I just recently signed up for telephone service through my cable
> company (It is supposed to be installed Tuesday, December 5.) Other
> than my cable company, I had considered services such as Vonage and > Sunrocket.
> After I signed up with my cable company, I was thinking and had the
> following question: Is it possible to subscribe to two different VOIP
> telephone services at the same time and be able to use either of them
> whenever you want? In other words, after I port my current telephone
> number to my cable company and start with their service, what if I
> decide I need another line later and want to try another company for
> the new line, say Vonage, Sunrocket, or another one of my choice, for > example?
> What would be involved with doing this, especially if I don't have an
> active landline? Would I need to go through my local telephone
> company and have them install a new telephone line and then once it is
> working, transfer the telephone service for the new line to Vonage,
> Sunrocket, or some other provider of my choice? Would it be possible
> to have two VOIP lines with two separate VOIP providers utilizing the
> same high speed cable modem connection?
> Just curious if this would be possible.
Possible, yes -- but don't try making two calls at once unless you have really good service. Most home net connections are asymmetric and your 'outbound' connection probably isn't fast enough to handle two calls at once.
And even if you can pull it off in the slow times at 4 AM, try it at
6 PM when everyone is home surfing the web and it won't go -- if you are really unlucky, you won't be able to get even one decent VOIP phone call through during the busy hours.Cable modem speed is /very/ dependent on how heavily they have your cable segment loaded with Internet users, and how much of the shared segment bandwidth they are using.
That's the one saving grace of DSL -- it's slower, but it's all YOUR bandwidth, no sharing. Unless they overload the backhaul connection at the switchroom to Earthlink (or whomever), it's fairly reliable.
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