Re: Comcast Telephone Service????

[Anders <nospam@xxxxxxxx>]

ABLE_1 wrote:
> Hello all,
>
[.....]
>
> So here is my question.  What is Comcast doing or did we just get lucky??
> Any all thoughts here would be very much appreciated.
>
> TIA
>
> Les
>
>

I think you could get good results like that with just about any VoIP
solution if you just test six times, so I think that was mostly luck.
VoIP is really just another way of moving the audio data over the wire.

There are two things that makes our industry fret over VoIP;

1) Quality
    Typically VoIP adapters compress the audio signals digitally in a way
    that may distort them to a point where the receiving end can't decode
    the signals any more. Depending on what reporting protocol you use,
    this can be more or less of an issue. SIA uses different frequencies
    and encoding techniques than ContactID for example. Up/downloading
    can be really problematic.
    The VoIP box typically optimizes the compression to work well with
    human speech. Some VoIP equipment may have special algorithms for
    fax signalling or even modems, but our industry formats are non-
    standard, often designed to be easily decoded with dirt cheap
    hardware and are not recognized by the VoIP box.
    So the VoIP equipment tries to apply a voice algorithm to the SIA
    beeps, and out comes garbled data.

2) Reliability
    POTS lines are powered from a central point somewhere in your
    neighborhood. That station is the junction point for 100:s or
    1000:s of households, and is equipped with a pretty beefy backup
    battery in case there is a local power failure.
    The VoIP ATA-box needs power from the residence and typically they
    don't come with any backup power option.
    The ATA boxes are not designed with power consumption as a
    high priority, so to back one up for 6-12h requires a pretty
    large battery.
    Depending on the network setup, the VoIP box may be hooked up
    behind a cable modem, DSL modem and/or home router. These also
    needs to be backed up for the system to work. Again, they were
    not designed for battery operation, so you may easily be looking
    at a total draw of 20-30W.

As much as it hurts, I think we have to accept that POTS is slowly
going away. Even though most manufacturers have solutions to hook
their panels directly to Ethernet, all the products I've seen
are afterthoughts and ridiculously expensive. $200 for a network
adapter? A NIC for a PC is $10 - and that's the good ones. Retail!

The only real way out here is panels that are network enabled out
of the box AND making the Internet Service Providers understand
the need of backed up & reliable connections.

Just my 2c.

</A>