Five Reasons for no VoIP

Russell Shaw answers Lance Ulanoff's Five reasons why he doesn't have VoIP.

Since I haven't yet made the leap to residential VoIP either, here are mine:

1. VoIP services don't support my home alarm system or my TiVO, so I would need to maintain a POTS line.

2. I have Comcast as my broadband provider, while reliability has been good for the last year, it's been downright awful for the last two weeks. Meanwhile, the last time I lost POTS service was during hurricane Gloria in Long Island in 1985.

3. Those I know who have tried VoIP, generally using Vonage, have complained of spotty reliability and poor customer support.

4. I have this nagging fear of what happens to my home phone number if my VoIP provider goes bankrupt. What happens if it gets lost in cyberspace and can't be transfered (we need a system like Network Solutions/Verisign offers to allow web management of URLs - I should be able to manage my phone number through a web site).

5. Given #1 above, and the fact I make little to no long distance calls from home, the cost benefit just isn't there. Since I still need a POTS line, I'm looking at about $20 a month for a local line, plus $25 per month for a VoIP line, meaning that my current phone bill, which is currently $49 including unlimited local and long distance, would be reduced by about $4.00 (I'm not including taxes & other fees in this equation). Saving $4.00 to me doesn't offset the negatives I noted in the other points above. I should add that I get $5.00 off my wife's Verizon cell plan for bundling my home phone service into the same bill, so the cost savings equation goes away.

6. (Bonus reason) I just don't have a need for anything more than caller ID and call waiting for my home service. I'm not going to set up any custom features via a web site for my home phone.

7. (Bonus reason #2) I'm not willing to trust the safety of my family to VoIP. I'm extremely concerned about the ability for residential services to provide the same kind of 911 support currently provided by POTS. I want to be guaranteed that calls are handled the same way, and aren't sent to different call centers as has been discussed with the Vonage/911 lawsuit in Texas.

8. (Bonus reason #3) I might be wrong about this, but I don't think any of the VoIP services support faxing.

A couple of disclaimers. I've used a public VoIP service in my office for over 3 years now, it works great and I have no complaints, but they deliver it over their own T1, any software update requires us to walk around the office and reboot each phone, and the original service provider has gone bankrupt. We also can't support fax over our VoIP service, we needed a POTS line for that.

I'd also note that I use Skype a lot, I like it but the call quality is nowhere near as good as my home phone or my office VoIP line and the client seems to be somewhat unreliable. We tried a three-way conference call yesterday with two PC users and me being the lone mac user. My client crashed on startup, and one of the other user's clients crashed several minutes into the call.

Now having said all that, if I needed a second home phone line for work, I would select a VoIP provider in a heartbeat. I might also look at a VoIP service if I made a lot of long distance calls. I'm just not convinced that replacing a working, cheap POTS line with a more unreliable VoIP line makes any sense right now.

Comments

[Dude]

Interesting post, but let me disagree.
1) Alarm.com will be VOIP compatible (as will other alarm systems)

2) Don't know about you, but my Comcast account is rock solid (knock on wood)

3) Use Broadvoice (smaller than Vonage). In the 6 months I've had it's been rock solid (passes the wife test)

4) If your provider isn't obscure, it will be acquired and grandfathered by someone else, so no worries there

5) We call long distance and international A LOT! For $24.95/mo nobody comes in even at a distant second. (Basic phone + called ID, forwarding, etc + long distance + international = $24.95)

6) Before VOIP I thought I didn't even need all these goodies either, but can't live without call forwarding now (or caller ID, or 3 way calling, or distinctive ringing, or...)

7) Since I switched, I still plug in an old analog phone on the regular phone jack, and get a line good only for 911 ($0.00) from my old RBOC. Moot point

8) I don't get faxing on Broadvoice yet (although they claim any day now...) Don't fax, so moot point.

9) (Bonus) Call anywhere whithout worrying about phone bills.

10) (Bonus) Can take my phone anywhere there is broadband (including work)

11) (Bonus) Because of 10) I can call anywhere in the world (almost) without paying

12) I can use a Softphone (like X-Ten freeware) to take/make calls near WiFI on my home phone.

Got more bonus points, but I'll stop now.

[Irwin Lazar]

Thanks for the feedback. As I mentioned above I'm currently paying $49.95 for unlimited local and long distance, including call-waiting, caller ID, three way calling, etc., so the VoIP feature set doesn't buy me much and I don't worry about my phone bill. (Again though, I don't call internationaly).

I do have a cell phone with unlimited local/long distance on nights weekends, so that is another alternative I can use.

Congrats on having a better experience with Comcast than what I've had. Comcast was fine up until about three weeks ago. Since then I've had two DNS outages, one hard outage, and noticeable slowness in the evening hours when presumably my neighborhood is using it most heavily (we can't get DSL so everyone is on Comcast).

As far as the 911 phone, is it wired throughout your house?

[Aswath]

Regarding use of unused land line for 911, do you have to pay royalty to VoIP Inc (http://news.com.com/Net+phone+company's+answer+to+911/2100-7352_3-5221705.html?tag=cd.top)?

Kidding aside, if one is using this technique, then don't follow the scheme of rewiring the home to use ATA from any phone in the house (that requires disabling the connection to phone network).

[jim]

i agrre with aswath.

[Corro'll Driskell]

I have had a great experience with Vonage overall. I do admit that their customer support lacks promptness and access. But, in the last 5 years i have only called twice. I have had to call only once for a technical issue out of the two.

What hits home for me is the fact that I can not add the wifi phone without adding an additional line. We are considering taking our business else where do to that fact.