Cable Telephone Service

[David Gale]

As others have said, you probably want to keep at least a regular phone line for emergencies. (I have regular local calls, no long distance carrier (by the way, AT&T is EVIL); I place a local call to a computer to place long-distance calls via VOIP. If that went down, I could use a carrier access code in case of emergency...)

That said, I just recently started using Charter High-Speed. I've only had it about a month so far, but I haven't had any problems at all. One thing to be aware of is that, when you call to sign up, they _only_ quote you their standard price--if you get a flier offering a better deal, or see something on their web site, you need to ask for it specifically. Seems a little screwy to me.

-D.

[avoidspam]

I've had Vonage (via my Earthlink/Time Warner Cable internet service) since January 2004 and have had no outages (loss of dial tone) since I dropped my BellSouth service. My neighbors who still have BS telephone service lost dial tone 2 times for 72 and 48 hours respectively during this time. Loss of the TWC service doesn't concern me since in that event any calls to my Vonage number would be transferred to one of my cell numbers and/or my Vonage voice mail box.

Dealing with Vonage when it is necessary to call them has never been as frustrating as a call to BellSouth customer disservice, my last contact was on behalf of my son to have a "feature" he had no need for removed, after they explained "We activated it for all of our customers because we felt they would want it!" - this feature prevented the use of your phone's "busy call back" feature and instead substituted the telco's auto9 call back if busy that would result in a $.75 cent charge per call!

When I call to have it deactivated the CSR first claimed it could not be turned off and only after I spoke to his supervisor did he come back on the line and tell me that he was told that it could be turned off and it would be removed within 12 hours.

The next cal I made happened to be to a busy number and the money grabber had in fact been turned off within minutes of my call!