[TriLUG] OT - Vonage / AT&T Dsl combo

Josh Vickery josh at vickeryj.com
Wed Oct 29 07:46:31 EDT 2008


I'm in the process of evaluating Verizon DSL and landline service
against the Time Warner offerings that I currently have, not as much
for price, but for quality of service. I work at home and having a
reliable phone and internet connection is important to my work.
Recently Time Warner has been having service issues that they have not
been able to correct for a few days and it's driving me crazy. I'm
still waiting on a Verizon tech who was supposed to come yesterday, so
I can't yet comment on the service. The price appears to be very
similar (slightly lower) than Time Warner's for similar offerings. I
have yet to see what sort of "fees" get tacked on to the bill though.

That said, have you called Time Warner and told them that you are
considering switching to DSL and Vonage? I'm guessing "naked" DSL (DSL
without a landline) Light will probably cost $30/month + "fees",
putting your total around $60/month (unless you opt for a less
expensive Vonage plan). If you have cable TV with Time Warner, they
might be able to match that rate. I do know they offer a "light" Road
Runner service, and the rate on the Digital Phone service seems to be
quite negotiable, ranging from $20/month to $40/month. I don't mean to
suggest that there is any particular reason to stick with Time Warner,
but that I thought you might find it useful to know that they are
willing to negotiate their pricing and services.

Not to get too far off topic, but I would like to share what I'm
planning on doing with the group, and see if anyone has any thoughts.
I plan to keep my Duke Road Runner service (5mbps/768kbps) as well as
Verizon's Power Plan DSL (3mbps/76kbps) and setup my router (Debian
Etch box) to load balance the two connections and provide fail over
support. When failure happens, I plan to log it. After a while I'll be
curious to see how many times the various connections failed.

I'm not sure how well the load balancing will work, but I'm interested
in experimenting with it.

As for pricing, what got me started down this path was calling Time
Warner Business Class. They offer the same service I have now, but for
considerably more money. For that money, they provide assurance that
issues will be resolved within 24 hours. However, for the money they
charge it's actually cheaper to have both DSL and Cable Internet. Plus
since I work at home this is the closest I'll get to networking
anytime soon.

Josh

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 12:04 AM, Carl Crider <c.crider at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just cancelled Vonage after 3+ years. No need now that our family
> is covered with cell phones. Had reliable service the entire time, no
> real complaints. Last DSL I used at home was with Earthlink.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Craig Taylor <ctalkobt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm currently re-evaluating my options for at least 1.5k down & basic phone
>> service (NC regional) as TimeWarner is just too much. Does anyone have
>> experiance with Vonage (24.99/month unlimited residential) and DSL Lite(1.5k
>> down)?
>>
>> I know from past experience that AT&T Dsl is a <sarcasm>delight</sarcasm> at
>> times but those delights are typically short-lived (especially if you use an
>> alternate DNS server).   Any opinions / suggestions?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> - Craig Taylor
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