 a month for 300 channels, 1.5Mb internet and basic local (no long distance) phone.
Our Uverse runs $86.00 a month for an 18Mb internet connection and 390 TV channels.


My only two complaints about cable - other than the dwindling connection speed over the years,,,,

- Support used to be local to me here near Akron Ohio - hen they moved it all to Florida then finally to India.
- They buried the cable in the fenced in back yard & "critters" ate through it every couple years. They insisted on running the cable through the back yard & every time it got chewed, it was a major deal to meet them and let them inside the fence. Then they'd run the cable and leave it on top of the ground for a couple of weeks.
That cable on top of the ground was an irresistible temptation to our Husky and he'd tear it up before they could come out and bury it.

One oddity so far with the Ooma. It worked like a charm on the 1.5Mb DSL.
It drops calls and is constantly going off line on the much faster Uverse.
Go figure.
We only maintain a landline for one of our tenants convenience so I'm not overly concerned about it.


Then comes the fun of cancelling the current phone and internet serviceSurprisingly - that was pretty easy to cancel. It only took my wife a half dozen calls and four or five hours.
Getting the Direct TV cancelled has been a nightmare. They claimed their system was down and we should call back in an hour. That was yesterday morning and my wife has called every hour on the hour and they still claim the system is down.

(LOL! Anyhow - - smartest thing I ever did was put the services in her name ;). I call and they won't even talk to me because the service is in her name :D )


Anyhow - good luck and enjoy the price drop.
I've found none of the different services are perfect.
I am loving this 18Mb internet and 390 TV stations though - for less money than we had been paying!

[Brian Elfert]

I have had real good luck with Comcast cable Internet since I switched around 2010. My DSL was doing just fine, but it was only $7 a month extra to add Internet to my cable TV package. I saved about $25 a month and faster too. I don't recall ever having an Internet outage to date.

[Kev Williams]

About cancelling-- Years ago I got on a long distance service called Talk.com-- it was owned by aohell. I decided to change, so I called Talk.com to cancel. They had this really neat trick (and I'm aware of several other companies that use it)-- First, they tell you "oh, we can't cancel your service in the middle of a billing cycle, you need to call at the end of this cycle." Ok, when's that? "The 24th" (or whatever). So then we call on the 24th. When a human finally answers, "oh, we can't cancel your service now, you just started a NEW billing cycle..." Arguing didn't help-- the next month we forgot to call, paid for another month. The NEXT month we called on the 23rd, a human never did pick up the phone.

I ended up mailing them a letter, written in 2" bold red letters that simply read
CANCEL OUR SERVICE
IMMEDIATELY
OR I WILL SUE YOU.

They cancelled. And sent me a sad puppydog letter of apology. Big whoop....

Know what one of my 'new age' fears is? You know these stupid "price-saver" tags every grocery store has and scans, and tracks your spending? I'm just waiting for a letter in the mail from Colgate asking to know why I switched to Crest toothpaste...
;)

[Wade Lippman]

You can receive and send faxes over the internet with any number of services. The free one we use for the 4 faxes a year we need comes in as an attachment to an email. I still have a fax machine I hook up to our phone line about once a year to send faxes, but the services let you send also; just not for free.

[Rich Riddle]

We switched to cable Internet service a couple of months ago. It's far superior to the telephone service. Just make sure you send back any equipment they gave you when setting up your prior service. We ended up with a bill for $120 for a modem that sells on eBay for $5 shipped.

[Rich Enders]

At home we have a high speed cable connection in order to send and receive CAD files that can get quite large. However last week I was in rural Nevada at a friends home that had some sort of dish on the side of the house. Using their internet was quite slow, taking 10-25 minutes for a typical file. So I tried using the Hot Spot on my AT&T (4G showing 3 bars) cell phone, and the same files up and down loaded much faster.

I don't know the specifies details of the data speeds, but I bring up the concept as another option for your consideration.

[Jim Matthews]

Netflix is more about the back catalog. If you want current offerings, join Xbox gold and stream off the Microsoft server. It has access to Hulu and thereby, current video on demand.

[Curt Harms]

.................................................. ......................
Anyway- Getting 25 meg speed (on a good day, I know) for $30 a month for a year. Then I'm dropping my one phone line, and going with MagicJack or some other Voip thing. Suggestions? (Ooma seems to get rave reviews). I would dump the other phone line but I need a bare-bones line for a fax machine. UNLESS, someone can explain to me a way to make my computer receive faxes...
.................................................. .......................


How much faxing do you do? If a few pages/month, there are online fax services. You receive faxes as a .pdf file via email. I haven't used one - they weren't around when I was using fax services - but I'd sure look into them if I needed one today. And I own two MFD machines with fax capability.

[Larry Browning]

Netflix is more about the back catalog. If you want current offerings, join Xbox gold and stream off the Microsoft server. It has access to Hulu and thereby, current video on demand.
What I have found with Netflix is that you shouldn't be looking for this movie or that TV show, but rather look at what they do have and find something completely new to watch. They have some really amazing stuff to watch that you have never heard of. The trick is finding it. Netflix is producing more and more original programming, so they are starting to go the way of HBO. When I am watching TV it's about 75-80% Netflix. About the only thing I watch on regular TV is live sports and the news. Everything else is either Netflix or VUDU.

[Shawn Pixley]

Presumably, you have a mobile phone. I'd cancel both land lines and go mobile only. Get cable or other internet access and use a fax to email service (actually, I didn't think anybody used fax anymore).

My family / house - three mobile phones (one hotspot enabled, and two with unlimited data, all with unlimited text, and roll-over minutes), Time Warner internet, and Dish Satelite television. My three mobile lines are less then the two land lines you have. No one in my house uses any domains from TW.

[Shawn Pixley]

I don't know about XBox Gold, but I like Netflix for their international catalogue. When I was unable to do much after surgery, I watched a lot of films. I first got on a Scandanavian film kick (there are a few really good Finnish films). Then I went on to French & German films.

[Steve Peterson]

It seems like every house we buy is outside the area of good internet. 15 years ago it we bought a house in a brand new subdivision near Sacramento. Not even DSL was available, just dialup.

We moved to a house further away from the city 9 years ago. The only things available are a few wireless services. $60 per month for "3mb", but the system was so overloaded that it was often closer to 300k during peak times. At least there was no data limit. Downloaded movies would pause so often that we would simply give up.

We moved to another house that is much closer to town a few months ago and are happy to have 3mb DSL. At least is appears to consistently give us close to the bandwidth we are paying for. We are hoping to be able to get Netflix as soon as I run a network connection to the living room. Wifi does not connect good enough.

We have a 4G box that is great for traveling and as a backup. It costs $20 for 5GB of data per month, however every additional GB costs $10. It would get really expensive if this was our only internet available. I don't know the speeds, but think that they may be somewhere in the 5-10mb range.

Steve

[Garth Almgren]

I had FiOS (first from Verizon and then it got sold to Frontier) for 8 years in two different locations before moving to our new house in January, where the only decent fast internet available is Comcast. I despise Comcast for both their customer service practices, and the lousy network performance.

In 8 years with FiOS I only had two problems with the service - once when the ONT on the side of my house died, and once when the blade in the CO where my fiber terminated went kaput. In both cases the customer service was great - they had a technician out the next day, on a Saturday, and they were able to quickly resolve the issue. I can recall only one other 6 hour outage where the cause was a backhoe breaking a fiber line about a mile away. My only complaint was the billing - with all the transitions my account had gone through (apartment to house, then Verizon to Frontier), they could never find my account when I did need to call. That, and their website sucked.

Since switching to Comcast, I've had nothing but problems - my router and cable modem need to be rebooted every other day, and three times now I've called because of poor performance (dropping lots of packets, high latency, and really, really slow speeds). In each case, the "technician" on the other end of the line walks me through the steps I told them I've already tried (and I know what I'm doing - I do this stuff for a living), and they work their magic in the background to fix whatever the real issue is. All while denying there is any problem whatsoever with their systems, because they're the best dontchaknow.

[Curt Harms]

Presumably, you have a mobile phone. I'd cancel both land lines and go mobile only. Get cable or other internet access and use a fax to email service (actually, I didn't think anybody used fax anymore).


I read that in the wake of stricter record retention requirements, fax enjoyed a mini boom. It's pretty available and doesn't leave any copies on any servers. There's a record of a call being made but not the contents of that call. The efax type services may leave copies on intermediate servers, I don't know. The other use is sending documents that require an "original signature". I don't know why a fax of a signed document is okay but a scanned and emailed copy of a signed document is not but that seems to be the case sometimes.

[Kev Williams]

thanks for the replies everyone! :)

As for cutting the wire and going strictly mobile- I already have a Wilson amplifier and we still barely have a bar or two of cell service on the wife's Cricket. T-mobile doesn't work unless you go outside. I have Verizon on an old LG flip phone, want nothing to do with smart phone. And-- I simply cannot stand the voice quality of cell phones. To my ears it's like trying to decipher pig latin. It's bad enough listening to people on cell phones, it's horrible to me if we're both on a cell. I guess 40 years of screaming engraving machines and 130db rock & roll have taken its toll on my ears ;)

Good to know on the fax services (I don't get out much :D ) - I'll check into that, thanks!

Another question on voip phones- I currently have 5 phones, 2 in the basement shop, 2 upstairs, one in the garage, they're Vtech cordless (which by the way are the ONLY cordless phones I've found that 'talk' good enough for me to understand)... are multiple phones on the same line okay with voip?

[Mike Henderson]

thanks for the replies everyone! :)

Another question on voip phones- I currently have 5 phones, 2 in the basement shop, 2 upstairs, one in the garage, they're Vtech cordless (which by the way are the ONLY cordless phones I've found that 'talk' good enough for me to understand)... are multiple phones on the same line okay with voip?
Normally, yes. The ringing voltage (and current) was designed to ring clapper type bells on the old phones - and those took a fair amount of power. Most electronic phones just detect the ringing voltage and make some noise through a speaker. So they don't need a lot of power from the voip device to generate ring.

And, if you have cordless phones, the only thing that detects the ring is the base station. When it detects ring, it sends a signal to the handsets and they make their own noise. So a cordless phone only has one appearance on the line, as far as ringing detection is concerned.

Mike

[Steve Peterson]

I have Verizon on an old LG flip phone, want nothing to do with smart phone. And-- I simply cannot stand the voice quality of cell phones. To my ears it's like trying to decipher pig latin. It's bad enough listening to people on cell phones, it's horrible to me if we're both on a cell.

That's one of my pet peeves also. How come phones sound worse today than they did 40 years ago? And why do people tolerate it? This is why we went back to a land line.

I think the reasons for the horrible quality are cost cutting ab profit margins. A $600 cell phone will have a bill of materials cost of around $200. The manufacturer has to do everything possible to keep their cost around $200. The budget may only have a few pennies to spend on the microphone and speaker so they put in crappy components. Then they go searching for even cheaper components, just so they can hit their price point.

Steve

[Larry Browning]

That's one of my pet peeves also. How come phones sound worse today than they did 40 years ago? And why do people tolerate it? This is why we went back to a land line.


These things they call smart phones have a primary purpose of everything but a phone. The phone feature is merely an after thought. Ask anyone under the age of 30 how often they use the smart "phone" to make a voice phone call and you will most likely be told that they can't remember the last time they did that or that they have never done it. The reason the audio quality has gone down is that the customers being marketed to really don't care about it.

[Mike Henderson]

That's one of my pet peeves also. How come phones sound worse today than they did 40 years ago? And why do people tolerate it? This is why we went back to a land line.

I think the reasons for the horrible quality are cost cutting ab profit margins. A $600 cell phone will have a bill of materials cost of around $200. The manufacturer has to do everything possible to keep their cost around $200. The budget may only have a few pennies to spend on the microphone and speaker so they put in crappy components. Then they go searching for even cheaper components, just so they can hit their price point.

Steve
All modern cellular phones encode the voice into digital. They use a voice coder (vocoder) and encode it at as low a rate as possible because the lower the rate, the more phones can be supported in a cell. The type of vocoding is set by standards bodies but I suspect there are several vocoders to choose from, some being of higher quality than others - but perhaps also at a higher bit rate, or more complexity to achieve the coding.

Cordless phones also encode the voice to digital. For certain types of cordless phones, such as DECT, the vocoder may be standardized. In general, most systems such as cordless phones and cellular phones prefer to use a low coding rate which usually also means lower quality.

When you make a cell phone-to-cell phone call, the voice is coded at a low bit rate at one end, then transcoded to 64Kpbs for carriage through the network, then back to a low bit rate coding for the other phone. In addition to the problems of the low bit rate coding, the conversion between types of coding introduces error into the coding, which means you have trouble understanding.

However, most people can understand those types of calls so they aren't going to change.

Mike

[On a land line, your voice is digitally encoded once it hits the central office - it's coded at 64Kbps. That 64Kbps is carried through the network, and since it's digital, there is no noise, crosstalk or other impairments introduced into the signal. You can call Asia and you'll get a clear signal. Then, at the other end, the 64Kbps is converted back to analog for the other person to hear.]

[Shawn Pixley]

I haven't had the bad sound quality experience of which you speak. In fact, my experience is the opposite. People comment, "you sound like you're right next to me."

We switched from Verizon to ATT years ago, because Verizon's cell signal at our hiuse is so bad. They tried everything to incentivize us to stay, but refused to consider the cell quality. It was some surrealistic conversations (we'll give you free phones to stay with us. Will you be upgrading the signal at our house? No, but with our phone you will experince the broadest coverage across the nation? How does that help me if I don't get calls at home? You could go inland to where the coverage is better. I think we are done here. But we really want you to stay as a customer. Why would i do that? Because we offer the best coverage of any major carrier. Huh? Remember, we'll give you new phones. How does that help? ... And it went on like this)

Now we have iPhone 5's on ATT with good quality all over the world. Yesterday I had 3 calls on my mobile, so we do use it in voice mode.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

It seems every website and/or it's designers believes everyone has 50 meg internet speed. I've been on DSL since it came out. And I'm okay with 1.5meg speed, which is what I'm paying for, but I'm rarely if ever connected at that speed. For the past 2 weeks (and right now) I'm connected at 640k up and down. With my grandaughter using her laptop on my wifi, it takes 15 seconds to download a 100k photo. Ridiculous. Whenever going to a website, it just sits there, while in the lower left corner of the screen I read "waiting forthis.com, waiting for that.com, waiting for unlimitedadsforyou.com"...


Adblocker style plug-ins don't always speed up web-surfing (some of the ones for Chrome, for instance last I looked, still downloaded advertising pages, but simply didn't render the content) but ad-blocking proxies (I experimented briefly with Privoxy (http://www.privoxy.org), in the past, and found it interesting) or editing the "hosts" files on either your computer or router will prevent your computer from downloading the ads from websites. I've experimented with this in the past when I was stuck on slower connections, and found it sped up a lot of the web for me - a fair amount of web pages hang waiting for the ads to load; by bypassing this, things sped up considerably for me at that time. Certainly, the ads are often the most bandwidth intensive parts of some websites. Doesn't sound like it's really worth continuing your current internet solution as it is, but might be worth trying out to speed things up in the interim.



And with decent internet speed, I might entertain the idea of Netflix or some other such service. Suggestions? FWIW, my son has Netflix, and virtually every time I ask if such&such a show or movie is on Netflix, he says it isn't. That doesn't work for me... ;) Maybe Hulu or Vudu... Anyway, if that happens, I can knock another $50 or so a month off the Dish bill every month.


I still find a lot of choosing a streaming site can really depend on what you want to watch - we looked at this site : http://www.canistream.it and it was helpful in the past, but it was a while back, so I don't know how helpful it might be now.

[Bert Kemp]

Project Free Tv has tons of movies and tv most tv shows are on it a day or 2 after they broadcast. Also most network tv streams their shows over the internet just look up the network. ABC<CBS ect

[Moses Yoder]

My wife gets a discount on Sprint since she works for Chiphone so of course we switched from Verizon to Sprint. Sprint reception in our house was nonexistent until we installed the Sprint Airave, they discounted it to about $100, and our reception now is better than a land line. I would imagine every company has it's own version of this booster that works through the internet.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Project Free TvThat web site lit up my Security Essentials like a Christmas tree.
I tried a few movie titles and each one wanted me to update something or other (either Java or IE).

Since I recently got burned by a bogus Java update, I decided it wasn't worth the risk.

[Ole Anderson]

Comcast upgraded our service at no cost so now we have 57 mbps down/12 up every time I run a speed test. I see no degradation from neighborhood use. Only problem is that the new all-in-one modem/router/phone/wireless box gives a really spotty wireless connection. So bad that I hardwired my BluRay (for streaming) and my laptop. Now I get rock solid speed. And the phone works great for receiving all those computer generated sales calls. I didn't want the phone service, I was going to go with just cellphones, but phone came "bundled" cheaper than no phone. I just can't bring myself to disconnect that "free" phone.

[Kev Williams]

just tested my internet speed: .55 down, .48 up. Yes, the decimals are in the right place, unfortunately! Pretty lame...

I have my fax taken care of, thank you! :) -- Costing me a whopping $3 a month for 25 pages both ways, which is more than enough. Much better than the around $30 for a land-line fax.

Got my cable modem in the mail Saturday, $68 on Amazon, so no $8 a month rental...

Just need to figure out the phone service I want. The 19th is my install date...

So, Magic Jack- someone either talk me into it or out of it! ;) -- My only experience with it is a guy at the boat harbor who used to talk to his mom in Australia using the harbor's wifi and his laptop, he had nothing but good to say about it. I'd love to hear more real-world internet phone experiences, of any brand!

[Pat Barry]

All modern cellular phones encode the voice into digital. They use a voice coder (vocoder) and encode it at as low a rate as possible because the lower the rate, the more phones can be supported in a cell. The type of vocoding is set by standards bodies but I suspect there are several vocoders to choose from, some being of higher quality than others - but perhaps also at a higher bit rate, or more complexity to achieve the coding.

Cordless phones also encode the voice to digital. For certain types of cordless phones, such as DECT, the vocoder may be standardized. In general, most systems such as cordless phones and cellular phones prefer to use a low coding rate which usually also means lower quality.

When you make a cell phone-to-cell phone call, the voice is coded at a low bit rate at one end, then transcoded to 64Kpbs for carriage through the network, then back to a low bit rate coding for the other phone. In addition to the problems of the low bit rate coding, the conversion between types of coding introduces error into the coding, which means you have trouble understanding.

However, most people can understand those types of calls so they aren't going to change.

Mike

[On a land line, your voice is digitally encoded once it hits the central office - it's coded at 64Kbps. That 64Kbps is carried through the network, and since it's digital, there is no noise, crosstalk or other impairments introduced into the signal. You can call Asia and you'll get a clear signal. Then, at the other end, the 64Kbps is converted back to analog for the other person to hear.]
Cell phone audio is just as digital as the wireless handset you might have in your house. In fact its no doubt much better. The 64kbps that is referred to is a significant limitation to the quality of the landline that doesn't exist on a cell phone. This is likely the biggest issue and one that will get resolved in time. I also don't buy the idea that young folks don't know how to use the phone. ROFL that's a simply hilarious observation.

[Scott Shepherd]

just tested my internet speed: .55 down, .48 up. Yes, the decimals are in the right place, unfortunately! Pretty lame...

I have my fax taken care of, thank you! :) -- Costing me a whopping $3 a month for 25 pages both ways, which is more than enough. Much better than the around $30 for a land-line fax.

Got my cable modem in the mail Saturday, $68 on Amazon, so no $8 a month rental...

Just need to figure out the phone service I want. The 19th is my install date...

So, Magic Jack- someone either talk me into it or out of it! ;) -- My only experience with it is a guy at the boat harbor who used to talk to his mom in Australia using the harbor's wifi and his laptop, he had nothing but good to say about it. I'd love to hear more real-world internet phone experiences, of any brand!

Magicjack doesn't get great reviews in the tech world. You will see people online from time to time say they use it and it works fine, but people that test that stuff for a living haven't been giving magicjack the best reviews. It normally rates on the low to middle end of the other products. There's a lot of mention of them having horrible support and constantly trying to upsell you on things. I've never used it, but that's what I've read. I've had Vonage for about 8-9 years now and it's been fantastic. However, it's not as cheap as it used to be.

[Garth Almgren]

If you ever have to call the cable company, don't tell them that you own your own modem unless they specifically ask. Once they know that it isn't their modem, they will just refer you to the modem's manufacturer. Guess how I know. :rolleyes:

As for Magic Jack, I'm surprised you found someone who had something good to say about it. Just about everyone I've talked with who has it, the only good thing they could say about it was "well, at least it's cheap". The voice quality is pretty horrendous due to massive compression, and it does require your PC to be turned on in order to receive or make a call.

[Ole Anderson]

Seems like every time I ask someone if I can fax a document to them, forgetting that I am not at the office anymore so I have no fax machine, I get the reply that they would prefer that I scan it and attach it to an email. Faxes are going the way of the Labrador Duck. An attachment can be saved "in the cloud" and forwarded in a split second, a fax can be saved in a manila folder and forwarded by snail mail.

[Kev Williams]

I agree on the fax issue. I have maybe 6 customers that I need to switch over to email, but some of these customers are employees who order name badges, but they don't have immediate access to the office computer.

Thanks for the Magic Jack reviews guys, that was enough to convince me to search elsewhere! I know Vonage is good, but IMO their monthly rates are a tad extreme.

[Larry Browning]

Seems like every time I ask someone if I can fax a document to them, forgetting that I am not at the office anymore so I have no fax machine, I get the reply that they would prefer that I scan it and attach it to an email. Faxes are going the way of the Labrador Duck. An attachment can be saved "in the cloud" and forwarded in a split second, a fax can be saved in a manila folder and forwarded by snail mail.

I have mostly had this same experience, but one major exception seems to be in Medical Billing. I recently have been dealing with a major healthcare organization which required back and forth communication with them. (The issue has been resolved) I was told that they would not accept emailed documents nor would they send me email attachments. Our document exchanges would have to be either through snail mail or fax. I was lead to believe that they needed actual paper documentation not because of some security or privacy requirement, but because of their own book keeping procedures and that the email was just too much hassle for them because they would then have to actually print out any email that I sent them or scan something to send me.

[Rich Engelhardt]

As for Magic Jack, I'm surprised you found someone who had something good to say about it. Just about everyone I've talked with who has it, the only good thing they could say about it was "well, at least it's cheap". The voice quality is pretty horrendous due to massive compression, and it does require your PC to be turned on in order to receive or make a call.That was the old one.
The new Magic Jack doesn't need a PC, you just plug it into any internet connection and a wall outlet, then plug your phone into it.

Anyhow - I went with Ooma because it was cheaper in the long run.

[paul cottingham]

Its funny. Here in Victoria, BC, DSL is faster than cable. Service is better too. I suspect the gap has closed since I first got DSL in 1997 when the speed difference was massive, and no over subscribing the area, leading to (litereally) less than dial-up speeds and tons of excuses from the local cable provider. I will never go back to cable internet.

[Curt Harms]

Its funny. Here in Victoria, BC, DSL is faster than cable. Service is better too. I suspect the gap has closed since I first got DSL in 1997 when the speed difference was massive, and no over subscribing the area, leading to (litereally) less than dial-up speeds and tons of excuses from the local cable provider. I will never go back to cable internet.

I guess it all depends on infrastructure. A relative to who I provide unpaid tech support had a DSL connection much like Kevin mentioned above, well under 1Mb./sec and long ping times. I don't know if it was distance from the CO, crappy wire or a combination. We had DSL from the same company (Verizon) but had new wire and less than 5000' from the CO. We had excellent service.

[Dan Hintz]

All modern cellular phones encode the voice into digital. They use a voice coder (vocoder) and encode it at as low a rate as possible because the lower the rate, the more phones can be supported in a cell. The type of vocoding is set by standards bodies but I suspect there are several vocoders to choose from, some being of higher quality than others - but perhaps also at a higher bit rate, or more complexity to achieve the coding.

Cordless phones also encode the voice to digital. For certain types of cordless phones, such as DECT, the vocoder may be standardized. In general, most systems such as cordless phones and cellular phones prefer to use a low coding rate which usually also means lower quality.

When you make a cell phone-to-cell phone call, the voice is coded at a low bit rate at one end, then transcoded to 64Kpbs for carriage through the network, then back to a low bit rate coding for the other phone. In addition to the problems of the low bit rate coding, the conversion between types of coding introduces error into the coding, which means you have trouble understanding.

However, most people can understand those types of calls so they aren't going to change.

Mike

[On a land line, your voice is digitally encoded once it hits the central office - it's coded at 64Kbps. That 64Kbps is carried through the network, and since it's digital, there is no noise, crosstalk or other impairments introduced into the signal. You can call Asia and you'll get a clear signal. Then, at the other end, the 64Kbps is converted back to analog for the other person to hear.]

Back in the day, I implemented a number of the popular vocoders for cell service (handsets and base stations)... G.711, G.722, G.728, etc. These are relatively low bitrate codecs, 10-30kbps, give or take. Any transcoding that takes place (if it takes place at all, depends upon the network being shuffled through) will be, for all intents and purposes, lossless. If anything, it's repacketizing, not transcoding, so the bitrate over the trunk goes up slightly for header info, but the main channel data is not affected from a quality perspective.

Any intelligibility issues people are likely to run into during phone conversations would be due to QOS downsampling, essentially lowering the bitrate on the fly because the channel does not have the bandwidth to support a higher bitrate at that moment in time. For example, look at Dish TV reception during a heavy rainstorm or during snow... the picture begins to get blocky, but you still get a moving picture. As the channel bandwidth decreases further, you start to get frame freezes, but it picks up from time to time. Eventually the channel is degraded too much and the picture is lost.

[Mike Henderson]

Back in the day, I implemented a number of the popular vocoders for cell service (handsets and base stations)... G.711, G.722, G.728, etc. These are relatively low bitrate codecs, 10-30kbps, give or take. Any transcoding that takes place (if it takes place at all, depends upon the network being shuffled through) will be, for all intents and purposes, lossless. If anything, it's repacketizing, not transcoding, so the bitrate over the trunk goes up slightly for header info, but the main channel data is not affected from a quality perspective.

Any intelligibility issues people are likely to run into during phone conversations would be due to QOS downsampling, essentially lowering the bitrate on the fly because the channel does not have the bandwidth to support a higher bitrate at that moment in time. For example, look at Dish TV reception during a heavy rainstorm or during snow... the picture begins to get blocky, but you still get a moving picture. As the channel bandwidth decreases further, you start to get frame freezes, but it picks up from time to time. Eventually the channel is degraded too much and the picture is lost.
To the best of my knowledge, Dan, when you make a cellular call to a land line phone, the speech has to be converted from the coded voice to 64Kbps PCM. First, the regular telephone network is only set up to handle 64Kbps voice in a circuit switched environment. Second, the line card servicing the land line subscriber can only handle 64Kbps PCM voice.

When a call is made between two cellular subscribers on two different networks in two different parts of the country, my understanding is that the voice is carried by the standard telephone system, which would mean that the voice would have to be converted to 64Kbps PCM to be carried over the circuit switched network.

It's possible that the voice could be carried on a packet network as VOIP (in its original coded form), but even then, the two cellular systems may be using different voice coders on their systems, so a conversion would have to be made between them. Depending on the type of coding being done, that could require going to PCM or linear before going to the other voice coder. I'm not an expert on voice coders, but it seems to me that it might be difficult to go directly from one type of LPC to another type of LPC without doing a conversion to linear first. (and I'm pretty sure that all the decent low bit rate coders are a type of LPC and are not waveform coders)

It's possible that this conversion between coders would not introduce too much error, but since LPC coders basically do estimation I would assume that there would be some error introduced by the differences in estimation, similar to the quantization error introduced when you convert analog to PCM.

Mike

[Thinking about this some more, I wonder if it would be possible to establish a circuit switched connection through the PSTN for the cellular call. The connection would go from the mobile switching center of one cellular network to the mobile switching center of another cellular network, across the general PSTN. Then, if you really have a clear channel 64Kbps connection, you could negotiate between the two ends to indicated that the call is going to be coded voice, then put the coded voice in some layer 2 frame (HDLC) and just ship it to the other end. I never heard of that being done but it could work. You'd still have the problem of the two ends using different coders as mentioned above, however.]

[Thinking about this even more, what I suggested just above won't work because you can't know (in the US) whether the number you're calling is a cell phone or a land line. Some other countries assigned unique prefixes to cellular phones so that you know whether the call is going to or coming from a cell phone, but in the US there's no distinction between the numbers. So when someone on a cell phone dials a number, the system does not know what the other end device is. Which leads me to believe that any cellular call, once it enters the PSTN, is converted to 64Kbps to be carried over the PSTN. So on a cell phone to cell phone call, you'd have the voice coded in an LPC coder, then converted to PCM, then converted to LPC for the other cell system.]