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.