[PVRCNC] OT -cable telephone

[Jim Jordan, K4QPL]

Brian,

Don't have experience with TWC telephone, but have a Vonage account and it 
works great. If you have either a standard or combo/wireless router attached 
to your cable modem, all you need is their little box that plugs into your 
router just like another computer and comes when you sign up. You can tap 
your phone extensions off of that and you'll hardly know the difference. You 
have a "dashboard" which you access online with a password and you can set 
up the 911 details, three different "bandwidth" settings ranging from 
communications grade to hi-fi phones and lots of other stuff to manage your 
account. Try that with Bellsouth or whoever has your POTS (Plain Old 
Telephone System)  account. All the call waiting, forwarding etc features 
are free. You can have vmail forwarded to email, get notification and even 
have the wav files forwarded to an email account. They'll even convert a 
voice mail into text email for additional charge. Unlimited USA, Canada and 
UK long distance. And all for $30/month. Yes, it's reliant on the internet 
and your ISP, but if you also have a cell phone, you're very well backed up.

It's also no more reliable than your power however, and although the cable 
modem and the box use a very small amount of kva, I have a pretty big UPS in 
front of them so they'll run for probably 10 hours in an outage. More than 
that you need 12v batteries with inverter, generator, or whatever.

P.S. I got all this set up as a parallel system, keeping my long time number 
on the POTS line and then took the Vonage "box" overseas to visit Tricia's 
Dad. Plugged it into his DSL cable modem, it fired up, identified itself and 
was working as if it were local in 2 minutes. I kept in touch with the 
office and made calls as if I were here. It worked so well that we left it 
there. We now pay for the account but pay no international long distance and 
Tricia now talks to him whenever she wants since he now has a 919 area code! 
I'll probably get another account for us and transfer our number to it.

Hope this helps.

73,

Jim




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian Alsop" <alsopb at nc.rr.com>
To: "PVRCNC" <pvrcnc at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 8:58 AM
Subject: [PVRCNC] OT -cable telephone


> Guys,
>
> Switching from landline to cable telephone via Time Warner.
> The economic arguments just got too overwhelming.
>
> Looking for others experience.  Only know that it will require a telephone 
> modem hooked to the same coax as the Internet modem.
>
> Things that I couldn't get answered.  Anybody I asked these questions to 
> had no clue.
>
> 1) Where is the cable modem located?  Does simply supplying it with 
> generator power during power outages restore all capabilities-- 
> including the local 911 kluge?
> 2) How is the cable modem interfaced with existing telephones?  Most 
> phones here derive their power from the phone line and presumably the 
> installation process will allow the same. 3) Is there some "volume 
> control"  to bump up volume some relative to the landline. 4) What about 
> the potential for RFI?  We don't intefer currently with the internet 
> service or landline.
> I'm looking forward to not paying 50% of my phone bill to taxes and 
> special interest groups.
> I'm also looking forward to not having to call out Embarq 4 to 5 times per 
> year to get rid of the loud hum on the phone line.
>
> What unadvertised "gotcha's" are there?   Thinking of something like 
> having to dial lots of extra digits to access long distance or things like 
> that.
>
> 73 de Brian/K3KO
>
> _______________________________________________
> PVRCNC mailing list
> PVRCNC at mailman.qth.net
> http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/pvrcnc