Discussion on:

VoIP over cable broadband: Does it mean business?

My wife and I still use POTS and cellphones for most of our home voice communications, precisely because no Internet connection in my experience has yet attained the "five nines" reliability that has been for decades the goal of most telcos. Uptime of 99.999% translates into downtime of about five minutes per calendar year; for me personally over the last decade my POTS phone service has been almost this reliable while my electric power has been maybe "four nines" reliable, which is to say my lights have been out for a total of about three hours over the last four years. No Internet service in my experience has managed an outage frequency within an order of magnitude of my electric service. I am of course aware that many people even in rich places have much less reliable untilities than what I get in a fairly high-density suburban neighborhood -- for instance as a young man I spent summers in the North Woods where in the average summer we'd have several six-hour blackouts due to severe thunderstorms and accepted this as normal up there. But even that level of reliability is pretty good compared to my experience of Internet access.

However, in my experience the same telcos that will dispatch a truck within the hour if a customer's POTS voice service is down display dramatically less sense of urgency if DSL is down but voice still works.

One key lesson I have learned is, I want to be a direct customer of whoever owns the wires. With DSL from a third-party ISP, troubleshooting can all too easily become finger-pointing: it's the DSLAM (owned by Company A), no it's the WIRE (owned by Company B), no it's the MODEM (owned by the me).

Now my primary home router is plugged into a RENTED cable modem. Since I've only had the cable Internet for about a month, at the moment my DSL remains active as a backup with one computer connected to it, after maybe six months I will decide whether to drop the DSL service. In case of trouble with the cable Internet service (which has not yet happened), I'll simply verify that one of our laptops CAN see the Internet when talking to my old router (the one that uses DSL), then unplug my new router and hook my laptop directly to the cable modem. If the laptop can see the Internet when connected directly to the cable modem, I'll know the problem is with my router in which case my worst-case scenario is I spend 80 bucks on a new router. If the laptop cannot connect when connected directly to the cable modem, then I am done troubleshooting and will call the cable company, knowing that WHATEVER THE PROBLEM IT IS THEIR RESPONSIBILITY THEY WILL NOT BE IN A POSITION TO POINT FINGERS.