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Short Wave Sportfishing

On Fri, 7 Dec 2007 16:35:12 -0500, " JimH" ask wrote:

"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:24:14 -0500, "Reginald P. Smithers III"
wrote:

The power of competition is amazing. I have been using Vonage for a few
years, and can not tell the difference between Vonage and BellSouth
except for the lower price and substantially more features offered by
Vonage.

Today, I got an offer in the mail from AT&T offering VOIP and similar
features at the same price as Vonage. As long as Vonage continues to
provides excellent service, I will not change, but it is nice to see the
market place working.

VOIP is a diaster waiting to happen and when it does, all you VOIP
losers...er...users are going to be stuck with no way to communicate.

You heard it here first.

It has been around for over 10 years and it will be around for a while.

If Vonage goes under, no big deal. If Time Warner VOIP goes under, no big
deal. If all VOIP providers go under, no big deal. In the end I will still
have a cell phone and will always be able to transfer back to my money local
grabbing telephone company (although that will never happen, regardless of
what happens with VOIP). I will also have saved over $500/year using VOIP
while it was up.

It's not about price - it's about complexity and inter-relationship of
digital systems.

Eventually the system will break because of the load - in particular
as the backbone carriers are not putting a lot of money into fiber
anymore because of costs and ROI.

You have to remember that cell phones are also digital - you don't
have analog cells anymore. All it takes is a node to collapse under
load and you can't communicate - like happened here in NE CT last year
when the only people who could communicate were those who had land
lines. I admit it was only for two hours, but it proves the point.

Plus, we have Charter and they can't keep the system up when Mother
Nature decides to fart loudly. Local thunderstorms - forget it - the
system is down for at least four/five hours. The speeds are never
consistent and it sounds horrible even on good days.

Good old analog phone line - the only way to go.

And further proof - when Katrina hit and the Feds needed to find out
what happened to the LOOP, they did it by land line because the cell
phone system collapsed - no Internet.

Keep your VOIP, save the money and try not to think about the
vulnerability of the system - it's way too fragile.

And don't even get me started on this digital TV fiasco.