VOIP Experience

[dodge man]

I get it, you don’t have fiber to your house. I said earlier my son works for the local phone company and they are 100% fiber. They are a phone co-op and have gotten some grants. They have run fiber all over the place because of the demand and because some of the other companies don’t care and have poor service. There is a push for rural high speed internet but if your phone company doesn’t care or want to do it for financial reasons it’s no help to you. We have 1 gig internet speed living in a rural area because of the phone companies efforts.

 

[LouNY]

its literally telling you there is obstructions, of course if there is a connection drop the vpn will drop, not entire sure what you expect here.

The only "obstruction" is a fringe on the east side which is in the picture posted and was not there untill the dish changed it's positioning. The service has often been mediocre in terms of speed and latency for what it has been hyped for. It is not impressive just better then what else is available to me. And the loss of connection for weather related reasons is quite aggravating and happens quite often every rain or snow storm has either losses or severe degradation of service.

 

[LittleBill21]

The only "obstruction" is a fringe on the east side which is in the picture posted and was not there untill the dish changed it's positioning. The service has often been mediocre in terms of speed and latency for what it has been hyped for. It is not impressive just better then what else is available to me. And the loss of connection for weather related reasons is quite aggravating and happens quite often every rain or snow storm has either losses or severe degradation of service.

if its complaining, its complaining, i would try to move it, especially if your experiencing issues.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Do you have fiber directly to your house?
For whatever reason when they ran it here they use the fiber for the trunk line, but distribution to customers is via coax. Not sure why. If the power goes out, all those fiber-to-copper converters go down.
Fortunately, we don't lose power very often.

Yes, the data rides on light all the way to the router. It amazed me when they strung my neighborhood, because houses here are far apart. My nearest neighbors are half a mile away.

 

[goeduck]

Do you have fiber directly to your house?
For whatever reason when they ran it here they use the fiber for the trunk line, but distribution to customers is via coax. Not sure why. If the power goes out, all those fiber-to-copper converters go down.
Fortunately, we don't lose power very often.

Our coax connected internet stays up after a power outage for a day or so. I assume until their backup power runs out.

 

[ultrarunner]

My DSL never went down when all power out widespread with millions out.

Neighbors were coming to me because I was the only landline left and the rotary dial never missed a beat and laptops had internet through DSL

 

[ponytug]

My DSL never went down when all power out widespread with millions out.

Neighbors were coming to me because I was the only landline left and the rotary dial never missed a beat and laptops had internet through DSL

You are lucky; here the DSL stayed up 10-15minutes because the techs would only replace a single battery, so the remote terminal never charged properly. I think by law the copper lines here are (were?) supposed to be up for 48 hours into an outage.

I'm so happy not to be dealing with the DSL teams, and all the finger pointing between the fiber team, the DSL team, and the copper line technicians (who were generally just plain great).

All the best,

Peter

 

[ruffdog]

the DSL internet is only 1.5 MBPS download and 400-500 kbps upload. Most of you folks think anything less than 10 MBPS is bad. I am barely better than dial up from 20 years ago.

Man, I feel your pain. I just checked and am at 976 kbps down and 210 kbps up. The phone repair guy says we are in the "dead zone".

 

[ultrarunner]

You are lucky; here the DSL stayed up 10-15minutes because the techs would only replace a single battery, so the remote terminal never charged properly. I think by law the copper lines here are (were?) supposed to be up for 48 hours into an outage.

I'm so happy not to be dealing with the DSL teams, and all the finger pointing between the fiber team, the DSL team, and the copper line technicians (who were generally just plain great).

All the best,

Peter

My DSL was at the farthest reaches of the large 3 story central office...

At one time the Central Office even added another whole foot at great expense back in the 70's... I hear now it is mostly empty but still has banks of batteries and generators fed from underground storage tanks across the road...

Back in the Pacific Telephone days reliability was Paramount... now..
not such as even getting a live person in this country is a challenge...

 

[duffer]

I've used VOIP for probably 15+ years. Early years were tenuous. 1-2 second delays on sending and receiving voice. Got a lot better when bandwidth got better, and phone tech improved too. I've had it on DSL, Cable, Cellular internet (Verizon), and now fiber optic.

Not knowing your location, tough to recommend anything specific, but you should at least contact your cellular supplier to see if they have a "whole house" wifi system available for you. My Verizon cellular internet ran at about 40 mbps (avg). Used it for VOIP, 3 Firesticks, an ipad and a PC. Was pretty satisfied. Certainly enough not to have to shell out $600 for Starlink. Verizon now gives you the modem/router as part of the plan.

You can buy a VOIP phone modem that plugs into your router directly (rather than using a PC as a bridge). I've had Ooma for about 2-3 years now, and it performs well. VOIP phone numbers are non-listed numbers so it does remove some (not all) of the spam calls. You can also activate a call blocker feature if you want. We use a 4 extension roam phone setup in the house, without any issues on the VOIP.

Good luck. Let us know what you decide.

 

[dodge man]

For 911 reasons the old land lines had to be kept up. The old land lines carried the power for the phones so if the power went off they kept working. I know when the power goes off now they have batteries in the nodes that keep things working. They have to run around with generators and keep things going after a period of time. Don’t ask me what a “node” is, I assume one of those bigger boxes you see along the road. I know one of the things my son does when time is available is open all the phone pedestals and boxes and check for mouse damage and put poison in them while avoiding wasps.

 

[Furu]

Not knowing your location, tough to recommend anything specific, but you should at least contact your cellular supplier to see if they have a "whole house" wifi system available for you. My Verizon cellular internet ran at about 40 mbps (avg). Used it for VOIP, 3 Firesticks, an ipad and a PC. Was pretty satisfied. Certainly enough not to have to shell out $600 for Starlink. Verizon now gives you the modem/router as part of the plan.

As was stated in the original post; your suggestion is not really a workable consideration as the cellular suppliers don't have enough signal to keep the cell phones working let alone data for internet at our current house.
At the build site in Montana we have to drive 10 miles to get a cell signal and we are less than a mile off a major state highway. Of course even interstate I-90 has 10-15 mile dead spots in Montana so it is not a unique problem.

 

[Furu]

For 911 reasons the old land lines had to be kept up. The old land lines carried the power for the phones so if the power went off they kept working. I know when the power goes off now they have batteries in the nodes that keep things working. They have to run around with generators and keep things going after a period of time. Don’t ask me what a “node” is, I assume one of those bigger boxes you see along the road. I know one of the things my son does when time is available is open all the phone pedestals and boxes and check for mouse damage and put poison in them while avoiding wasps.

Sure there are batteries to keep things running (NOT). Even though the fiber ends many miles (over 6 miles) from our house and copper runs for the last 6+ miles when there is a power outage the hard wire phone line fails in less than 30 minutes . This has been the case ever since they started putting in fiber in the area (area defined as further than 6 miles away) This has been true for the last 10 years or so because the batteries are not maintained and there is not a large enough battery bank to keep it going.
Just found out that Centurylink is still "working the issue" so we will be without phone for at least 12 days. So glad I pay for a service that is not delivered by a public regulated utility that rips the consumer off. At least internet at a meg up and half a meg down works.

 

[goeduck]

Man, I feel your pain. I just checked and am at 976 kbps down and 210 kbps up. The phone repair guy says we are in the "dead zone".

Do you get the old dial-up modem sound?

 

[Jrasband]

We use a voip phone with fiber optic and have no complaints, it's great! 1-VoIP | Residential and Business VoIP Provider

 

[lman]

I don't have cell service in my home so I use wifi calling with my cell phone. If your internet and wifi is good enough you wouldn't need to pay extra for voip. I think most cell phones now can use wifi calling. I also have internet in my barn to use wifi calling.

 

[goeduck]

I don't have cell service in my home so I use wifi calling with my cell phone. If your internet and wifi is good enough you wouldn't need to pay extra for voip. I think most cell phones now can use wifi calling. I also have internet in my barn to use wifi calling.

Absolutely. However, my wife likes her old land line phone, so I went with Ooma VOIP (not a POTS line, but she is happy). She is deaf in one ear, so what she wants, is what she gets. She likes her land phone and talks to her friends endlessly. I only use a cell phone for my calls and it seems to be WIFI calling 90% of the time when at home.

 

[Oscivorn]

I'm using a cloud call center setup at home with decent results. Voice quality stays clear as long as my connection is stable—wired beats Wi-Fi every time. I’ve got my router giving priority to VoIP traffic, which helped a lot. The cloud call center works well even when I'm on the road, as long as I’ve got good data or Wi-Fi.

 

[duffer]

I've used VOIP for probably 20 years, even back to the beginnings of the "Magic Jack" days. The problem has always been band width. Once the band width increased over the years, the better the reception. Now with fiber it's no different than the old style land lines as far as clarity, no time lag, and automatic unlisted number. The trick (at least for me) was plugging in the VOIP device directly into the router, rather than the PC to get the best performance.

 

[goeduck]

A nice feature that I did not think would be handy is being able to review Ooma VOIP voicemails on the app of my cell phone when not at home (or even at home). Also blocking callers is simple compared to blocking them on the old desktop set.