Cable vs landline broadband.

haveagoade

Is it me , or does no one else realise that these so called FREE broadband offers from Orange or Talk Talk are not at all free.

They require a BT line rental. Which as far as I remeber is around £10 a month.

It seems rediculous that Mobile phone buisness's such as carphone warehouse and Orange should be tying you into keeping your landline when they should really be encouraging us to ditch the landline and go mobile.

I have ditched my land line and taken the best cashback mobile deal with loads of minutes.

I have taken Ntl broadband and get to use skype too!

If you take out a good mobile contract I dont see why you would need a land line other than for broadband ,if ntl is available of course.

chatty123

i quite agree with you but unfortunately since i moved to my present address i have had to have a bt landline installed just to get internet as we have no ntl in our area. it's probably about time the cable was extended to much more areas.

BexTech

haveagoade wrote:

I have taken Ntl broadband and get to use skype too!

And use a proper VoIP service and save money when you need to call landlines.

normanmark

haveagoade wrote:

Is it me , or does no one else realise that these so called FREE broadband offers from Orange or Talk Talk are not at all free.

They require a BT line rental. Which as far as I remeber is around £10 a month.

nothing is ever free!!!

BexTech

normanmark wrote:

nothing is ever free!!!

I offer myself to any pretty young woman for free!

Chris123_2

If you have NTL or Telewest you can have a Virgin Mobile SIM for £10 a month with 300 minutes and 300 texts. They say on their site that it is £20 for none cable subscribers.

Telewest Website with details

Virgin Mobile Website

So you could have just the broadband and TV service and have the Virgin mobile deal so you wouldn't need a land line.

BexTech

Chris123 wrote:

If you have NTL or Telewest you can have a Virgin Mobile SIM for £10 a month with 300 minutes and 300 texts. They say on their site that it is £20 for none cable subscribers.

Though the offer from the Virgin website has and still is £5 off the £20 per month, has been for sometime, so a usual price of £15 per month.

Still with the cable offer reducing this further down to £10/month it's a good offer for those who use their mobile enough.

haveagoade

normanmark wrote:

nothing is ever free!!!

Philisophicaly YES......Financially NO!

As proved by MSN!

bunking_off

This is an interesting area, that it could be fascinating to see how things develop over the next few years.

As things stand today, if you take a BT line, then the voice line rental pays for the copper to the local exchange, and the fixed part of the voice network (ie stuff that doesn't vary according to whether you make calls).

Broadband defacto gets a free ride, because the prices charged for that - and I agree, there's no such thing as "free" there's always a catch - reflect the cost of the DSLAM (the DSL modem) at the exchange, plus your ISP's equipment and peering costs. The broadband bit is making no contribution to the cost of the copper lines...which is the real cost element.

In theory BT could provide "naked" DSL, ie you buy a line solely for broadband usage. They've chosen not to do so thus far, but there would be some price reduction over the usual voice line rental, because you wouldn't be paying for the voice bit of the network. However, the discount wouldn't be that great because the copper costs dominate the network ones.

BT are about to commence replacing their network with something called 21CN. When they do so, rather than having a separate voice and broadband network, everything will go into a piece of kit called an MSAN (multi-service access node). As such, at that stage the incremental standing costs of voice + broadband over broadband-alone will become even smaller.

So, it follows that at some stage BT may be forced to offer broadband without voice, but you'd still end up paying a rental that's nigh on the same as today's line rental in any case.

I suspect that someone in the cable companies hasn't really done the maths very well on their "broadband-alone" offerings, and the pricing structure would be somewhat different if they did. But who knows?

Just one final word of caution which I always feel I need to add when this topic comes up...there's nothing wrong with ditching your landline and relying on cable broadband + VOIP...but please, just make sure your mobile is charged up and you know where it is. In America, there have been fatalities because people have relied on this combination and come a cropper when the safeguards built into 911 (their 999...ie location info, ability for operator to hold call open, prioritised call routing) just haven't been there for a VOIP service. I think some VoIP providers will provide access to 999 in the UK, but they can't possibly be providing it at the same availability level as the usual service.

Alfie_E

It’s not so much a question of the reliability of the VoIP provider, it’s more down to the reliability of your Internet connection. With the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), one company has had control of all the infrastructure from end to end, and a legal obligation to provide a certain level of service. The main backbone systems for the Internet in the UK are probably just as reliable as the PSTN. And, the Internet is inherently robust in the face of small scale failure – the data is routed around effect systems.

The weaker links are your ISP and your house. While ntl:Telewest, just like BT, have to have back-up power for their own telephone lines, in the interests of cost saving, the same might not be the case for their cable connections. For your home, a decent Uninterruptable Power Supply is a good idea. It’s a good idea even if you only have a computer, but it will cover your VoIP hardware too.

Vonage and VoIP.co.uk are two providers that support 999. Vonage support it as, being an American company, they know the flak they can get from not supporting it. VoIP.co.uk let you record a location and an alternative telephone number for each VoIP number. I’m not sure how this information is passed on to the emergency call centres. I assume they have a 999 operator who passes it on, just as when you dial 999 on a BT line, you can hear the BT operator verbally confirming your telephone number to the emergency call centre operator.

bunking_off

Alfie, you're not totally wrong, but not totally right either.

Fundamentally, internet services are designed to a different level of reliability to telephony services...the latter works on "five-nines", ie 99.999% reliability whereas that degree of redundancy isn't built into internet provision. Think of it this way...how often does your broadband not work versus when could you last not get dial tone. This is one of the reasons why corporate customers pay for managed IP networks, rather than relying on the internet to get things through. In saying this, however, parts of the internet (notably, as you say, the core), are managed to a high degree of availability. I'd also highlight that the regulation of how reliable PSTN networks should be has all but been disbanded - there's a general condition but no specific absolute targets. In this context the service is reliable as is, because it's always been done that way and no-one wants to get the blame for engineering it to be any worse.

On 999, there are a series of limitations of using internet telephony services...

Location information is one thing...clearly it's only as good as the address data you put in. If you're not at home, clearly it'll display incorrect info. Some 999 providers mark addresses for internet telephony lines with "treat with pinch of salt". There's work going on in the standards agencies to establish a chain from your VoIP provider to ISP to BT/Openreach to be able to dynamically provide location info, but it's not there yet.

Reliability is another - the main aspects of this are the access, of your own ISP, and of the VoIP provider. None of these elements is designed to the same level of availability as PSTN...it'd be prohibitively expensive. As you rightly highlight, the difference with PSTN is that there's a monolithic company providing all these aspects, so joined up/holistic design that isn't there for internet voice.

Preference is another - I can't comment on what the internet voice providers to, but PSTN provides dedicated channels for 999 calls so you defacto get priority over normal voice calls.

Finally there's the "other features". If you make a 999 call from a voice line, the call can be held open by the 999 agent (regardless of you hanging up). If you're attacked while making the call, this will stop the attacker hanging up. I'm not aware of a means of making this work on internet voice services, as it's driven by the behaviour of the line card (the analogy for which is the PC client software).

None of this negates internet telephony as a concept. I just wouldn't rely on it for 999. NB I've used the term "internet telephony" here, rather than VoIP, which is the technology. VoIP can be as good as PSTN if the IP network is appropriately designed...e.g. under 21CN BT will migrate all its services to VoIP, but it'll be transparent to the end customer.

Incidentally, there are only three 999 providers in the UK - BT, Cable & Wireless and Kingston Communications. If you call 999 from anyone else, it will route to one of these three. Thus, if you ring from voip.co.uk, they'll pass the call to e.g. BT together with the CLI (calling line identity). There's no voip.co.uk 999 agent involved. When you registered, voip.co.uk would have supplied BT with an address to marry with your CLI. Mobile works slightly differently...again it's either BT or Cable & Wireless, but in this case the radio cell IDs get sent to triangulate you down to a particular location. So great if you're in the city, not so great if you're up a remote mountain.