On Sat, 2004-03-20 at 20:26, Randy Crews wrote: > Has anyone used this service from TW? Do you have any feedback on > quality versus existing POTS service? > > > > Randy > I have the service (comparing it against FeatureTel). It works fine. The sound quality is very high and the unlimited LD is a nice feature.
There are some caveats: - No voice mail - You lose a call during a local network "reset", but those aren't common, and service comes right back - You need to have a cell phone for emergency backup (if there is an extended loss of power - like during our ice storms or hurricanes). The cool thing about TWTC doing the VoIP is that your call stays on their local network, so the latency to the Servers is very low. As long as the latency stays under 50ms the call quality is crystal clear (they even have to run a "white noise" generator so you know the call is still active). Latency is the time it takes for a data packet to travel from the server to your phone. The shorter this time, the clearer the call. Anything above 50ms and the callers begin to hear echos and breaks in the call. TWTC also has QoS running on their internal network so that call information has priority out of your local network pipe. Thus, your neighbor can hog the pipe with his porn downloads all he wants, and your call still goes through crystal clear. The alternatives like Vonage, Packet8, and local vendor FeatureTel all have their servers off net from TWTC so their publicly available internet offerings all have higher latencies and no QoS. As an example FeatureTel's servers average a 32ms latency for customers off of TWTC. The call quality is still pretty good with FeatureTel, but the lack of QoS allows for latency spikes to occasionally break up the call (similar to when you switch towers during a Cell phone conversation) On the other hand, all the other vendors do have Voicemail, and FeatureTel also has a webportal for use by its users. Jon Carnes -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
