I'm working on getting rid of my home phone line since it's just a waste of money. I can get the Ooma and port my number to it. It would pay for itself in 6 months based on a $40/mo. phone bill. But I have DSL with AT&T and they are my home phone company. From what I've read I cannot have their DSL without having a phone line from them as well. I am going to call and confirm, but since I got the info from their site I would say that this is correct. Cable seems to be quite a bit more expensive and I've read that they don't actually provide the speeds they advertise since there are now so many customers using up the bandwidth. So I'm looking for a company that can give me DSL without needing an "active" (used for connected landline) phone line. Anyone know of one?
You'd need satelite internet. Satelite internet usually has pretty good download speed but poor upload speed. You can also go with a mobile aircard, but they sacrifice speed for mobility. Cable internet is the fastest and most reliable. But then you're just swapping the phone line for a cable line.
Some of the business-class plans run over a dedicated pair. However, they are typically a minimum of $80 a month.
Ugh. Well I was also going to try to eliminate my cable TV since there's really only a handful of stations I watch regularly. But there is a combo plan for cable TV and internet that's not such a bad price but there's a 2 year contract required. Do you know if satellite internet uses the same area of bandwidth/frequency that satellite TV would use? I ask because I just bought a BOCS media extender that uses your existing cabling to get your media to other rooms in the house but it uses the same area/frequency that satellite TV uses so it's incompatible with that but can share the cabling with cable TV.
If I were you, I'd go for the local cable company's "Triple Play" package of cable TV, broad band internet, and internet phone service. It's plenty fast enough (and for most people, and certainly in my case, blazingly faster than DSL). You should be able to get it for $89 to $99 a month (plus fees, taxes, etc.). And then when the initial 1 year subscription runs out and the cable company raises your rate by 50%, just ask them to keep the same initial rate. And if that doesn't work, tell them you're canceling your service to go with the satellite or phone company. When I politely told my cable company this, it immediately offered me a rate that was even lower than my initial rate, plus it guaranteed that rate for 2 years.
Yeah, I can get those three for $99 plus tax and fees. Or I can get just internet and cable for something like $74 plus tax and fees, which is about what I'm paying for just cable TV now, but that's with HBO. I want to make sure I'm going to be with the same internet company for a while since I'm already dreading changing my email addies. I use about 4-5 at a time to keep it all managable, but sometimes don't log in for months at a time so I don't want to go the free route for that.
I have no idea. You'll pretty much have to make some compromises or bundle up like Boo suggests. It all depends on where your priorities and needs lie. " I'm already dreading changing my email addies." Why would you use their address when you can use a Yahoo or Google address forever, for free, and from anywhere?
If you don't log in to yahoo regularly it gets closed. I don't like Google sniffing my email. Does gmail get closed if you don't log in enough? I've been thinking of registering a domain, maybe I should just do that and use that as my email.
"I've been thinking of registering a domain" Oly if you plan on hosting a personal webpage. "If you don't log in to yahoo regularly it gets closed." The account has to be idle for months for that to happen. Also, you can set Outlook or whatever e-mail software you use to check the yahoo address and that, in itself, is activity which will keep it active. You shouldn't need to actually visit yahoo directly to keep it open.
A little hesitant since Australia is significantly different from the US of A. However one of the options that is increasingly popular over here is called "Naked DSL". In this case, you still have the phone line from home to the exchange DSL equipment but the line does not connect to the equipment that manages the phone. This arrangement came into being when the Govt forced the duopoly telcos to allow the ISP's to install their own DSL equipment within the exchange. This scenario probably doesn't exist in the States as most everyone over there that I met in the year I was there, seemed to prefer a defacto "government" formed by big business rather than a democratically elected one; i.e. all govt is bad - business can do no wrong. hwell: Cheers Warwick PS please forgive the cynicism.
I completely agree with you. It's a shame our experiment failed and greed triumphed. Hopefully we can turn it around. hwell: Hm... will look into that, thanks.
