There’s nothing like losing phone service for a week to give one an appreciation of modern communication.  On October 12^th the first snowfall of the season in western New York State turned nasty.  A cold front moved across the warm waters of Lake Erie from the west and in a lake-effect storm dropped 20 to 30 inches of heavy wet snow onto trees that had yet to shed their leaves.  The net result was that tens of thousands of trees shed tens of millions of tons of their branches.  Almost half a million customers lost power.  We were lucky.  We regained power after 6 days and 1 hour.   We had spotty internet and phone service the next day.  Others were still without after 12 days.  My great plans of having a battery backup (UPS) on the cable modem and VOIP phone adapter were useless in the face of a widespread blackout.  The UPS worked for 2 hours as planned but the internet was lost with the power.

Even 13 days after the storm and 5 days after regaining cable and high-speed internet access, the VOIP phone service is erratic as our cable company struggles to repair the massive damage.  For quite a few days even dial-up access would have been a nice thing to have.

Our cellular phone service was so swamped we couldn’t even make one call until the second day.  All through this our neighbors had their landline phones fully functional.

Will I switch back to landline and off VoIP?  No, I think we’ll stick it out for a while because the savings with VoIP is significant.  On the third day of the disaster we were able to access a wireless network outside a business that had regained power.  We checked our voicemails online and sent critical emails.

Well, SunRocket VoIP went out of business.  We are changing providers and will report later on the impact of SunRocket bankruptcy.  SunRocket folded their tent in the middle of the night.  We noticed service problems for a couple of days and then the news reports made the situation clear.  That day we put our new VoIP service in place and started the phone number transition process.

The US has one of the best phone systems in the world and it is tough to beat it with wireless or internet VOIP.  Make your own decision about VOIP phone service.