Still on Dialup?

[fastbilly1]

Surprised no one has brought up T1 lines yet. They're quickly becoming the dialup of today with only 1.5mbps per T1 circuit. Bonding multiple T1s gets very expensive. They'll only be used for voice in the near future. You can break analog lines off them or get a PRI (similar tech delivering 23 call paths).

As long as people hate the cable companies, theyll still use T1s. Windstream, Cbeyond, Earthlink, they are all using ATT's backbone. But the cable companies mostly are the only carriers on their lines (most of them let Google ride their lines for the Starbucks deal). The oddball is Level3, but Level3 comes with a price.

[Jagosaurus]

Surprised no one has brought up T1 lines yet. They're quickly becoming the dialup of today with only 1.5mbps per T1 circuit. Bonding multiple T1s gets very expensive. They'll only be used for voice in the near future. You can break analog lines off them or get a PRI (similar tech delivering 23 call paths).

As long as people hate the cable companies, theyll still use T1s. Windstream, Cbeyond, Earthlink, they are all using ATT's backbone. But the cable companies mostly are the only carriers on their lines (most of them let Google ride their lines for the Starbucks deal). The oddball is Level3, but Level3 comes with a price.

Good point. I see AT&T as the government... much worse than cable companies

What area of the country are you in? We run into all those AT&T resellers here minus earthlink (to my knowledge), add Logix, Cogent, and XO.

[fastbilly1]

Surprised no one has brought up T1 lines yet. They're quickly becoming the dialup of today with only 1.5mbps per T1 circuit. Bonding multiple T1s gets very expensive. They'll only be used for voice in the near future. You can break analog lines off them or get a PRI (similar tech delivering 23 call paths).

As long as people hate the cable companies, theyll still use T1s. Windstream, Cbeyond, Earthlink, they are all using ATT's backbone. But the cable companies mostly are the only carriers on their lines (most of them let Google ride their lines for the Starbucks deal). The oddball is Level3, but Level3 comes with a price.

Good point. I see AT&T as the government... much worse than cable companies

What area of the country are you in? We run into all those AT&T resellers here minus earthlink (to my knowledge), add Logix, Cogent, and XO.

I am near Nashville. We have all of those but Logix. Oh and TDS. Good ole fiber to the house TDS.

I live in Charter territory, and get a whopping 50x10 for $45 a month.

[Jagosaurus]

As long as people hate the cable companies, theyll still use T1s. Windstream, Cbeyond, Earthlink, they are all using ATT's backbone. But the cable companies mostly are the only carriers on their lines (most of them let Google ride their lines for the Starbucks deal). The oddball is Level3, but Level3 comes with a price.

Good point. I see AT&T as the government... much worse than cable companies

What area of the country are you in? We run into all those AT&T resellers here minus earthlink (to my knowledge), add Logix, Cogent, and XO.

I am near Nashville. We have all of those but Logix. Oh and TDS. Good ole fiber to the house TDS.

I live in Charter territory, and get a whopping 50x10 for $45 a month.

Cool deal. I lived about 15 miles south of Nashville in Franklin with my previous job before I got transferred back to Houston. I really like the area!

I had Comcast when I lived in that area. Their residential prices, coax service were more competitive there than in the Houston market.

Yeah Logix is big in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, & OKC. Don't think they're any where else.

Interesting that XO only does phone lines here. Not sure it's nationwide that way. Maybe they offer dialup

[marurun]

What? No talk of ISDN lines? Geez, you youngsters...

[BoringSupreez]

When I worked at Blockbuster for the longest time, I would get into arguments with people over this. They seemed to believe that every person in the United States had access to high speed internet. Huge portions of the midwest and mountain regions have restricted access to this stuff, having to rely on Dialup or the egregiously expensive satellite that, in all honesty, is not much of an improvement.

Drove me nuts. They also were people that said that we are overpopulated in the United States and that there is no countrysides any more. That we are so overcrowded that there is no place to farm. It was a college town... college students are... weird.

.

[Purkeynator]

This seems impossible to me. To use dial up you would need a regular old phone line instead of voip. I live in the city and last year I tried to get regular phone line and it was not even available. Everything seems to be voip based now....

[samsonlonghair]

This seems impossible to me. To use dial up you would need a regular old phone line instead of voip. I live in the city and last year I tried to get regular phone line and it was not even available. Everything seems to be voip based now....

They make a better profit on VOIP compared to POTS (plain old telephone service) but it is still available. They'd rather sell you voip so hey can make more money. As the wise economist Sean J. Combs once said, "It's all about the Benjamins"

[fastbilly1]

This seems impossible to me. To use dial up you would need a regular old phone line instead of voip. I live in the city and last year I tried to get regular phone line and it was not even available. Everything seems to be voip based now....

To have a voip line, you have to have an internet connection. You can do voip over dialup in some circumstances, but you will be frustrated with the result.

Its funny, one of my wife's friends was praising an article this morning about British Telecom and Sky's work on increasing speeds in the UK for "high speed" internet, and lamenting that we do not do something similar here in the USA. But he did not believe that if I pull out of my neighborhood and make a right and go half a mile, those people cannot get anything but dialup and Hughesnet. People just assume that everyone has access to high speed, but an hour away from most major cities there are large deadzones. Heck there are spots inside cities where you cannot get it.

[Jagosaurus]

Keep in mind VOIP is an ambiguous term. Let's say you have Internet and TV through a single cable company. Do you then call your TV "Internet TV" bc it comes in on the same circuit as your data pipe? Nope.

Scenario 1:
True VOIP is your voice packets traveling via SIP over the Internet to a soft switch. You have to configure Quality of Service (QOS) on your local firewall but once the voice leaves your LAN, it's traveling over the open Internet. This is how Vonage, Vocalicity, 8x8, etc work. Internet goes down, phones are out.

Scenario 2:
What you're likely referring to is digital in, analog out & the carrier/cable company gives voice priority over data, ensuring QOS at the circuit level. See Comcast telephony gateway (coax to analog handoff) or AT&T IP flex. Voice can be up with a path to PSTN, even if Internet is down. Sure it could be classified as "VOIP" but a much different model than scenario 1.

... don't get me started on defining a VOIP phone system... gets even more grey.