Comments on: Cell phones and DSL and cable, oh my!

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 19:55:39 +0000

Andy:
First off, I don’t think that DSL will give you any more reliability than cable. Comcast hardly went down when I was in Michigan. I wasn’t famliar with many DSL outages, though either.
Regarding VOIP: Unless you have a FAST DSL connection (1.5Mbit) you’ll find that your phone calls go all wacky and delayed if you do other things on the phone.
I have VOIP at work, on my 960 kpbs DSL, and for the most part, it works. If I fetch a big web page, or my computer makes a big request, or something like that that downloads a few hundred K of stuff, my phone conversations get all digitaly, I miss words, and occasionally the majority of some sentences.
I NEVER had that on cable. Why? Well, the 3Mbit ceiling on cable left me enough headroom to view web pages, call up stuff, and occasionally download files WITHOUT interrupting my phone call.
Now that I’m on DSL.. wow. I miss a lot of stuff.
Don’t buy into the ‘Cable is shared bandwidth, DSL is dedicated” crap. On cable, I had at least 1.5 Mbit, and more often had 3Mbit. Now, I have 960kbps, for more money, with more VOIP problems.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 16:50:18 +0000

I wouldn’t rely on VoIP at this point; DSL and cable just don’t have the reliability you’ll want/need. Also, VoIP doesn’t do 911 very well yet.
Of course, cell plans aren’t cheap. A good cross-tool solution might be Skype, which lets you buy “Skype-out” credit for 2cents a minute. That lets you do Skype-to-POTS calls (e.g., computer to land line) calls. That doesn’t help with incoming calls, but you’re not locked into any contracts, either. What’s your long-distance vs. local can ratio?

By: topher

topher — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 14:40:22 +0000

I've done a good bit of analysis on this actually. First of all, packaged deals can be dangerous. Check this link out: http://credit.typepad.com/credit/2004/11/utilities_mimic.html Second, if you get cell phones, you'll enjoy the flexibility of using them outside of your apartment as well, and probably won't need VoiP. Unless you get one with about 20 minutes on it for $4 as a backup for your VoiP. Lastly, if you go VoiP, you'll probably want a cable connection, since you'll then be able to kill your phone line completely. My suggestion is to either go with cell phones and either cable or DSL based on price, OR cable and VoiP.