I totally agree with Ken her, also having been in the business in an earlier
life. I use Skype because it is free, and the quality is tolerable most of the
time, but this is not corporate grade VOIP by any stretch of the imagination.
As for landlines--we have one because our only internet access option is DSL
from the local phone company. But I never use it to actually make calls, and I
don't even remember the number. My cellphone is my main communication device,
followed by my computer and iPad (for Skype calls).
Cheers,
Nathan
Nathan Wajsman
Alicante, Spain
http://www.frozenlight.eu
http://www.greatpix.eu
PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
Blog: http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/
YNWA
On Mar 12, 2014, at 11:25 PM, Ken Norton wrote:
> MagicJack is just one of several options. They advertise heavily to
> the senior citizen crowd, if that means anything. It might be just the
> thing to go along with your Jitterbug cell phone and knife set.
>
> Sorry, as somebody employed by "old world" telephone and heavily
> involved in the technology, I tend to be a little snarky about
> MagicJack. Just a little snarky. I reserve my major snarks for the
> cable-tv companies--the slumlords of telecommunications.
>
> The option I prefer is to have minimal telephone service through the
> local provider, with a decent DSL connection. As the cellphone is my
> primary mode of communication, I use the cellphone almost exclusively.
> If you REALLY want to have a "land-line for long-distance calls" that
> a cellphone isn't satisfactory for, you can have a "MagicJack"
> equivalent through your cellphone provider, so it's lumped in with
> just that one bill and can also be had as a deal-maker for free or
> nominal cost.
>
> My biggest beef with MagicJack style services isn't the secondary fees
> and little gotchas that come up, but the quality of service. The
> Internet is NOT built for real-time streaming communications. It can
> take longer to establish the call and the voice quality can be pretty
> horrid. Worse, though, is
>
> the
>
> latency,
>
> and lo.......................................... ackets.
>
> It can really suck.
>
> Voice over IP (VoIP) is not the same thing as Voice over Internet.
> Both use VoIP as the technique. But the Internet is the
> wild-wild-west. We telephone companies are converting over to VoIP
> switches, but the difference is that we have isolated communication
> "trunks" for that service that doesn't touch the Internet traffic.
> Even with the isolated network, we still have weird stuff happening,
> but nothing compared to the haphazard nature of trying to get free
> telephone service to work over the Internet.
>
> Another factor, which most people don't realize, is that the "last
> mile" technology of "Fiber to the Home" is pretty well meaningless.
> Once you get back to the serving office, you and your hundreds or
> thousands of neighbors are all stuffed into the same backhaul pipe
> which is sometimes a fraction of what is really needed. This is less
> true with the Big companies that have their own private state or
> nationwide fiber networks, but the local CO-OP, CLEC or Municipal
> telephone company has to buy their connection to get out of town and
> to the Internet NAPs. The "oversold" nature of those pipes can be
> downright horrid. It doesn't matter if you have a 20Mb DSL connection
> if your DSLAM is served by 4 T1s either. (6Mb). At the big-honkin
> old-world telephone company I work for, I'm slinging 10Gb connections
> around like they are candy in a parade.
>
>
> --
> Ken Norton
> ken@xxxxxxxxxxx
> http://www.zone-10.com
> --
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