Phone/Cable/Internet Service Comparisons
This page is not a typical recommendations page. It contains responses to questions posted on Frambors about the pros and cons of phone/internet/cable services. Some of the discussion is a bit technical.
Voip vs traditional or cable phone services
I am currently a Verizon customer for my home phone subscribed to the Freedom Essentials package at a cost of $44.99 a month. I received from Vonage in the mail an offer for a similar phone service package at a cost of $24.99 a month. I already have the necessary DSL connection required by Vonage. Has anyone made the change to Vonage? I would appreciate your comments.
Enzo Rotatori
Responses
We've been using Vonage over our RCN cable connection for about a year now. The call quality (in my opinion) is similar to a good cell phone connection - a little less clear than a "traditional" phone line, but definitely clear enough for us, and to be honest, I don't really notice. Price was the biggest factor for us - $25 for unlimited calling in the US and Canada is hard to beat!
I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone.
- Gary Zaino 1/18/07
And I wonder why you had problems, and other people rave about it. Vonage must have some idea as to why certain customers barely notice a blip when they change to VoIP, and others, such as yourself, retreat to phone quality of the 1930's. Vonage must know, but they are certainly not making it public. As for me, I pay $50 per month for Verizon, long distance costs nothing, so I'll stick with them.
Tony Siciliano 1/18/07
I had Vonage for a few months and it was a nightmare from the word go. Dropped calls, poor sound quality, and echoes were all an everyday occurrence. I spent countless hours on the phone with their tech support and they never fixed a thing. They kept blaming my internet access which was a cable modem. I would never use them again. I have Comcast phone service now and it works great.
Rich Scales 1/18/07
These are various discussions that have been had about phone services. I am a very happy Vonage customer, and I only pay $14.99 a month for the 500 minute package. I don't need unlimited. The call quality is crystal clear.
I use it over a high performance FiOS connection. I would be hesitant to use Vonage over DSL. Browsing the web, you don't notice variations in connection speed, dropped packets and retries. Talking on the phone you notice all of these things. If your Internet connection is less than perfect, your phone calls will reflect that. If you are on the lower speed DSL tiers you may have trouble making calls while you are downloading files or watching streaming media on your computer.
My recommendation is to take the 30 day trial with a 'temporary' phone number. It will give you a chance to find out whether your particular DSL line is suited to voice calls. Also, you may want to adjust the 'bandwidth saver' feature on Vonage. It will change the data rate of your phone calls down to a lower rate by using more aggressive compression. This may cause a perceptible change in voice quality, but it also may dramatically improve the reliability of your calls.
Finally, there is the safefy factor. If the power goes out, or your Internet connection fails, you have no phone service. I use a large (truck sized) battery in my basement to run my phones and Internet connection in the event of a power failure. You probably won't - unless you also service data center UPS systems and have access to giant batteries like I do.
E911 service seems to work through Vonage in Framingham so you shouldn't have to worry about that. So, go for it, it's a great deal if it will work for you technically. The only way to be sure is try it out.
-jake 1/18/07
Switched to Vonage ($16/month for 500 minutes, sufficient for us), as have my brother (NJ) and son (MA). No problems, works great- at *far* less money. Remember, the $45/month from Verizon does not usually include the $10 or so in fees, taxes, etc. that accrue even if you make *no* calls..... At least that's what I was seeing with RCN.
Also- Vonage-Vonage calls are free. And, if you lose internet access or your equipment goes down, Vonage can automatically transfer calls to another number (for instance, your cell phone).
I do recommend putting the Vonage box and your internet modem on a UPS (uninterruptable power supply, available from many local stores) to protect them, and top let you ride out short power failures.
Dick Pabst 1/20/07
We have had Vonage for about 9 months now, and I would say 90% of the time it's great. However, (and weirdly enough coinciding with the discussion here) over the past two days calls received by me have been choppy. It's like when you are talking on a cell phone with a weak signal. I was hoping it was a one day thing, but it is still happening.
Just FYI.
Marla Davis 1/20/07
Query: How you feel about Verizon cable and actually what is Fiber Optic's? I am using Comcast for my TV and Verizon for everything else. Ginny Marino
Responses
Fiber optics is just a way for them to provide you with super fast download and upload speeds. Cable can't compare with the speeds Verizon is able to achieve through use of FIOS, you can even get the complete FIOS package, (FIOS TV, FOS Internet, and VOIP Phone). I recently switched from Comcast to Verizon, added two premium TV packages (HBO & Showtime) and the mid-level Internet service and actually save $10 a month from the bill I got for cable with HBO and Internet service from Comcast. -- Henry M. DeBardeleben 3/20/07
Fiber optics will improve your online transmission speed, but it may not be important for you. Run this test. (http://www.bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/results.php ) for your bandwidth. I just got 7 megabits/second with fiber optics.
David Weitzler 3/20/07
David, I couldn't use your line test (recd an error page) but we use http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ to test our speed, and select the New York server.
Having both Comcast and Verizon internet service here I'll add my 2 cents.
The main difference between the two is one is a cable and the other is light (fiber optics) so the medium it's delivered through is different. Both can go pretty darn fast, and honestly you might not notice the difference unless you're an avid gamer where 100ths of a second matters. Cable tends to have more limitations and has the potential to go slower because it is shared with your neighbors where fios is not which in the end makes that a bit faster.
With our Comcast service we pay for 10/1 (means 10mbs download and 1mbs upload) and my speed test was just 9095 down and 930 up. That's pretty fast. On our FIOS we get 15/2 and I know he kicks my butt in speed, especially uploading.
Most people don't need the excessive amounts of bandwidth or speed, so unless your planning on doing massive amounts of file transfers or your going to be gaming and that 100th of a second matters go with whom ever gives you the best deal.
Cariann Steenbruggen 3/20/07
And I just got 6.4 Mb/sec with RCN cable. Their subjective rating: Awesome
Tom Hankinson 3/20/07
There are a couple of points that are useful to know. First, for most people, a few Mb per second download is way more than enough. But there's more to it than that, so let me give some background.
The cable carries many channels, and some are set aside for internet and phone. The entire bandwidth of the cable is shared among many homes. The fiber can potentially carry many times as much data as cable carries, and may be a dedicated connection. But it may not really matter because both the cable and the fiber are ONLY the connection between your home and the Central Office (CO). The speed gain makes great marketing, but there is much more to the question of bandwidth for real world applications.
Typically, the connection companies "oversubscribe" their equipment. They know that at any given time, not everyone is going to be on the phone, or downloading at the maximum rate. So they use some statistical measures to decide just how much total bandwidth they will make available through their CO for some number of homes. So for example, they may have one dedicated server for each 100 homes, which is plenty as long as no more than 35 people are active. But on a Friday afternoon, when the kiddies are home surfing on youtube, the parents are trying to connect to the office, and some high schoolers are on-line gaming, those 100 homes can drop to a crawl.
With a 7Mb connection speed, you may get 7Mb from a dedicated test download site. But the companies could be treating traffic from those sites as higher priority traffic making the whole thing look better than it really is (seriously). Those speed tests may only accurately test your connection to the CO, not the CO's bandwidth to the outside world.
There have been times when RCN has been slower than dial-up used to be. I have called them and they have done speed tests, saying things are fine. But they are only really testing the connection between their CO and my house. They will not tell you that they may have a router that's down, or a blade that's overheated and dropping traffic. They will tell you the web sites you are visiting must be slow. Right. Every one of them which are normally fast are now suddenly slow.
So bottom line, get a decent deal, and if things are not behaving well, call and complain. Don't let them get away with telling you it's your web sites. Sometimes they can route you through a different server. But they won't do anything when things are bad unless you call them. And if six different web sites are suddenly slow, it's your provider that's the bottleneck. Just know that they will oversubscribe their network, and it will occasionally affect you.
Fiber does hold the promise of personalized HDTV selections, but I'm not sure if Verizon has that yet. And since Verizon is the new kid, they may have more internet bandwidth to spare right now. Personally, I'm OK with RCN right now.
Marty Pomeroy 3/20/07