VOIP Experience

[dodge man]

I get it, you don’t have fiber to your house. I said earlier my son works for the local phone company and they are 100% fiber. They are a phone co-op and have gotten some grants. They have run fiber all over the place because of the demand and because some of the other companies don’t care and have poor service. There is a push for rural high speed internet but if your phone company doesn’t care or want to do it for financial reasons it’s no help to you. We have 1 gig internet speed living in a rural area because of the phone companies efforts.

 

[LouNY]

its literally telling you there is obstructions, of course if there is a connection drop the vpn will drop, not entire sure what you expect here.

The only "obstruction" is a fringe on the east side which is in the picture posted and was not there untill the dish changed it's positioning. The service has often been mediocre in terms of speed and latency for what it has been hyped for. It is not impressive just better then what else is available to me. And the loss of connection for weather related reasons is quite aggravating and happens quite often every rain or snow storm has either losses or severe degradation of service.

 

[LittleBill21]

The only "obstruction" is a fringe on the east side which is in the picture posted and was not there untill the dish changed it's positioning. The service has often been mediocre in terms of speed and latency for what it has been hyped for. It is not impressive just better then what else is available to me. And the loss of connection for weather related reasons is quite aggravating and happens quite often every rain or snow storm has either losses or severe degradation of service.

if its complaining, its complaining, i would try to move it, especially if your experiencing issues.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Do you have fiber directly to your house?
For whatever reason when they ran it here they use the fiber for the trunk line, but distribution to customers is via coax. Not sure why. If the power goes out, all those fiber-to-copper converters go down.
Fortunately, we don't lose power very often.

Yes, the data rides on light all the way to the router. It amazed me when they strung my neighborhood, because houses here are far apart. My nearest neighbors are half a mile away.

 

[goeduck]

Do you have fiber directly to your house?
For whatever reason when they ran it here they use the fiber for the trunk line, but distribution to customers is via coax. Not sure why. If the power goes out, all those fiber-to-copper converters go down.
Fortunately, we don't lose power very often.

Our coax connected internet stays up after a power outage for a day or so. I assume until their backup power runs out.

 

[ultrarunner]

My DSL never went down when all power out widespread with millions out.

Neighbors were coming to me because I was the only landline left and the rotary dial never missed a beat and laptops had internet through DSL

 

[ponytug]

My DSL never went down when all power out widespread with millions out.

Neighbors were coming to me because I was the only landline left and the rotary dial never missed a beat and laptops had internet through DSL

You are lucky; here the DSL stayed up 10-15minutes because the techs would only replace a single battery, so the remote terminal never charged properly. I think by law the copper lines here are (were?) supposed to be up for 48 hours into an outage.

I'm so happy not to be dealing with the DSL teams, and all the finger pointing between the fiber team, the DSL team, and the copper line technicians (who were generally just plain great).

All the best,

Peter

 

[ruffdog]

the DSL internet is only 1.5 MBPS download and 400-500 kbps upload. Most of you folks think anything less than 10 MBPS is bad. I am barely better than dial up from 20 years ago.

Man, I feel your pain. I just checked and am at 976 kbps down and 210 kbps up. The phone repair guy says we are in the "dead zone".

 

[ultrarunner]

You are lucky; here the DSL stayed up 10-15minutes because the techs would only replace a single battery, so the remote terminal never charged properly. I think by law the copper lines here are (were?) supposed to be up for 48 hours into an outage.

I'm so happy not to be dealing with the DSL teams, and all the finger pointing between the fiber team, the DSL team, and the copper line technicians (who were generally just plain great).

All the best,

Peter

My DSL was at the farthest reaches of the large 3 story central office...

At one time the Central Office even added another whole foot at great expense back in the 70's... I hear now it is mostly empty but still has banks of batteries and generators fed from underground storage tanks across the road...

Back in the Pacific Telephone days reliability was Paramount... now..
not such as even getting a live person in this country is a challenge...

 

[duffer]

I've used VOIP for probably 15+ years. Early years were tenuous. 1-2 second delays on sending and receiving voice. Got a lot better when bandwidth got better, and phone tech improved too. I've had it on DSL, Cable, Cellular internet (Verizon), and now fiber optic.

Not knowing your location, tough to recommend anything specific, but you should at least contact your cellular supplier to see if they have a "whole house" wifi system available for you. My Verizon cellular internet ran at about 40 mbps (avg). Used it for VOIP, 3 Firesticks, an ipad and a PC. Was pretty satisfied. Certainly enough not to have to shell out $600 for Starlink. Verizon now gives you the modem/router as part of the plan.

You can buy a VOIP phone modem that plugs into your router directly (rather than using a PC as a bridge). I've had Ooma for about 2-3 years now, and it performs well. VOIP phone numbers are non-listed numbers so it does remove some (not all) of the spam calls. You can also activate a call blocker feature if you want. We use a 4 extension roam phone setup in the house, without any issues on the VOIP.

Good luck. Let us know what you decide.