My new telephone III

Unlimited free phone calls within the US is nice, especially when many parts of the bay area are considered long distance from where I live. There are other add-on features like online mailbox, huh, my cordless phone has a digitial answering machine, so no thanks. But the part that I can really use? Caller-ID. I've never had caller-ID in my life (call me whatever). I never knew the joy of screening calls! Sunday morning the phone rings, instead of getting up or wondering who the eff, my cordless phone speaks out the calling number (or caller's name if it is in the address book). I didn't even know my cordless phone could do that. More sleep for me.

Did I mention free? $25 a month in my pocket from now on. Yipee.

The problem is though, when I ported my number over, AT&T made me put my DSL on another phone line. I suspect that was the noisy pair of wires cause after that, my DSL was actually almost 10% slower. I was upset. And you know what upset customers do? They switch.

Everybody knows cable is faster than DSL. Comcast in my area offers the same speed cable internet for the same price. But because I am a Comcast TV customer, they knocked $8 off. More bandwidth for less, are you kidding me?

I bought a Linksys cable modem, and while I was at it, I updated myself with a Linksys wireless-N router that does QoS. Hm... I'm gonna put my Ooma behind my router one day.

I did discover the downside of VoIP though. Turned out it was because of a loose connector but my cable went out the second day I had it. Boom, all of a sudden no phone, no internet. I was left with my cell phone, that was pretty scary.

There is actually another reason why I want the Ooma behind my router - I can configure port forwarding, but it won't open those ports, like it just ignores my settings. I need port forwarding for... I am not telling you, nice try.



New modem, new router and new phone at all once. It's too much for me.