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Vonage In a matter of "betting my life" on one service or the other, I personally would
In a matter of "betting my life" on one service or the other, I personally would choose the local phone company without question. There are going to be exceptions, but generally speaking, ordinary phone service is far more reliable. There is a hard link- copper wires on a pole or buried underground- between you and the phone company's switch. Nothing short of a car wreck bringing down a phone pole, careless backhoe operator digging up a cable, or some other physical trauma to that telephone cable, will break that link. The phone company has over 100 years of experiencing routing phone calls, and it's one of the best networks on the planet.
When making a 911 call with your local phone company, the call is sent up those reliable copper wires to the local switch, then on to the local emergency center. If you have Enhanced 911 service (most areas do), the operator knows exactly where you are before you even speak the first word.
When making a 911 call with Vonage, your call must be converted from an analog signal to digital (that cheap Linksys adapter not known for its quality), sent through your cable modem, routed through Cox's network out onto the internet, hop across one or more long-haul transit networks (typically) several states away to a peering location where the message jumps to one of Vonage's carriers- and THEN be translated from a digital internet message back to analog and put on the public switched telephone network, where it makes its journey all the way back to your local public service access point, which is not the same thing as a true 911 call center. As you can see, there are many more potential points of failure. If you are incapacitated and cannot speak, the operator has no clue who or where you are, and cannot send help- and that fact alone could mean the difference between life and death, especially for someone in bad health.
With your poor health, 911 is a critical life-or-death issue, moreso than for the average household. Thus, my recommendation would be NOT to give up your regular phone service. If you make a lot of long distance calls, you might consider using Vonage as your primary phone, and getting what's known as "Message Rate" service from your local telephone company as a reliable backup for emergencies. Message Rate service is typically less than $20/mo, and that's a small price to pay for something that could save your life.
Or, perhaps Vonage just isn't the right product for you at all. Only you can decide what's best for yourself.
Read The Full Thread: They Don''t Have Enough Support People
• I emailed Vonage a few days ago, expressing my concern with sound quality. I got
• -what phone adapter do you have?
-who is your isp?
-what were your results
• I called vonage today on a billing issue, and also tech support. I had a live person
• I've posted these in another thread, but:
Charter Communications
Linksys
• have you tried to change your bandwidth saver settings?
try to set it to 50,
• I've already got the bandwidth saver settings set for the highest voice quality.
• from http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=bandwidth_saver
• and?
No offense, but I've posted that I have a high speed connection with 256MB
• We apologize for the inconvenience. We are trying our best to answer customer
• Yes, the company is clearly suffering from under-staffing in all areas. I've
rebus posted "In a matter of "betting my life" on one service or the other, I personally would" on 02/05/2005 |
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