Tuesday Evening Links

That's better than normal. Comcast has always charged for any use of an eMTA. Also, any cableco voice service is a rip-off. It's unreliable like Voip, and expensive like a copper landline.

If you're going to give up the rock solid reliability of copper, then just go for Ooma or something free/almost free like that. Cable voice is a rip off.

After Irene, the power was out for a week here. AT&T kept their CO's battery banks recharged off of diesel power, and had diesel generators at the RTs to recharge them, with gas generators at most VRADs (a few of the bigger ones had diesel). The landline at home was rock solid the whole time. Meanwhile, it took something like 4-6 days AFTER the commercial power was restored for Comcast to finally bother to get their system back up. Cable just isn't reliable. It wasn't meant to be, and it won't be as long as Comcast and the cable companies don't treat their cable plants like copper plants. Copper plants have backups for the backups.

A Verizon cell line would be a lot more reliable than cable. Heck, anything would be. And VOIP is just as (un)reliable as Comcast, since it depends on them for an internet connection.

People don't think about reliability when they get a slightly cheaper cable phone service. But they should. It's not a carrier-grade product, it's not regulated as a copper plant, and it doesn't serve the same purpose as a copper landline. That being said, I'm not planning on having a landline when I get my own place, but I certainly wouldn't get cable phone either... just my iPhone. Hopefully at least one tower around me has good diesel backup.

Just because your local AT&T CO sucks doesn't make cable any more reliable. AT&T will still stay up during a storm and cable won't.

Ooma is known to have the highest quality voice of any service out there. It is better even than cable phone service.

My parents have unlimited long distance on the landline, which is a total waste of money, but it's a flat bill every month. I keep telling them they should get Ooma and just get the most basic lifeline copper service as a backup, but they don't listen.

Also, with the cell phone plans all going unlimited, the case for having any sort of home phone service is getting weaker and weaker. It's just an annoyance at this point to have yet another stupid phone to ring, when most people just call the cell anyways.

AT&T cell phones with a headset are marginally OK. Ooma is the choice for the highest quality- they are way above what a landline can do.

Cable fundamentally won't be reliable without power backup systems along the way. POTS has those.

In my parents' case, they could get Ooma and keep the lifeline basic POTS for the alarm system and during power or cable events. Although our Comcast goes out on a fairly regular basis, at which time EVERYTHING shuts down, TV, internet, and cell phones (since we use a Microcell and Wifi for the smartphones, they get like 2 weak bars without it).

Just about anything can cause power outages, not just hurricanes. That hurricane was a more extreme example, for a longer period of time for more people.

No matter what the power problem, cable still won't work with no power. POTS will.

I don't believe that in a second. Even without the trees or weather needed to create blackouts like we have here, there's still transformers blowing up, cascade failures, and regional blackouts that can happen anywhere.

If anything, you just made the case for a Verizon cell phone there. They have the most robust network in terms of power outages and other events.

Transformers can, and do, blow up. And it has nothing to do with energy efficient technologies.

New York and most of the northeast saw a massive blackout in 2004. There's nothing stopping something like that from happening in other parts of the country.

Better than PCBs all over the place... it's happened recently around here... That takes power out for quite a while.

We have a lot of transformers that just blow. The only way to engineer around it would be to have a lot more redundancy, and no one wants to pay for it. Heck, all our utilities should be underground. But no one wants to pay for that either.

A town near here has PCBs leak on a sidewalk, people walked through them, and they were all over the place...

Everything, everywhere should be underground. It just makes so much more sense than aerial.

Underground would also increase the reliability a LOT. And the $50K is a massive pile of bloated BS. They just didn't want to do the work, so they porked the number through the roof.

Somebody's pumping the price on that. Putting wire in a trench doesn't cost that. Even with 100' lots (many are smaller than that), that's $500 a FOOT. It just doesn't cost that much. FIOS was something like $1-2k/house. Power probably costs more, maybe double or triple that.