when should I cancel the landline account?

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: Oct 03, 2003 Posts: 8

I just got the Cisco ATA box in today. It works great. When should I call my telephone company to disconnect my landline service?

Posts: 40 · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 4:35 am Post subject:

That all depends on a lot of individual / personal factors:

How sensitive are you to outages, and what alternate means of comms do you have during those outages (e.g. cell phone)?

How "solid" is your ISP connection?

I'm 3-months into Vonage and I still keep a "minimum" Verizon line run into the house. It came in handy during Hurricane Isabelle's multi-day power outages ... even the cell towers around here died.

I recommed a three month "trial run" before cutting the POTS cord completely.

Posts: 21 · Posted: Fri Oct 03, 2003 9:56 am Post subject: Keep the POTS line

In my case, I would say never.

I was really hoping Vonage would let me say goodbye, RBOC. By getting high-speed Internet with our cable service, I naiivly believed this would be possible, and indeed it would be if I didn't mind the cable modem cutting out in the middle of most every phone call. If we enjoyed saying, "Hello? Hello?" a lot during our phone calls, we'd certainly just keep the cable modem service.

Unfortuunately, we've ended up having to order a friggin POTS line to get DSL. No monopoly there, eh? In Chicago, it seems you can't get residential DSL from ANYONE unless you've already got a land-line. So in order to ditch the highly unreliable (RCN) cable in favor of DSL, we're basically forced to defeat the whole purpose of Vonage and re-acquire a basic POTS line.

For now, we're keeping Vonage, but only as long as they remain competitively priced. Since we have the land line anyway, it'll be a simple matter to just disengage from this experiment on a whim.

Good luck.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: 1062479064 Posts: 3

I'm giving Vonage a 4-month try. I've put my local Sprint landline account into "Vacation Mode" where they bill at half the monthly rate (but not the voicemail, etc!). Before I went into vacation mode, I ditched the CO based voicemail. The vacation rate starts next Tuesday. I have an answering machine lying around that I'm going to plug into the Sprint demarc with an announcement informing folks to call my new Vonage number...no recording functions, just announcing the new number.
I'll see if that works out.

If Vonage doesn't work for me after 4 months, I pay Sprint $18.00 to go off vacation mode (some areas of the country it costs less, other areas more) and cancel Vonage.

Right now Vonage isn't in danger of being "thrown out" There have been a few instances where I was ready to throw the ATA into the street, but after weighing the costs and benefits it is still here. Most of the problems I have encountered occurred during the period when Vonage went live in the Raleigh, NC area.

Good luck to you.

Regards,

Jim