Switching to cable internet

[Kev Williams]

thanks for the replies everyone!

As for cutting the wire and going strictly mobile- I already have a Wilson amplifier and we still barely have a bar or two of cell service on the wife's Cricket. T-mobile doesn't work unless you go outside. I have Verizon on an old LG flip phone, want nothing to do with smart phone. And-- I simply cannot stand the voice quality of cell phones. To my ears it's like trying to decipher pig latin. It's bad enough listening to people on cell phones, it's horrible to me if we're both on a cell. I guess 40 years of screaming engraving machines and 130db rock & roll have taken its toll on my ears

Good to know on the fax services (I don't get out much ) - I'll check into that, thanks!

Another question on voip phones- I currently have 5 phones, 2 in the basement shop, 2 upstairs, one in the garage, they're Vtech cordless (which by the way are the ONLY cordless phones I've found that 'talk' good enough for me to understand)... are multiple phones on the same line okay with voip?

[Mike Henderson]

thanks for the replies everyone!

Another question on voip phones- I currently have 5 phones, 2 in the basement shop, 2 upstairs, one in the garage, they're Vtech cordless (which by the way are the ONLY cordless phones I've found that 'talk' good enough for me to understand)... are multiple phones on the same line okay with voip?

Normally, yes. The ringing voltage (and current) was designed to ring clapper type bells on the old phones - and those took a fair amount of power. Most electronic phones just detect the ringing voltage and make some noise through a speaker. So they don't need a lot of power from the voip device to generate ring.

And, if you have cordless phones, the only thing that detects the ring is the base station. When it detects ring, it sends a signal to the handsets and they make their own noise. So a cordless phone only has one appearance on the line, as far as ringing detection is concerned.

Mike

[Steve Peterson]

I have Verizon on an old LG flip phone, want nothing to do with smart phone. And-- I simply cannot stand the voice quality of cell phones. To my ears it's like trying to decipher pig latin. It's bad enough listening to people on cell phones, it's horrible to me if we're both on a cell.

That's one of my pet peeves also. How come phones sound worse today than they did 40 years ago? And why do people tolerate it? This is why we went back to a land line.

I think the reasons for the horrible quality are cost cutting ab profit margins. A $600 cell phone will have a bill of materials cost of around $200. The manufacturer has to do everything possible to keep their cost around $200. The budget may only have a few pennies to spend on the microphone and speaker so they put in crappy components. Then they go searching for even cheaper components, just so they can hit their price point.

Steve

[Larry Browning]

That's one of my pet peeves also. How come phones sound worse today than they did 40 years ago? And why do people tolerate it? This is why we went back to a land line.

These things they call smart phones have a primary purpose of everything but a phone. The phone feature is merely an after thought. Ask anyone under the age of 30 how often they use the smart "phone" to make a voice phone call and you will most likely be told that they can't remember the last time they did that or that they have never done it. The reason the audio quality has gone down is that the customers being marketed to really don't care about it.

[Mike Henderson]

That's one of my pet peeves also. How come phones sound worse today than they did 40 years ago? And why do people tolerate it? This is why we went back to a land line.

I think the reasons for the horrible quality are cost cutting ab profit margins. A $600 cell phone will have a bill of materials cost of around $200. The manufacturer has to do everything possible to keep their cost around $200. The budget may only have a few pennies to spend on the microphone and speaker so they put in crappy components. Then they go searching for even cheaper components, just so they can hit their price point.

Steve

All modern cellular phones encode the voice into digital. They use a voice coder (vocoder) and encode it at as low a rate as possible because the lower the rate, the more phones can be supported in a cell. The type of vocoding is set by standards bodies but I suspect there are several vocoders to choose from, some being of higher quality than others - but perhaps also at a higher bit rate, or more complexity to achieve the coding.

Cordless phones also encode the voice to digital. For certain types of cordless phones, such as DECT, the vocoder may be standardized. In general, most systems such as cordless phones and cellular phones prefer to use a low coding rate which usually also means lower quality.

When you make a cell phone-to-cell phone call, the voice is coded at a low bit rate at one end, then transcoded to 64Kpbs for carriage through the network, then back to a low bit rate coding for the other phone. In addition to the problems of the low bit rate coding, the conversion between types of coding introduces error into the coding, which means you have trouble understanding.

However, most people can understand those types of calls so they aren't going to change.

Mike

[On a land line, your voice is digitally encoded once it hits the central office - it's coded at 64Kbps. That 64Kbps is carried through the network, and since it's digital, there is no noise, crosstalk or other impairments introduced into the signal. You can call Asia and you'll get a clear signal. Then, at the other end, the 64Kbps is converted back to analog for the other person to hear.]

[Shawn Pixley]

I haven't had the bad sound quality experience of which you speak. In fact, my experience is the opposite. People comment, "you sound like you're right next to me."

We switched from Verizon to ATT years ago, because Verizon's cell signal at our hiuse is so bad. They tried everything to incentivize us to stay, but refused to consider the cell quality. It was some surrealistic conversations (we'll give you free phones to stay with us. Will you be upgrading the signal at our house? No, but with our phone you will experince the broadest coverage across the nation? How does that help me if I don't get calls at home? You could go inland to where the coverage is better. I think we are done here. But we really want you to stay as a customer. Why would i do that? Because we offer the best coverage of any major carrier. Huh? Remember, we'll give you new phones. How does that help? ... And it went on like this)

Now we have iPhone 5's on ATT with good quality all over the world. Yesterday I had 3 calls on my mobile, so we do use it in voice mode.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

It seems every website and/or it's designers believes everyone has 50 meg internet speed. I've been on DSL since it came out. And I'm okay with 1.5meg speed, which is what I'm paying for, but I'm rarely if ever connected at that speed. For the past 2 weeks (and right now) I'm connected at 640k up and down. With my grandaughter using her laptop on my wifi, it takes 15 seconds to download a 100k photo. Ridiculous. Whenever going to a website, it just sits there, while in the lower left corner of the screen I read "waiting forthis.com, waiting for that.com, waiting for unlimitedadsforyou.com"...

Adblocker style plug-ins don't always speed up web-surfing (some of the ones for Chrome, for instance last I looked, still downloaded advertising pages, but simply didn't render the content) but ad-blocking proxies (I experimented briefly with Privoxy, in the past, and found it interesting) or editing the "hosts" files on either your computer or router will prevent your computer from downloading the ads from websites. I've experimented with this in the past when I was stuck on slower connections, and found it sped up a lot of the web for me - a fair amount of web pages hang waiting for the ads to load; by bypassing this, things sped up considerably for me at that time. Certainly, the ads are often the most bandwidth intensive parts of some websites. Doesn't sound like it's really worth continuing your current internet solution as it is, but might be worth trying out to speed things up in the interim.

And with decent internet speed, I might entertain the idea of Netflix or some other such service. Suggestions? FWIW, my son has Netflix, and virtually every time I ask if such&such a show or movie is on Netflix, he says it isn't. That doesn't work for me... Maybe Hulu or Vudu... Anyway, if that happens, I can knock another $50 or so a month off the Dish bill every month.

I still find a lot of choosing a streaming site can really depend on what you want to watch - we looked at this site : http://www.canistream.it and it was helpful in the past, but it was a while back, so I don't know how helpful it might be now.

[Bert Kemp]

Project Free Tv has tons of movies and tv most tv shows are on it a day or 2 after they broadcast. Also most network tv streams their shows over the internet just look up the network. ABC<CBS ect

[Moses Yoder]

My wife gets a discount on Sprint since she works for Chiphone so of course we switched from Verizon to Sprint. Sprint reception in our house was nonexistent until we installed the Sprint Airave, they discounted it to about $100, and our reception now is better than a land line. I would imagine every company has it's own version of this booster that works through the internet.

[Rich Engelhardt]

Project Free Tv

That web site lit up my Security Essentials like a Christmas tree.
I tried a few movie titles and each one wanted me to update something or other (either Java or IE).

Since I recently got burned by a bogus Java update, I decided it wasn't worth the risk.

[Ole Anderson]

Comcast upgraded our service at no cost so now we have 57 mbps down/12 up every time I run a speed test. I see no degradation from neighborhood use. Only problem is that the new all-in-one modem/router/phone/wireless box gives a really spotty wireless connection. So bad that I hardwired my BluRay (for streaming) and my laptop. Now I get rock solid speed. And the phone works great for receiving all those computer generated sales calls. I didn't want the phone service, I was going to go with just cellphones, but phone came "bundled" cheaper than no phone. I just can't bring myself to disconnect that "free" phone.

[Kev Williams]

just tested my internet speed: .55 down, .48 up. Yes, the decimals are in the right place, unfortunately! Pretty lame...

I have my fax taken care of, thank you! -- Costing me a whopping $3 a month for 25 pages both ways, which is more than enough. Much better than the around $30 for a land-line fax.

Got my cable modem in the mail Saturday, $68 on Amazon, so no $8 a month rental...

Just need to figure out the phone service I want. The 19th is my install date...

So, Magic Jack- someone either talk me into it or out of it! -- My only experience with it is a guy at the boat harbor who used to talk to his mom in Australia using the harbor's wifi and his laptop, he had nothing but good to say about it. I'd love to hear more real-world internet phone experiences, of any brand!

[Pat Barry]

All modern cellular phones encode the voice into digital. They use a voice coder (vocoder) and encode it at as low a rate as possible because the lower the rate, the more phones can be supported in a cell. The type of vocoding is set by standards bodies but I suspect there are several vocoders to choose from, some being of higher quality than others - but perhaps also at a higher bit rate, or more complexity to achieve the coding.

Cordless phones also encode the voice to digital. For certain types of cordless phones, such as DECT, the vocoder may be standardized. In general, most systems such as cordless phones and cellular phones prefer to use a low coding rate which usually also means lower quality.

When you make a cell phone-to-cell phone call, the voice is coded at a low bit rate at one end, then transcoded to 64Kpbs for carriage through the network, then back to a low bit rate coding for the other phone. In addition to the problems of the low bit rate coding, the conversion between types of coding introduces error into the coding, which means you have trouble understanding.

However, most people can understand those types of calls so they aren't going to change.

Mike

[On a land line, your voice is digitally encoded once it hits the central office - it's coded at 64Kbps. That 64Kbps is carried through the network, and since it's digital, there is no noise, crosstalk or other impairments introduced into the signal. You can call Asia and you'll get a clear signal. Then, at the other end, the 64Kbps is converted back to analog for the other person to hear.]

Cell phone audio is just as digital as the wireless handset you might have in your house. In fact its no doubt much better. The 64kbps that is referred to is a significant limitation to the quality of the landline that doesn't exist on a cell phone. This is likely the biggest issue and one that will get resolved in time. I also don't buy the idea that young folks don't know how to use the phone. ROFL that's a simply hilarious observation.

[Scott Shepherd]

just tested my internet speed: .55 down, .48 up. Yes, the decimals are in the right place, unfortunately! Pretty lame...

I have my fax taken care of, thank you! -- Costing me a whopping $3 a month for 25 pages both ways, which is more than enough. Much better than the around $30 for a land-line fax.

Got my cable modem in the mail Saturday, $68 on Amazon, so no $8 a month rental...

Just need to figure out the phone service I want. The 19th is my install date...

So, Magic Jack- someone either talk me into it or out of it! -- My only experience with it is a guy at the boat harbor who used to talk to his mom in Australia using the harbor's wifi and his laptop, he had nothing but good to say about it. I'd love to hear more real-world internet phone experiences, of any brand!

Magicjack doesn't get great reviews in the tech world. You will see people online from time to time say they use it and it works fine, but people that test that stuff for a living haven't been giving magicjack the best reviews. It normally rates on the low to middle end of the other products. There's a lot of mention of them having horrible support and constantly trying to upsell you on things. I've never used it, but that's what I've read. I've had Vonage for about 8-9 years now and it's been fantastic. However, it's not as cheap as it used to be.

[Garth Almgren]

If you ever have to call the cable company, don't tell them that you own your own modem unless they specifically ask. Once they know that it isn't their modem, they will just refer you to the modem's manufacturer. Guess how I know.

As for Magic Jack, I'm surprised you found someone who had something good to say about it. Just about everyone I've talked with who has it, the only good thing they could say about it was "well, at least it's cheap". The voice quality is pretty horrendous due to massive compression, and it does require your PC to be turned on in order to receive or make a call.