| reply to Crookshanks
Re: $148 average subscriber bill ..... said by Crookshanks:said by The Truth:I have never thought of my cable bill as a luxury due to the fact that it really is a small price to pay for all of the service that it provides us here at my home.
TV is a luxury. Internet and phone service not so much... For better or worse telecommunications is our largest household expense after the mortgage and car payments: Verizon Wireless (2 smartphones): $163/mo Frontier Business Class DSL: $70/mo Frontier POTS: $26/mo Total: $259/mo I could knock $30 off that if I didn't need the business class DSL and another $26 if I was willing to part with the redundancy of the POTS line. The former is something of a necessity for work (and they pay for it, thankfully) and the latter is something that's worth $1/day to me. Still, if I was willing/able to part with them we'd be paying $203/mo for what is effectively unlimited calling, data and wireline internet service. That's not all that bad when you compare it against the options of yesteryear. Drop the mobile data/smartphones and it would be <$140/mo. So your paying $96 monthly for the two services DSL and POTS - that seems in line with the $148 average for a triple play. Add in your smartphones and you double the $148 average (if you had video). We are in the $280 range for everything (Video, HSD, Tele and cell phones) and use all three of these all day long for the five of us - a great value. |
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| said by The Truth:We are in the $280 range for everything (Video, HSD, Tele and cell phones) and use all three of these all day long for the five of us - a great value.
I'm probably a tech snob but I don't count the cable company's VoIP product as a real phone. My POTS line exists because I KNOW I can count on it during emergencies. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen Time Warner's phone product go down without any obvious cause, to say nothing of the week it took them to restore service after the floods we endured last year.
If it wasn't for the proven reliability of POTS we'd exclusively rely on our cell phones for voice service.
I'm roaming off topic though, my original point was I don't lump cable television service under the category of telecommunications at budget time. Basic telecommunications (which I would define as wireline voice and internet service) are an essential service in the 21st century. Television is a luxury. A relatively inexpensive luxury to be sure but still a luxury. |
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 RobIn Deo speramus.Premium
join:2001-08-25
Kendall, FL
kudos:3 | said by Crookshanks:said by The Truth:We are in the $280 range for everything (Video, HSD, Tele and cell phones) and use all three of these all day long for the five of us - a great value.
I'm probably a tech snob but I don't count the cable company's VoIP product as a real phone. Maybe not TW, but Comcast's phone service isn't VoIP as they keep the voice packets entirely on their private network and it is never transmitted over the data network.
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| VoIP on a private network is still VoIP.
In any case my criticism wasn't of the fact that it's VoIP -- POTS calls are digitized as well -- my criticism stems from the fact that the service is embarrassingly unreliable. They shouldn't even be allowed to sell it as "phone" service without being mandated to meet the same reliability metrics that the phone company has been required to meet for decades.
As far as I'm concerned there is no excuse for voice service to go down other than the physical destruction of infrastructure. Time Warner has no provisions in place in our market to deal with routine power outages, never mind actual disasters. Verizon can truck in generators to power the COs for weeks following a natural disaster but Time Warner can't cope with a two hour power outage caused by a thunderstorm? Pathetic.
People I personally know who lost wireline voice service during the 2011 floods:
Time Warner Customers: 3 commercial, 14 residential
Verizon Customers: 0
Frontier Customers: 0
People I know who lose wireline voice service during routine power outages:
Time Warner Customers: all of them
Verizon Customers: 0
Frontier Customers: 0
It doesn't even matter that Time Warner's modem has a battery in it, because the damn DOCSIS nodes go down during every bloody power outage. What's the point of having batteries in your CPE if the last mile infrastructure doesn't have generators and/or batteries? I suppose the battery is useful if you forget to pay your electric bill and your house is the only one that loses power..... |
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| said by Crookshanks:VoIP on a private network is still VoIP. In any case my criticism wasn't of the fact that it's VoIP -- POTS calls are digitized as well -- my criticism stems from the fact that the service is embarrassingly unreliable. They shouldn't even be allowed to sell it as "phone" service without being mandated to meet the same reliability metrics that the phone company has been required to meet for decades. As far as I'm concerned there is no excuse for voice service to go down other than the physical destruction of infrastructure. Time Warner has no provisions in place in our market to deal with routine power outages, never mind actual disasters. Verizon can truck in generators to power the COs for weeks following a natural disaster but Time Warner can't cope with a two hour power outage caused by a thunderstorm? Pathetic. People I personally know who lost wireline voice service during the 2011 floods: Time Warner Customers: 3 commercial, 14 residential Verizon Customers: 0 Frontier Customers: 0 People I know who lose wireline voice service during routine power outages: Time Warner Customers: all of them Verizon Customers: 0 Frontier Customers: 0 It doesn't even matter that Time Warner's modem has a battery in it, because the damn DOCSIS nodes go down during every bloody power outage. What's the point of having batteries in your CPE if the last mile infrastructure doesn't have generators and/or batteries? I suppose the battery is useful if you forget to pay your electric bill and your house is the only one that loses power..... You're misinformed about how cable plant works. Every node is designed with a power supply cabinet that 1) provides commercial power and 2) have battery backups which engage once commercial power is lost and 3) is monitored 24/7 and sends out alerts if there is a disruption in power. Most of the time we know of a outage before you do and have trucks rolling out to these power supplies for backup on our backups. If you're bragging about having landline service during the one hurricane in the last ten years than congratulations but I've never lost phone service of any kind here at our house and I'm on the coast here in Florida. |
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1 edit | said by The Truth:You're misinformed about how cable plant works. Every node is designed with a power supply cabinet that 1) provides commercial power and 2) have battery backups which engage once commercial power is lost and 3) is monitored 24/7 and sends out alerts if there is a disruption in power. Most of the time we know of a outage before you do and have trucks rolling out to these power supplies for backup on our backups. That may be the way Comcast does it in your particular market but I can assure you it is _not_ the way Time Warner does it in my market. I even have an e-mail from our Account Executive admitting that they had no provisions in place to deal with power outages. They didn't lose any physical infrastructure. We had power in our office. They had power at their NOC. Yet we had no phone service. Why do you suppose that is? We asked them why we had no service for a week. Their answer was "Talk to NYSEG" (the local electric utility).
I had cable internet/television service from them as recently as a year ago. The power goes out and I lose both services, in spite of my investment in UPS'es and generators. Why do you suppose that is?
said by The Truth:If you're bragging about having landline service during the one hurricane in the last ten years than congratulations but I've never lost phone service of any kind here at our house and I'm on the coast here in Florida.
I'm bragging about never losing service when friends of mine with the competing Time Warner product lose service all the time, sometimes for no apparent reason. They even had a market wide outage lasting several hours a few years ago. No penalty of any kind was assessed against them, even though they left thousands of people without 911 service. Verizon would have been raked over the coals by the PSC if they had an outage on that scale. |
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| Just as we're required by the FCC to provide battery backups in our EMTA's being that phone service is considered a life line we are also required to do so with our cable plant to be able to provide phone service during a loss of commercial power to our nodes (just like in a home but on a bigger scale). Being we are a sister company of Time Warner and coordinate most of our software and policies with them I doubt their cable plant is much different than ours. As for why your phone drops during loss of commercial power I have no idea why as I obviously am not there to verify. |
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