What vexes VoIP users?

Mon Feb 28 22:15:48 UTC 2011

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> On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said:
> > On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote:
> > > VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother.
> 
> > Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be 
> > whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year!
> 
> I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not
> to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address.  On
> the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV
> these days - if VoIP is "too niche", how are those two making any money?

The ILEC's are also losing POTS lines that were originally sold as
secondary residential lines for Internet and to a (possibly much)
lesser extent faxing.  In the case of upselling a customer who has
two POTS lines and your dialup service to having only one POTS line
with DSL on it, it isn't entirely clear that it is fair or accurate
to represent this as a lost POTS line, at least for some counts.
Kids have also moved towards cell phones and away from landlines as
the preferred method of communication, but you already mentioned
cell phones.  Just wanted to point out that there's probably been a
huge loss of second POTS phone lines in residential for many reasons.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.