When my little girl went from being a benign, unmoving lump of sleeping, drooling baby to a terroristic unplugging, biting, chewing, eating, swallowing, gagging, breaking, pulling, tugging beast of a toddler, my home decor changed. When we moved into our excessive 4 bed / 2.5 bath home in 2007, we had dreams. We had a guest room, and a Disney room, and my home office taking up about 25% of the under A/C space. When the beast began terrorizing our home, we retreated into a fallback position and isolated her to the safest room in the house, my former office. I was relegated to the Disney room. It’s purple. Very purple.

When moving between old office and new, as is my tradition in packing, I crammed everything into boxes with the knowledge that should I come to need an item, I would go searching through the boxes piled in the “supply closet” of my new “office”. In almost two years, I have not touched these boxes. Today was a day of reckoning when I was reminded of an important rule: Don’t use old Cat 5 and other copper cables.

There are people who will disagree with me, and I accept their disagreement with the knowledge they are wrong. Cat 5 (ie. network cable)  and copper coax cable (ie. cable tv cable) costs between $0.25 and $1 per foot. On a new VoIP phone, you need anywhere from 3 to 25 ft. of Cat 5 depending on the location of your phone / adapter in relation to your router and with the assumption that you are not using a wireless solution.

Many homes, like mine, have an accumulation of old cables, and when you get a new ATA (analog telephone adapter, aka. that veyeop thingy) that inexplicably comes without one, you go to the pile, untangle the least confined cable, and hook it up. Time and time again I have gone through ten and twenty minute troubleshooting sessions with people (and, in true ‘Dr. heal thyself’ fashion, spent hours myself) only to find that a strange or intermittent problem with connectivity, registration, or voice quality was remedied by putting on a fresh Cat 5 cable.

In fifteen years of working with networking setups, one in ten intermittent or quality issues end up being plain old bad cables (remember from previous posts, 50% are unplug or partially unplugged cables). Just in my five years of VoIP experience, I can’t count the number of times voice quality issues have been wiped out completely by getting fresh cables with good connectors. Considering the cost is < $15 for almost any project, save yourself the time and hassle. Throw away the old Cat 5 and coax cables, buy fresh ones for the new install, and you are eliminating a huge point of failure for years to come.

Residential VoIP - No Operators

Some say the media sensationalizes our economic woes for their personal gain. Others say the media accurately portrays the extreme financial burdens we find ourselves facing. And some people say, “Hey. I don’t care about anything, I always have and always will try to save money.” With today’s world becoming increasingly digital, VoIP (digital telephone) seems like a naturally good idea.

Clearly, we at VoIP Tech Chat advocate VoIP. We love it. We love it so much, we made a website called VoIP Tech Chat. And we actually now and then have chats and write articles on VoIP (ok, that last part was a little sarcastically since both Patrick and Fred seem to have been too busy to actually talk or write lately… but anyway…).

Residential Telephone Service and VoIP

If you can read this, you probably live somewhere. Or you’re a robot… which would be AWESOME since we are desperately trying to increase our robotic readership, but seriously, most people in our “audience” live somewhere and have residential phone service. Well, we should say most people used to have residential phone service.

Ten years ago, Mobile Phones were a novelty. Today, they are viewed as a necessity. In the United States, more people have wireless phone service than have traditional landline (POTS) telephone service. And, even with higher drop rates, lower voice quality, and service availability issues, 1/3rd of the current US population live in “wireless only” households (interestingly a very small percentage live in a landline only household, with the group represented mostly by persons “well over” retirement age).

There are some disadvantages to the Wireless Only approach, including emergency calling (aka 911), coverage, name listing in directories, and cost. If you are a “heavy” talker, your wireless phone bill can be very costly depending on your usage. The advantages include calling features (such as caller id and voicemail), having your phone with you at all times, and (interestingly enough) the ability to make emergency calls away from the house.

But wait… isn’t this VoIP Tech Chat? Yes Virgina… let’s continue. VoIP generally provides advanced (and included) calling features, “unlimited” local/long distance calling, inexpensive international rates, and all at a price less than your traditional POTS landline service. The negatives with VoIP? VoIP 911 service does not compare to landline usage. Although most VoIP providers implement an e911 service, the reliability of VoIP for emergency calls does not compare to a landline. A landline simply provides better 911 service, period. (we actually wrote a pretty decent article about VoIP and 911 back in the day… )

Landline POTS telephone service remains the most reliable telephone service available. The consistently maintain five-nine (99.999%) availability and provide the best access to emergency service (911). POTS service also comes with a limited feature set (by default) and hefty price tag.

Let’s compare VoIP, Traditional Telephone, and Wireless

Verizon Unlimited Local service starts at $24.95 per month. If you wanted Caller ID, Voicemail, and Call Waiting (with Caller ID) your bill jumps up to $51.90 — which is absolutely ridiculous, considering this price is the pre-tax rate.

Vonage offers an “unlimited” Local and Long Distance service for $24.95 monthly which includes more than 25 features (such as Caller ID, Call Waiting, and Voicemail). VoIP.com offers the same package for $19.95 (or more than $30 less a month than Verizon). Now, the “unlimited” voice on VoIP providers tends to be around 5,000 minutes a month or so. If you go over it, expect a notice.

Cellular Service ranges anywhere from $30 – $130 monthly per phone depending on the options you choose. By the time you reach the high end, you’re generally getting unlimited minutes and data (mobile web, email, etc.).

For a typical household, VoIP remains a very cost-effective telephone solution; although you must remember that without good (and we mean good), high-speed Internet, your VoIP will be unusable. Many local phone companies offer a “dial tone only” line for less than $15.00 monthly. With the use of VoIP and a dial-tone only landline, you can still save more than $150.00 yearly while providing your family a reliable method of calling during emergencies and power outages.

As Billy Joel would say, it comes down to reality, and that’s fine with me. If you need to tighten the belt, VoIP can help. However if you can get by without having high speed Internet and don’t mind using the mobile phone all the time, you may be fine with becoming a “wireless only” household. Or you may not care about money whatsoever and decide to have all three maxed out.

Either way, when you do realize the benefit of VoIP and embrace the force, we’re here to help.

If you are reading this article thinking that we’ll discuss cookware or the latest Rachel Ray recipe, you’ve come to the wrong place. At VoIP Tech Chat our mission is simple — we’re here to chat about VoIP. Think of it as Coffee Talk, without the coffee or infatuation with Barbara.

Sometimes, to discuss VoIP, we must discuss what VoIP is not — in this case, VoIP is not POTS.

POTS is the common nickname and acronym for Plain Old Telephone Service – you know, the “traditional” phone jack in your wall. The POTS system uses technology that is basically unchanged since the early 1900’s. The wires may be upgraded, sure there’s more features, but the telephone technology in use via POTS is essentially the same technology introduced before there were airplanes, highways, or even household refrigerators.

Background, aka Trivial Knowledge that Patrick would call Interesting

The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, who along with Thomas Edison, created a method of transferring voice over long distance through the use of connecting wires. Basically, one telephone would be physically connected to another.

Operators manually connected the two-parties together allowing the transfer of voice to occur. Human operators have since been replaced with automatic exchangers; where a computer determines the party you are wishing to talk to and making the connection. This device for automatic transfer is sometimes referred to as a telephone switch and the POTS engineers like to call their telephone network a Public Switched Telephone Network, or PSTN.

VoIP vs POTS

At VoIP Tech Chat, we are huge (no fat jokes please) proponents of Voice over Internet. Go Know. Of course, if we didn’t believe so strongly in Internet Telephone, then having a VoIP Tech Chat website would be a pretty stupid idea.

VoIP differs from POTS in many ways. Fundamentally, the end result is the same. In both systems you pick up a phone, dial a number, and talk to the other party. Other than that, the systems are extremely different. VoIP is digital and does not use wires to physically connect devices. VoIP works by digitzing your voice, sending it over the Internet to the destination, and then having it return to audio on the other side. (If you haven’t done so, you should really read “What is a VoIP?” by Patrick and Fred. It’s a great read and even mentions George Michael)

Like anything, both VoIP and POTS have their own Pros and Cons. Despite POTS technology remaining virtually unchanged since the early 1900’s, the reliability of POTS is unmatched. In fact the level of reliability achieved by POTS is the quintessential “five nines” reliability standard. This means, that with POTS, you can expect to have an outage for less than 6 minutes a year. (That’s why at&t and Verizon engineers make big change)

Now, let’s contrast five nines reliability to VoIP reliability. First, remember that VoIP requires a synergy of several service providers to get a dial tone. (Editor note: first quintessential and now synergy? Wow. Today must be vocab day at Voip Tech Chat) The two main players in VoIP are your Internet Service Provider and your VoIP Service Provider.

Let’s say for example that you were using Vonage as your VoIP provider and Comcast as your ISP. Comcast home Internet service has a 99.9% uptime average; which is very high for the industry. In fact, it would be hard pressed to find an ISP that provides you better than 99.9% uptime. Of course, even though 99.9% uptime is amazing, this translates to 44 minutes of downtime per month. Vonage doesn’t list their uptime average (in their defense, most VoIP companies do not list their uptime. We couldn’t find any for Vonage, VoIP.com, or Packet 8.). So, let’s assume Vonage has a 99% uptime (which is being generous according to the posts we read from users). This translates to an additional 7 hours of outage per month.

For reliability, there is no better choice than POTS. (Which is why many people keep a landline active for 911 service) But if you’re an average phone user willing to weigh Cost against Reliability, VoIP starts to look amazing. Of course, we’ll cover VoIP advantages in another article.