My personal experience with "the slumlords of telecommunciations"
(Time-Warner in New York and Brighthouse Communications in Florida) is
that their VOIP service provides highly reliable and near perfect voice
quality... as good as anything I ever had from a Verizon land line. I
only use my cell phone when I'm on the road and have no other choice. I
used to use Verizon which I considered outrageously expensive and far
less than perfect. I switched to Consumer Cellular (for us old fogies)
which runs on AT&T's network. Depending on where I am service is
slightly worse but only slightly. Meantime I'm only paying 1/3 as much.
When you live in an RV/trailer park in the winter you find that living
in an aluminum house is a bit like living in a Faraday cage. Cell
phones are very unreliable if they work at all. I don't have a
Jitterbug phone but I'd be perfectly happy with one.
I understand that the internet was not designed for real time
communications but I think I'll buy a Magic Jack and make my own
determination of quality. My experiences seem to not match with yours.
Chuck Norcutt
On 3/12/2014 6:25 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.
>
>
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