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Last week I told you about my decision to bail out on Vonage and switch over to Comcast for our home telephone service. Subsequently, I've come across a couple of things here and there that illuminate the subject, so I thought I'd share them with you.
Over the weekend, Slashdot had a link to this forum thread at Broadband Reports, wherein people are complaining about AT&T's VoIP service. Apparently, AT&T has decided to dump its VoIP service and summarily informed thousands of their customers that the service was being cancelled. However, AT&T is blocking those customers from transferring their phone service to another provider, and they are unwilling to provide a forwarding message for those customers who have abandoned their VoIP phone numbers to sign up with other providers. In essence, AT&T is holding all of their VoIP subscribers hostage.
Meanwhile...today Comcast has announced that they're rolling out a service called SmartZone that will integrate their e-mail and voicemail services. Ooh. Straight out of 1999, you guys. This is a standard feature with most VoIP services. The announcement also goes on to tell us that they won't be charging any extra for this...well, that's mighty kind of you guys. Of course, they always say that at first and then a year or two down the road discover the sudden need to start charging a fee...which then goes up every year.
Meanwhile, telco expert David Isenberg has a post this morning considering this announcement. Isenberg's take is that this is Comcast's lame attempt to re-imagine themselves into a competitor for the likes of Google in the realm of offering value-added services rather than just as the "series of tubes" that gets the services to you.
Isenberg's assessment is that tying services to the tubes is exactly the wrong thing to do. Google, Yahoo, et.al. are not limiting themselves to subscription-only customers and to a single method of distribution. As he says, why limit yourself to 12.5 million customers (Comcast's present install base) when you can market to "1,000 million" customers.
On Thursday, I have to spend my entire afternoon at home waiting for a Comcast tech to show up to connect their VoIP device. I suspect it's just a router, just like Vonage's, but the CSR on the phone who got me to sign up had no clue. When I signed up for Vonage, they just mailed me the router and told me to plug it in. I have no idea why they need to make me miss half a day of work for something I can do by myself in three minutes.
Still no warm-and-fuzzies for me.
When we signed on with Comcast voice, the installer, installed a phone modem and did some secret stuff in the phone box outside where the phone line connects to the house. I was pissed off that we have to pay a monthly fee for the phone modem and there is apparently no buy your own option.
Posted by Karan [URL] at 05/ 7/07
Update: Bridget needed to swap the cable appointment for taking Charlotte to her dance recital picture session tomorrow. So I didn't have to squander my afternoon.
We've got a new cable modem that has the phone jack built right into it, and apparently has a built-in router for the telephony, because I can get to its web interface. Haven't checked out any of the "Comcastic" new features yet, but I will do so and report back here.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 05/10/07
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