Connectivity issues

Our ISP here was out this afternoon. (Cable and internet) for a bit before I had to run to an appointment, so I got a bit behind in entries. It’s interesting though, Charter has been really pushing their new telephone service lately. Which is all well and good, but I’ve thought many times, if I were to get phone service from Charter how many times a year I’d be without phone service? How would I have called to report the outage today? (Carrier pigeon) – cell phone is the expected answer I’m sure, but….

There’s a lot to be said for having a diversity of choices in life… When I went to the appointment this afternoon, data transfer was an item on the list, so the choices were zip drive, networking, removable usb drive. (The last option alone gives us a few choices. The linux boot cds can make the network side of those options a myriad of possibilities, etc.) Now, I know POTS (plain old telephone service) is kind of an old technology at this point. Plain copper wire, very simple. That’s one thing that I like about it, it’s simplicity helps it to be fairly resilient. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve had a phone outage IN MY LIFE.

On the other hand, cable gives us great bandwidth and certainly some sophisticated technology, but I’d have to use two hands to enumerate the number of outages IN THE LAST YEAR. (Every power outage past 15 minutes and a few other events.) In our area, repeaters are needed to get the cable signal to us, there are probably 2 repeaters between our house and the main trunk line. So, when the power was out last fall as hurricane leftovers came through… I had my battery powered tv hooked up to the cable and 15 minutes after the power went out, the repeater batteries died and so did the cable. Phone service did not.

Bottom line, bundling is a neat idea, but I like options. Right now POTS is a good, reliable voice communications option…

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Connectivity issues

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