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Comparing Title II utilities to water and electricity is silly. How happy are you with your landline telephone and cable TV services? You know, the ones that ev

by cheald 12y ago

Comparing Title II utilities to water and electricity is silly. How happy are you with your landline telephone and cable TV services? You know, the ones that everyone hates and is replacing with internet-carried alternatives?

chronomex 12y ago
My landline telephone is very satisfactory. I've never encountered any service disruptions with it. In fact, I can't think of a single time in my entire life where I've picked up the phone and not had a usable dialtone on the other end, or where I've placed a call (to another landline) and received a bad connection. The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.
- briandear 12y ago
  How are your download speeds over that landline phone? There's a difference between meeting a minimal level of service and actually delivering innovation, such as speed increases. How do you like your high definition phone calls? You don't have that yet? Crazy. I would thought the phone company would be trying to rush that out the door so as to be more competitive against all of the phone company competition out there.
  - c22 12y ago
    I have never been on a phone call that felt more "high definition" than two landlines connected together unmediated by any voip or cellular link.
- cheald 12y ago
  My problem with my landline is price ($35/mo to start) and features (practically non-existent, with huge premiums charged for useful things). The service effectively hasn't changed since the 1980s, while the prices have steadily risen. I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.
  - falcolas 12y ago
    > It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do. However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down. Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year). Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.
    - cheald 12y ago
      The landline option I had previously was serviced by my cable company. If my internet was out, so was my landline, despite it not being VOIP. At my previous residence, it was serviced by the local phone company, and ran through a multiplexing box which plugged into my house power. Both that option and my cable modem have battery backups which continue to function in a power outage, but once that's gone, no more service. That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.
amputect 12y ago
I agree that it's a silly comparison; you should take that up with the post I replied to, which explicitly mentioned water and power and seemed to imply that my internet service would degrade to the same quality as those utilities (if only!) When I had a landline telephone, I was completely happy with it. It was inexpensive and reliable, and if I was unsatisfied with my service I could choose from several other providers. I could use my own equipment with it, all of the consumer electronics were interoperable with any service provider, and I never had an outage (to my knowledge; I didn't get a lot of phone calls). I had a wide variety of options for dialup internet at the time, either through my phone provider or other competing providers. This was in a small town in northern Idaho, too, and it wasn't exactly known as a telecommunications hub or city of industry. I am unhappy with my cable TV service, which is provided by the same company as my cable internet service. My cable provider is the only one in my area, and has no incentive to do anything other than take slightly more of my money every year in exchange for performing zero upgrades or service improvements. This is just a single data point, but only one of the two companies I mention above is subject to Title II regulation currently, and it's coincidentally the one that I had a good experience with.
ANTSANTS 12y ago
I don't know of anyone that has ever experienced any kind of technical problem with their landline telephone or cable TV services. Rather, you pretty much need a cell phone and (to a much lesser extent) a home internet connection to participate in society today, and the marginal utility from having a separate home line or a cable TV service in addition to those services is not enough to justify the cost for most people.

by cheald 12y ago

chronomex 12y ago

My landline telephone is very satisfactory. I've never encountered any service disruptions with it. In fact, I can't think of a single time in my entire life where I've picked up the phone and not had a usable dialtone on the other end, or where I've placed a call (to another landline) and received a bad connection. The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.

briandear 12y ago
How are your download speeds over that landline phone? There's a difference between meeting a minimal level of service and actually delivering innovation, such as speed increases. How do you like your high definition phone calls? You don't have that yet? Crazy. I would thought the phone company would be trying to rush that out the door so as to be more competitive against all of the phone company competition out there.
- c22 12y ago
  I have never been on a phone call that felt more "high definition" than two landlines connected together unmediated by any voip or cellular link.
cheald 12y ago
My problem with my landline is price ($35/mo to start) and features (practically non-existent, with huge premiums charged for useful things). The service effectively hasn't changed since the 1980s, while the prices have steadily risen. I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.
- falcolas 12y ago
  > It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do. However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down. Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year). Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.
  - cheald 12y ago
    The landline option I had previously was serviced by my cable company. If my internet was out, so was my landline, despite it not being VOIP. At my previous residence, it was serviced by the local phone company, and ran through a multiplexing box which plugged into my house power. Both that option and my cable modem have battery backups which continue to function in a power outage, but once that's gone, no more service. That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.

amputect 12y ago

I agree that it's a silly comparison; you should take that up with the post I replied to, which explicitly mentioned water and power and seemed to imply that my internet service would degrade to the same quality as those utilities (if only!) When I had a landline telephone, I was completely happy with it. It was inexpensive and reliable, and if I was unsatisfied with my service I could choose from several other providers. I could use my own equipment with it, all of the consumer electronics were interoperable with any service provider, and I never had an outage (to my knowledge; I didn't get a lot of phone calls). I had a wide variety of options for dialup internet at the time, either through my phone provider or other competing providers. This was in a small town in northern Idaho, too, and it wasn't exactly known as a telecommunications hub or city of industry. I am unhappy with my cable TV service, which is provided by the same company as my cable internet service. My cable provider is the only one in my area, and has no incentive to do anything other than take slightly more of my money every year in exchange for performing zero upgrades or service improvements. This is just a single data point, but only one of the two companies I mention above is subject to Title II regulation currently, and it's coincidentally the one that I had a good experience with.

ANTSANTS 12y ago

I don't know of anyone that has ever experienced any kind of technical problem with their landline telephone or cable TV services. Rather, you pretty much need a cell phone and (to a much lesser extent) a home internet connection to participate in society today, and the marginal utility from having a separate home line or a cable TV service in addition to those services is not enough to justify the cost for most people.