Comcast Digital Phone Service - Worth It??

[G&T]

*I posted this on the Comcast Board a few day ago; I got no responce. Maybe some of you have it??*

We've had SBC (local and long distance) for a year and their prices are so outrageous (over $100.00 a month) I was really wanting to change to ANY other company. When I went to the mailbox today I saw a flyer that offered Comcast Digital Phone for $24.95 a month for 12 months and decided to sign up.

Does anyone have their phone service? Has anyone heard anything +/or/- about it?? Thanks.

(I also shelled out 5.95 for the extra features like V.M, C.ID, CW, CWID)

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I had it when I lived in a Comcast area and it worked great.

I now live in a COX area and still have cable telephone and it also works great and is a lot cheeper then SBC.

 

[billfromny]

Other Options

I've had Vonage service since October. I've no complaints.

 

[G&T]

Thanks for your quick responces!
I too had COX Digital phone service when I lived in the OC, and never had any problems with them; and I never hear anything bad about Vonage. I hope Comcast won't let me down!!!

 

[JEFFinINDY]

Thanks for your quick responces!
I too had COX Digital phone service when I lived in the OC, and never had any problems with them; and I never hear anything bad about Vonage. I hope Comcast won't let me down!!!

I had terrible luck with Vonage. Incoming calls sound great, but nearly everyone I talk to complains about the choppy audio quality when I'm speaking. The Vonage feature set is great, but if you have problems be prepared for a lot of finger pointing. Vonage will point to the cable company, the cable company will point to Vonage. And loard help you if you ever have to call Vonage for technical support and you wind up in their call center in India!

I'm switching back to SBC. SBC has a $39.99 unlimited local and long distance special that you sign up for on the web (12 month deal -- after which is $47/mo). I'm sure you could find something better than $99/month!

 

[G&T]

SBC acts like vultures; I don't trust them. As for Vonage, well, I am not using them, although I have heard really positive things about them.
I don't think Comcast Digital Phone uses a broadband connection (I may be wrong) I think they use copper wire - in this area.
I wonder why you had such a bad time with Vonage?

 

[Shawn95GT]

Vonage

If outbound callers are complaining of breakup then you were saturating your uplink. I've implemented QoS to fix that at my place. I'm on a 4.0/512 link. My webserver here didn't help matters much but even just lots of web traffic can kill you uplink (requests and acks).

Vonage isn't perfect but it's SO much cheaper that the minor inconveniences (10 digit dialing, goofy call waiting beep, location tracing 800 numbers think you are calling from NJ) are worth it... to me. Unlimited calling to anywhere in the US or Canada.. $27.44/mo taxes and all. I just added a toll free number for inbound calls and I'm now paying a total of $33/mo with taxes included. Unlike teclos, Tax for Vonage is a couple dollars vs 30%+ of the bill.

That being said.... The local cable / telcos are almost subsidising their phone service to compete. Cox had their unlimited phone package down to $35 for a while there (now back to $45/mo) and this is before tax. The multi-service disocunts almost make phone service free. That's hard to argue with.

Feel free to PM me if anyone wants a Vonage referal .

I had Cox's phone service and Qwest before them. Cox phone was fine when it was up. It would periodically crap out where your phone would just go dead. You'd never notice unless you happened to try to dial out when it was down.

Qwest's phone service just always worked - period.

Vonage craps out when the Internet conenction goes down. It fails over to my Cell automatically and switches back to Vonage when the Internet comes back up. It even works with my home alarm.

 

[JEFFinINDY]

If outbound callers are complaining of breakup then you were saturating your uplink. I've implemented QoS to fix that at my place. I'm on a 4.0/512 link. My webserver here didn't help matters much but even just lots of web traffic can kill you uplink (requests and acks).

That may well be, but all tests show that my upload speed is 384Kbps, and I have the Vonage quality set to the lowest (30Kbps) AND have the QOS feature enabled in the Vonage router and set to 256Kbps. Still, the problem occurs when nothing is happening on my network. Beyond changing the bitrate, there's nothing you can do when you have problems, and all Vonage can say is "your line is saturated" (and usually in broken, nearly unintelligible English to boot).

I think someday that VOIP will be great. Perhaps it's better if you can get the service from the same provider that provides Internet access. But between choppy audio, lag, echos, and highly variable technical support, it's really hard to recommend VOIP, and specifically Vonage, at this time.

Vonage isn't perfect but it's SO much cheaper that the minor inconveniences (10 digit dialing, goofy call waiting beep, location tracing 800 numbers think you are calling from NJ) are worth it... to me. Unlimited calling to anywhere in the US or Canada.. $27.44/mo taxes and all. I just added a toll free number for inbound calls and I'm now paying a total of $33/mo with taxes included. Unlike teclos, Tax for Vonage is a couple dollars vs 30%+ of the bill.

Yup, it is very cheap. And the features are really cool. I think someday it will be a great solution, but for now, it's more frustration than it's worth. How much of your time fiddling with routers and calling tech support does it take to eat up a $15 or $20 savings?

Jeff

 

[Shawn95GT]

When I had a 256k uplink it was REAL bad. I then went to a 1.5/768 line. This sounded line crap on my end (downloads were saturating my Internet connection). I too found that the built in QoS in the DTa was all but worthless.

Not daunted I went out and picked up a Linksys WRT54GS and a subscription to Sveasoft and I've had QoS up and running in various states for close to a year now.

The 1.5 meg downlink was presenting a problem as you can't really control what is coming down the pipe to you.. only what you ask for (uplink). randomly dropping inbound packets resulted in choppy voice quality on my end.

I changed ISPs again and am now on a 4.0/512 line and it works pretty good. My DTA is has priority over all other traffic in and out of my router and it's almost seamless that I'm using VoIP.

As with anything, you are at the mercy of the infrastucture so adding a half dozen or more router hops between me and Vonage gives plenty of places for things to go wrong... and they do. It is livable for me.

I think the Cable companies that are offering 'digital telephone' service are doing VoIP. It's all intranet to them so QoS and bandwidth isn't a problem.

Doing anything over the Internet is a crapshoot. Like I said before it's VERY livable for me. It is most definately not same/same as what you get from the local telco. The savings for me is consistantly $30 a month or more. I had regular phone bills bettering $100 before I went to Vonage.

The taxes are the real killer with traditional phone service. VoIP being exempt from most of the telco taxes is what keeps 'em cheap.

 

[cpdretired]

*I posted this on the Comcast Board a few day ago; I got no responce. Maybe some of you have it??*

We've had SBC (local and long distance) for a year and their prices are so outrageous (over $100.00 a month) I was really wanting to change to ANY other company. When I went to the mailbox today I saw a flyer that offered Comcast Digital Phone for $24.95 a month for 12 months and decided to sign up.

Does anyone have their phone service? Has anyone heard anything +/or/- about it?? Thanks.

(I also shelled out 5.95 for the extra features like V.M, C.ID, CW, CWID)

I have had Comcast Digital since it was offered here in Chicago. My best guess is about 6 or 8 years. I have two lines with unlimited calling. The monthy bill is $69.00. Comcast gives you free with the service three upgrades CW, CID and others. I have only had a couple of outages in all these years. Calling into Indiana & Wisconsin is a local call. I would never switch back to SBC.

My TV service is Dish. Once installed run a 75ohm cable from the Comcast network box to your TV and see what happens.