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There’s
nothing like losing phone service for a week to give one an appreciation of
modern communication. On October 12th 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.
We've been using Vonage
for over three years now with great success.
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.
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