Comments on: The price of VoIP's thriftiness

It's about 30 percent cheaper than traditional dialing, but Net-based phoning has some not-insignificant drawbacks.

Dont have most of this issues

I find this article interesting to a point. I have been on ATT Callvantage for 4 months now. During that time, I have had one occurance of a network outage. I consider that the equivalnet to Verizon having on outage and it was on the ATT end, not my cable. If I call in a Pizza order, it did not matter if it was my traditional land line or my VoIP line, Pizza Hut still asks for confirnamtion.

using VoIP with TIVO works fine

It is simply not true that you need a phone line for the initial TIVO setup call -- you simply enter ,#401 as the prefix code -- TIVO will still call it a telephone call but it will use your cable model. This information can be found in TIVO Support online. It works perfectly -- and once you enter ,#401 you do not have to reenter it again to do resets.

instead of tivo

you can use replay tv which connects with a phone line OR a broadband connection. I chose replay tv because I don't have a phone line in my house but I do have a broadband connection. It easily hooked up to my home network.

Doesn't make much sense

I'm tired of seeing these CNet stories that have statements in the that make no sense whatsoever. Here's the latest:

"During a power outage, a VoIP phone is only as good as any battery backups on hand, because delivering power through the broadband connection isn't possible on a wide commercial basis. An emerging alternative broadband-delivery technique, broadband over power line, will solve this problem, but wide deployment is years away."

So, if we're using broadband over powerline, somehow we will be imune to power outtages? The first statement makes me think he is waiting for power-over-broadband which appearently isn't available on a wide commercial basis. I didn't realize it was available at all, does anyone have one of the those special DSL lines that also powers your house?