RR modem quuestion

while not 100% this group...

In my area Time Warner/Road Runner offers a digital phone service.

I have heard the the bandwidth taken by this is outside the upload/download limts (384k up, 7meg down) on my RR connection, is this true does anyone know?.

Reply to
lars
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Not outside but takes up about 64kbit of the bandwidth. Actually it's likely to vary between 32KB and 128KB depending on what's happening at the time. But the later is my speculation.

Reply to
DLR

I was a Digital Phone customer while on TW in NYC, but I'm not sure how they split the infrastucture. I do know that on Cablevision, it's split. In other words, the bandwidth that is fed to the voice service is provisioned separately from the data. So with them, it's possible for the Internet service to work, and the phone be down or vice versa.

Reply to
Cyrus Afzali

Please clarify what you mean by this statement:

By this are you asking whether 384k up / 7meg down is enough bandwidth to satisfy the VOIP requirements? Or are you asking if the VOIP signal has no impact on the Internet bandwidth, much like the TV signal that shares the same copper, but works on a completely different frequency.

A_C

Reply to
Agent_C

I am asking if the telephony is totally outside and has no impact on the interent.. or viceversa...

Reply to
lars

"I am asking if the telephony is totally outside and has no impact on the interent.. or viceversa... "

Well, the answer depends on what they using. For the past several years, phone over cable systems were switched digital phone systems. The cable company would mount a box called a NIU or some other acronym, that would have a cable connection and a phone wire block. It would connect to the cable drop before anything else on the line and pass through signal for television or internet. This would connect to a 5ESS switch, just like the baby bells use, and was switched data, meaning

64Kbps all the time. It uses different upstream and downstream bandwidth from the Internet traffic. They were sometimes powered by the cable system, sometimes from a battery backup on site.

Now, many cable companies are moving to VoIP systems that run on the current Internet infrastructure they've built for the high speed internet. They use a special cable modem that has 2 phone jacks on the back, next to the Ethernet and USB ports:

formatting link
do share the bandwidth used in the house, usually not that much though. They also require a battery backup for lifeline service, which at some point may stop working and I'm sure will requie a technician to come out and replace.

The best thing to do is call in and ask what all is involved in an installation. In some areas I'm sure they are running both systems at the same time, with the idea of eliminating the switched service at some point, so that's yet another thing to consider.

Reply to
Eric

"Eric" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@d71g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:

I recently had TW Digitalphone(VoIP) installed. The modem is the Motorola SBV5220 on the site linked to above. TW didn't install the batteries, nor provide them. When I called, they stated that they weren't installing them in any of their installations as during a power outage the network would probably be down anyway.

I am behind a NAT router and my internet IP didn't change. The modem is between the TW cable and the router. I think(don't know) that the modem issues two IPs so perhaps the bandwidth isn't shared. I do know that if the phone is in use, I can still download a huge file from a fast server as fast as before. Granted, that is just a subjective observation with no measurement other than Firefox's Download window showing 768KB during download. RR is capped here at 7Mbit down, 384Kb up. Again, I'm guessing on all this.

Also, TW is doing something a little different with their VoIP. The phone call is handled by TW network initially, but is routed the either MCI or Sprint for the majority of the call over their phone network. I think that virtually all phone companies do VoIP after a certain point on their network, so as to reduce the cost of long distance calls. That way they avoid a dedicated connection spanning a long distance.

Reply to
John Gray

Indeed, I've read several reviews that suggest VoIP will work with very slow broadband connections; including the $14.95 package Verizon is offering.

This test may be helpful to the OP:

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A_C

Reply to
Agent_C

"When I called, they stated that they weren't installing them in any of their installations as during a power outage the network would probably be down anyway. "

Wow. Yet another chance for the bells to market negitive preceptions about cable, this time about network uptime and lifeline service. I find it very iresponsible of TW to sell a VoIP service that doesn't have any power backup available, if this statement is true.

Unfortunatly, since most of the world thinks of cable as unreliable (reputation deserved in some cases), I'll get to read years of "cable telephone goes down all the time, so the bells service is fundamentally superior" postings in the newsgroups, just like I got to read years of "cable internet service is slower the more people are on it, while DSL is DEDICATED(?) back to the CO and therefore is superior" comments just because @Home corporation didn't want to get a decent circuit to their backbone and some clever marketing campaigns to exploit the flaw. Hopefully the CSSR the poster spoke with was misinformed, but who knows for sure. There is a chance that this is a localized problem, maybe the local office ran out of battery packs or something.

Reply to
Eric

"Eric" wrote in news:1147539075.420264.282900 @v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com:

fundamentally

I personally don't think it is much of an issue. When Northeastern US had the major power outage a few years ago in mid summer, everything went down. Where I live, the power came back on within less than 2 hours while in other areas it took several days to return to service.

I could get on the internet via RR as soon as power returned, but the phone was still down for several hours. This was a regular POTS line from Verizon. So much for their claims.

I did consider purchasing the batteries fro Motorola myself, but my wife and I have cell phones, which of course may or may not work. TW and the cell phones have E9ll services. Vonage and some of the others supposedly still don't. After a certain date, without E911 such services were to stop service but there was a waiver.??

Reply to
John Gray

It's interesting how that apparently varies by region. In New York City, voice circuits were fully functional during the 1965, 1977 and

2003 blackouts.

A_C

Reply to
Agent_C

Agent_C wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Normally, that was the case here when we had local outages. Evidently the large scale outage left Verizon without Edison power and the backup power was offline. When Edison came back online, somehow power wasn't restored to Verizon's POTS circuits.

Of course, systems being in poor repair and/or offline was what caused the problems at First Energy near Cleveland, Ohio which ultimately brought down the entire Northeast power grid.

Unless we are beating drums, I guess any modern communications are vulnerable at one point or another. Even smoke signals can be at the whim of heavy winds.

Reply to
John Gray

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