1984-earlier telephones,MA bell era...

[johnrk]

AT&T DSL

was good at first when I switched over from dial-up about 15 years ago. We had to wait a long time in my neighborhood for DSL. However, service really went downhill after they started pushing U-Verse, which I didn't particularly want.

I worked part of the time out of a home office for my company and I relied on that DSL. It went down one day and I waited SEVENTEEN DAYS for it to get back up! Oh, they'd blame it on my house, they'd blame it on this and that, they blamed it on some switching up in Houston, etc. Finally, on the 17th day they discovered that some ass had flipped a switch in my city's local station and it came back on. I lived on my 'smart' phone for spreadsheets, wp, etc., for that time.

As soon as it came back up I switched to high speed Comcast. They are much, much more reliable than they were here in the 80's and 90's and when they go down it tends to get back up within a few hours.

AT&T has an awful reputation in the city where I live, I know so many like me who left due to poor service and their tendency to nag the crap out of the customers. I still get their flyers for U-Verse in snail mail...

 

[48bencix]

Regulated Service

POTS is a Regulated Service and has a lot of taxes and regulations associated with it. My ATT bill includes $7.10 in taxes per month. Until recently my cell bill had no taxes but finally added $3.45 per month. I think that VOIP still avoids some of the taxes. Probably by the time I finally get VOIP the taxes will be there and it will not be any cheaper. It is good to hear that sound quality is possible with the system. I know it is possible with cell service also. I just think customers have not demanded it. It is so nice to be out of your home and be able to get any phone service that most of us didn't care about the voice quality.

I think there is some rule that all phone services must connect to receive a call for free. Except cell which charges for those minutes. So if you are calling using a VOIP you will be connected to all phones. With the regulated system all those charges were included if everyone participated. When all POTS regulated services are gone, the ones left will have to share the cost to run everything. Just seems that the copper lines were expensive to keep up but so is the whole internet, if not more so.

 

[ea56]

My sister and a friend of mine both had AT&T U-Verse and everytime I spoke with either of them on the phone the reception was terrible. And they both had problems with repeated outages, from what I could tell I believe these outages were mostly due to the inferior quality of the U-Verse equipment installed in their homes. And they both had LONG waits for someone from AT&T to get out to repair the problems.

Since I switched to Comcast, anytime I needed a tech, which has been twice, they were out the next day. And I’ve received generous credits on our acct. twice when there were some problems with the X-1 box. Comcast usually answers their phone right away and I can reach a human being with a whole lot less hassle than AT&T, and I always end up with a satisfactory resolution to whatever problem I may be having. Sure, Comcast isn’t perfect, these days perfection from any service provider is almost unknown, but they sure are a whole lot better than AT&T.

And it pains me to have to feel this way about AT&T. I worked for PT&T for 3 years during the 70’s, and I was always very proud to work for them. Back then the customer was always king, and we all took pride in the work we were doing. Now dealing with AT&T as a customer is a constant run around, and the customer is anything but king.
Eddie

 

[gusherb]

I axed our last POTS line after it developed a loud hum and any time they swapped F1 pairs it would still hum, some splices underground became compromised. That was in 2014, I made the move over to Comcast voice but kept having issues with choppiness. Finally after a few months of that I just ported the number out to Callcentric and have been using standalone VoIP since.

My IP desk phone is a Yealink, and I have a Gigaset cordless IP phone still sitting in the box waiting to be set up. Right now the cordless phones in the house are all analog Panasonic's.

 

[petek]

I've had Ooma now for 3 or 4 years with no problems. I've even talked a few friends into getting it as well and so far so good they're  happy with it as well,, and the big savings.   I keep reading on here all the complaining about robo-calls and can't quite figure out why after telling people that Ooma gets rid of 99 percent of them, they won't buy one..     Ooma could also do with better advertising I guess.   

 

[johnrk]

petek

My Ooma box died, I called them and they had a replacement by FedEx the next day at no cost to me. It was definitely out of warranty, maybe they liked my lilting voice. I'm very, very pleased.