 
Marilla
I Am My Own Arbiter
Premium
join:2002-12-06
Belpre, OH | No surprises That has been one (of a few) reason I've never seriously considered a switch myself; There are too many points of possible failure, for my taste. | |
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Sly
Premium
join:2004-02-20
Johnson City, TN
clubs: | Re: No surprises Take it with a grain of salt. My cell phone is a lot more problematic than my VoIP line. Some people freak out when they don't have phone service for a minute. I don't know of any phone service that is 100% reliable. | |
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LordMalak
join:2003-07-02
Brazil
 ·Net Virtua
| Re: No surprises said by Sly  :
Take it with a grain of salt. My cell phone is a lot more problematic than my VoIP line. Some people freak out when they don't have phone service for a minute. I don't know of any phone service that is 100% reliable.
Ever heard of LANDLINE?? | |
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Sly
Premium
join:2004-02-20
Johnson City, TN
clubs: | Re: No surprises Yea, I used to bend over and take it from Sprint. With the constant AC hum and telemarketer calls twice a week, I had a land line.
No, they are not 100% reliable. In fact, they suck ass. | |
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Marilla
I Am My Own Arbiter
Premium
join:2002-12-06
Belpre, OH | Re: No surprises AC hum can still be spoken over... say, if you need to dial 911.
Telemarketer calls twice a week? Man.. how did you survive it?  | |
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| | | hescominsoon
join:2003-02-18
Brunswick, MD | landline is not 100% reliable. | |
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Marilla
I Am My Own Arbiter
Premium
join:2002-12-06
Belpre, OH
| Re: No surprises Landline is a good measure more reliable than cell technology, in large part due to requirements such as backup generators at CO's.
A hum on the line isn't an impediment to making a 911 call. Losing DSL Sync, other connection problems (like that hum on the line), someone's router somewhere dying... and many other things, could cause loss of VoIP service.
I seem to recall a day, not so long ago, when power was out in New York City, and to many other people in the North East.. and yet for many, telephone service worked fine.
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Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD - just use the right tool for the right job... end the OS Politics!
Real politics is much more interesting! www.georgewbush.com | |
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| | | | | thegoldwater
Thegoldwater
join:2002-03-10
Parkton, MD
| Re: No surprises Not necessarily. In rural areas like Northern Baltimore County here in the People's Republic of Maryland, Verizon still has 30 and 40 year old copper feeds running down the back roads. During a good rain (and we have had lots of that), the hollow core of the feed gets filled with water in the low parts between poles... the only way for them to fix this is to roll a truck with an air tank they connect to blow the water out.
It was the main reason I ditched the landline.
Besides, phones suck anyway. Too many jackasses in this country feel that my having a phone number gives them the right to bother me. | |
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N3OGH
Bear patrol must be working like a charm
Premium
join:2003-11-11
Philly burbs
·Verizon Online DSL
| Re: No surprises said by thegoldwater :
Besides, phones suck anyway. Too many jackasses in this country feel that my having a phone number gives them the right to bother me.
AMEN!!!! | |
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Ben67
join:2000-07-08
Monroe, GA
| said by LordMalak :
Ever heard of LANDLINE??
Ever hear of Alltel? At my prior address my Alltel landline service went down quite often for a while(the SLC/RT would crash leaving the whole area without service). This usually happened on the weekend so they wouldn't fix it till Monday and if Monday was a holiday it would be Tuesday. When I asked them what someone w/o a cellphone should do in an emergency they said they would have to use someone Else's phone that worked. How nice.
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P4 2.4c@3.4,P4P800,512meg hyperx pc3500,256megPNY FX5600,SBlive,2x36G WD Raptors raid0,18.1" Sunmicrosytems LCD, yada,yada | |
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| | | | tyscoj
join:2002-06-17
Fort Pierce, FL
| Re: No surprises said by Ben67 :
said by LordMalak :
Ever heard of LANDLINE??
Ever hear of Alltel? At my prior address my Alltel landline service went down quite often for a while(the SLC/RT would crash leaving the whole area without service). This usually happened on the weekend so they wouldn't fix it till Monday and if Monday was a holiday it would be Tuesday. When I asked them what someone w/o a cellphone should do in an emergency they said they would have to use someone Else's phone that worked. How nice.
You should have documented this and taken it to the PUC. There are certain requirements that have to be met by the telephone company, otherwise they start getting fined. In most areas a phone should be fixed within 24 hours...but others may be more lax.
Now that I think of it...Comcast really didnt meet alot of thier MTTR's there either...it was a pain to try to get them to fix a customers phone. | |
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Sly
Premium
join:2004-02-20
Johnson City, TN
clubs: | Re: No surprises Woo hoo! I'm so impressed. Not. I don't give a crap. I never said that VoIP was more reliable. There are many landline systems across the US that rely on electrical power at the substation to operate. | |
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Marilla
I Am My Own Arbiter
Premium
join:2002-12-06
Belpre, OH
| Re: No surprises said by Sly :
Woo hoo! I'm so impressed. Not. I don't give a crap. I never said that VoIP was more reliable. There are many landline systems across the US that rely on electrical power at the substation to operate.
You have stats on that?
Because last time I checked, most CO's were required to have backup generators. No such thing on any Internet/Cell equipment.
--
Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD - just use the right tool for the right job... end the OS Politics!
Real politics is much more interesting! www.georgewbush.com | |
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WhyADuck
Premium
join:2003-03-05
2 edits | Re: No surprises He's not talking about CO's, he's talking about remote terminals (well, actually he wasn't - a previous post was) - basically, the point at which a fiber optic feed from the central office is broken out into copper pairs to serve a small community or a neighborhood. These remote terminals are powered by commercial power and usually have backup batteries, but not generators (if they really need to they can hook up a portable generator, but they don't really have enough of those to go around in a major outage).
We have one of these in our neighborhood and a few years ago we had a prolonged power outage. The phones did stay up during the outage, but the next night the whole village lost phone service. Turned out that whatever caused the power outage (and I really don't remember at this point) not only tripped a circuit breaker inside the remote terminal, preventing the commercial power from being re-applied, but also damaged the charging circuit, so after a day or so the batteries were completely run down and everyone lost dial tone. So, because it was close to getting dark, the phone company guys drove a few miles to another remote terminal, swiped the charging circuity out of it, and installed it in the remote terminal with the dead batteries. They then left the whole mess for the daytime crew to clean up the next day. Anyway I'd say were were without service for around six to eight hours, and somehow we all survived.
Interestingly, there was one pay phone in the village (that I know of) that still worked, presumably because they had left that on one of the original copper pairs coming direct from the C.O. It got a lot of use that night as everyone was coming to call repair service - at one point when we had repair on the line, we were just handing off the phone from one person to the next, so that each in turn could report their specific outage (since we did not at that point know what the problem was). | |
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| | | hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Toledo, OH
 ·buckeye cable
| Yes in Fremont, Ohio too. My cell phone from ATTWS lost signal for about 5 minutes but then was working again when the backup power was in use.
Good thing i had my cell too at the time for work when it happened..the blackout power spike that hit when power was resotred hit so hard it blew a surge protecteor off the floor and then burned it to hell!
Computer was fine though. LOL | |
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| | | | hottboiinnc
ME
join:2003-10-15
Toledo, OH
·buckeye cable
| Re: No surprises When it happened one of my former employees called meabout 20 minutes after the spike and said "we just got our phone service back and we have a problem, one surge is fried black" i laughed and said okay no big deal as long as computers worked..and still talked on the cell phone...
office lost phone service during any thunder/lighting storm or like that for long periods of time due to the phone system was on a digital line from SBC. T1 didnt drop though LOL.
And cell worked great. | |
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sirsloop
Premium
join:2004-02-18
New York, NY | When was the last time your cell phone or internet connection dropped for 2 hours? Probably a lot more often then 18 months! | |
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sporkme
drop the crantini and move it, sister
Premium,MVM
join:2000-07-01
Morristown, NJ
·Optimum Online
| Funny thing is from at least 8:30 p.m. last night until at least 2:30 a.m. this morning, my Verizon POTS line was unavailbable via T-Mobile, Sprint, and VZ in Philly. Two rings then a fast busy.
Had to use my Vonage line to get through...
--
Thanks for the memories
Don't forget to vote! | |
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Marilla
I Am My Own Arbiter
Premium
join:2002-12-06
Belpre, OH
| Re: No surprises said by sporkme :
Funny thing is from at least 8:30 p.m. last night until at least 2:30 a.m. this morning, my Verizon POTS line was unavailbable via T-Mobile, Sprint, and VZ in Philly. Two rings then a fast busy.
Had to use my Vonage line to get through...
One question: Did you, during this time, have to make a 911 call by chance? hehe.. of course you didn't... but I'd lay odds that if you had, it would have gone through (assuming you had a dial-tone at all... it sounds to me like it wasn't really a problem with your phone line, per se)
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Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD - just use the right tool for the right job... end the OS Politics!
Real politics is much more interesting! www.georgewbush.com | |
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| | | icecold976
join:2002-07-20
Orlando, FL
 ·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Re: No surprises You want to hear something funny. Back in 99 when we were doing a CO office upgrade, the ENTIRE phone switched crashed. We were able to get 1/2 of the switch operating again within 15 minutes, but being that the CO was the central hub for E911, and the half of the switch that was down was the part that handled the E911 calls, it was a nightmare.
E911 service was down for 48 hours. Plain 911 service was down for the same amount of time. All I can say was the fine involved was huge. It was a software flaw that caused the cascading outage.
Some people didn't have phone service the entire 48 hrs either.
SO nothing is perfect. The batteries in the phone office only last so long, and the diesel fuel will only hold out so long.
VOIP isn't a full telecom service yet, so its going to have issues. I remember Packet8 having numerous outages lasting entire weekends, I have an outage lasting a few hours with Vonage and its big news... LOL
-Ice | |
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Slidetbone
Mazin Go
Premium
join:2002-11-10
Land O Lakes, FL
| Same here. POTS may be a pain for most; usually because of cost and ill feelings toward a Telco because of services they may not be able to get when others have it.
But it is the ole reliable medium.
Can't see whay people depend on cellphones and VoIP when the outages while sporadic, may catch them at the moment they may need it the most. Try calling on a cellphone in girdlocked traffic or in a dead spot at the worse time (flat tire, accident, out of gas, 911 call) or VoIP on a server power outage or bandwidth limitations.
It is convenient. Thats about the size of it.
VoIP? Not proven long enough. | |
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| | rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | Re: No surprises People used to say green-screens were the "old reliable". Ask how many people still think green-screen terminals are the cat's meow. | |
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| john262
join:2003-09-26
Elko, NV
·Wireless Beehive
| My land line has been out several times in the past year. Last January we had a big wind storm and my land line was down for several hours. My cell phone still worked on that occasion, but on other occasions my cell phone has been down too.
So as someone already said, no system can be 100% reliable all the time. | |
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maxxxpower
@optonline.net | I've had vonage since they started. Never had an outage that Im aware of. LOL damn. Now I just jinxed myself | |
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72276539
Premium
join:2001-01-19
Atlanta, GA | LMAO! Add VOIP is ready to be your home residential or business service? HAHAHAHAHAHA! | |
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See 12 replies to this post |
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jaa
Premium,MVM
join:2000-06-13
·Optimum Online
 ·Vonage
| Inconvenient, but no big deal So what? It was out for a couple of hours. My POTS line still worked, and so did my cell.
It costs 1/3 less than my POTS line, and covers all my long distance and is loaded with features (voicemail, callerid, call forwarding) that I would have to pay even more for with my POTS line.
The savings are worth the intermittent outages - for me.
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NOTHING justifies terrorism. We don't negotiate with terrorists. Those that support terrorists are terrorists. | |
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LordMalak
join:2003-07-02
Brazil
·Net Virtua
| Re: Inconvenient, but no big deal said by Sly :
Exactly. Some people only want to bash a new technology because they are too stuck on what they've been used to from the mainstream phone companies. Best advice I can give is "Try it. You'll like it."
Not really. I can't wait to dtch my landline altogether, but I just don't think my cell phone or VoIP can compete with it when it comes to reliability. My last phone prob was on 9/11 (I was in TX) when all calls I tried to make resulted on a busy signal. If my landline is out, it's always been my fault (phone off the hook, dog chewed phone cord, etc.).
Can't say the same for my cell phone, although it's improving by the minute. As for VoIP, I'd never rely on it solely. | |
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| | | TercelChick
join:2002-08-13
| Re: Inconvenient, but no big deal I work for BellSouth, and we got intermittent fast busies at work in Duluth, GA on 9/11. Apparently, call volume peaked from transplants calling back home to check on loved ones and reswitching of backbone around the Eastern seaboard. You can't criticize a service based upon a castastrophe. | |
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Slidetbone
Mazin Go
Premium
join:2002-11-10
Land O Lakes, FL | I prefer to deal with internet outages than VoIP outages caused by internet outages. | |
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DonLibes
Premium,ExMod 2001
join:2003-01-19
| why reliable phone and unreliable internet? Why is that we accept unreliable internet service but cannot accept unreliable phone service? I much prefer reliable internet service.
Why is reliable phone service so cheap ($15/month) and why is reliable internet service comparatively so expensive ($600/month). | |
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IronChefMoto
Premium
join:2001-02-08
Alpharetta, GA
| Bottom line -- gotta be responsible in your buying Honestly, I think an outage like this has to be looked at as a hiccup in the whole VoIP rollout nationwide and worldwide.
The real responsiblity (not Vonage's, particularly if they get overwhelmed) lies with the consumer. No one makes you drop your landline or cell phone for this service but yourself. If you decide to get into VoIP at home or at work, you need to be prepared for the risks associated with a new technology.
In particular, I think it would be rather irresponsible for, say, a family with a newborn or family member suffering from a medical condition to get this service without some degree of forethought. I think of a newborn that stops breathing or a grandparent living in the house that falls and breaks something -- if you know you have that sort of risk in your own home environment, then VoIP shouldn't be on your list of things to sign up for. Regardless of whether you're a diehard early adopter or not.
In this country, with the letigitious environment, I could see Vonage having to divert a lot of attention to numbnut parents or families that [HORRORS!] couldn't call 911 or get an ambulance to their house because of a Vonage problem.
Frankly -- it's your own g'damn responsibility, and you should sit back, scratch your ass, and wait for the service to come back online rather than panic about it. Kudos to those willing to risk using the service. Just keep in mind it's YOUR CHOICE to use the service when the sh*t hits the fan at your house.
IronChefMorimoto
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Desktop #1: Abit NF7-S 2.0 | AMD AthlonXP 2500+ | 1GB PC3200 DDR | 256MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Desktop #2: Shuttle SK41G | Athlon XP 1800+ | 512MB PC2100 DDR | Onboard Graphics
Laptop: Dell Latitude C810 | Intel PIII-M | 512MB PC133 SDRAM | |
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Chief Sparky
52 Still On Patrol
Premium
join:2001-04-25
Mount Vernon, WA
| Re: Bottom line -- gotta be responsible in your bu As I brought up in the VOIP forum, this is from Vonage's TOS regarding E911:
2.11 Alternative 911 Arrangements
You acknowledge that Vonage does not offer primary line or lifeline services. You should always have an alternative means of accessing traditional E911 services.
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I have the replacement for displacement... | |
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vic102482
Premium
join:2002-04-30
Upper Marlboro, MD | Didnt bother me none No problems with the outage here, didnt even know there was one. | |
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ke4pym
join:2004-07-24
Charlotte, NC
·Verizon BroadbandA..
·Packet8
·RoadRunner Cable
| Still have 911 service I'm not sure how it is elsewhere, but here in NC, when you turn off your land line you're converted to quickdial. I turned off my land line with Bellsouth after getting Vonage. My POTS line still has dialtone and I can still dial 911. I cannot, however dial anyone else.
And the power outage we had here a couple years back, for about 3 days ended up taking the POTS network out too. | |
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Swingerhead
Premium
join:2004-04-06
Richmond, VA | Re: Still have 911 service Or you could have a CB, throw it on channel 9 and ... breaker breaker, i need a smokey roger! | |
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wizzle
Premium
join:2004-06-15
Durham, NC
| Bottom Line (In My Opinion) VOIP is significantly cheaper.
Land line may very well be 100%. I don't care. I'm saving about $200 per year by going w/ a VOIP carrier who has better than 95% up-time as long as I've been on it. And since I talk on the phone about less than 1% of the time...this isn't a big issue.
As for 911...get a grip. Like that is a number you will use but once every 25 years or so from your household. And those calls will be made by your children who called the number for fun.
I'm really not trying to sell anyone over to VOIP, but I do want to make a point to say that local and long distance phone companies are overcharging.
So decide for yourself. Have 100% up-time or save hundreds of $$ per year. If you then decide to stay w/ your POTS...then you likely don't like going through any hassles to save money, and here is another free tip.
Do a price comparison for yourself on auto ins and you might save hundreds of $$ more.  | |
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| tommytomtom
join:2002-08-15
Springfield, VA
| Re: Bottom Line (In My Opinion) "As for 911...get a grip. Like that is a number you will use but once every 25 years or so from your household. And those calls will be made by your children who called the number for fun."
No offense, but you must not have lived very long to think that 911 is so unimportant; I say this as a VOIP user. | |
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| | wizzle
Premium
join:2004-06-15
Durham, NC
| Re: Bottom Line (In My Opinion) To clarify what I meant by this...
I didn't mean to imply 911 being unimportant. I was rather insinuating that the odds of you needing to call 911 as a result of VOIP downtime, power outage, or a faulty cable modem are very minuscule.
Never-the-less, there will be someone out there during such downtime that has a need to call 911 or place another type of emergency call. Great reason to have a backup. Sorry for the confusion. | |
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| | | tommytomtom
join:2002-08-15
Springfield, VA | Re: Bottom Line (In My Opinion) Thanks for the clarification; I agree, what are the odds? | |
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winterforge
Premium
join:2000-07-23
Roanoke, TX
clubs: 
| Vonage Statement Here's what it said in the service announcements area, by the way I never noticed it because I was still asleep when it happened (I'm west coast).
quote:
Dear Vonage Customers:
Today at 10.45 AM EDT Global Crossing, one of Vonage's IP providers, experienced a data routing issue which effected the Vonage network. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and our engineers are working diligently to ensure that this does not happen again.
The issue was isolated to Global Crossing's routing tables, which prohibited Vonage data traffic from getting to its proper destination. During the outage, many of the systems failed over to alternate routes, enabling the Vonage network as a whole to send and receive calls, however individual customers' success of making and receiving calls remained sporadic depending on where a particular customer was located on the Internet. The systems which were effected during the outage were: voicemail, voicemail email notification,vonage web login and network availability number. Network availability number did not work because the inbound traffic from the phone network was being routed to the wrong place by Global Crossing. The problem was resolved around 12.15 PM EDT today and has remained stable since then.
Again, we apologize for any problem this may have caused you and we are working closely with Global Crossing to ensure it does not happen again.
Thank you for your business; we look forward to continuing to serve you in the future.
Sincerely,
Vonage Management
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Guild Wars | winterforge | |
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| icecold976
join:2002-07-20
Orlando, FL | Re: Vonage Statement Its amazing that Vonage is catching all this flak when its their backbone provider that dropped the ball.
I'm sure that the super critical won't care and still blame vonage for the sky falling.
-Ice | |
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dknysprt95
join:2002-02-07
Irvine, CA | down again heh my vonage has been down for the last 3 hrs, good thing it isn't working hours. | |
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| DeePow
join:2004-09-27
30027 | Re: down again Need a referral for Vonage. Can you send me the email link?
Gets you a free month. | |
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Vonage Outage
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