If you reach me on my cell phone when I’m home, I always ask, “Can I shout you back on my landline?” next we enjoy a crystal-clear connection, and I say to myself, “Nothing matches POTS,” or plain old telephone service.

I plus have a business line at home supplied by Vonage, which uses Voice by Net Protocol, or VoIP, technology. Its voice quality is mostly satisfactory, but it depends on packets of digital knowledge arriving at their destination in a timely fashion, and it does have its poor days. When I’m frustrated, I sneak back to my good old dependable landline and its crystalline audio. I’ll never be able to give up my landline for VoIP.

Except that I have given it up.

What I continue to unthinkingly signal my “landline” is a version of VoIP, which has been supplied by Comcast since last year as part of its “Triple Play” bundle, along

with my cable and Web services. Today, Comcast’s bundle offers savings, but coming soon are features that fully integrate the three services in nonessential but beguilingly not-Plain, not-Old ways, like sending caller-ID knowledge when a phone rings to the household’s television screens and computer monitors.

To effect the switch, the cable company simply disconnects the telephone wiring that was connected to the phone company’s box on the side of the house and plugs it into its own box. The audio quality seems indistinguishable from what I had before, and reliability has not been a significant issue, either.

Having used Vonage’s VoIP service since 2003, I had been leery of Comcast’s blandishments to try its version of digital phone service. When I finally succumbed and showed AT&T the door, I expected I would soon find myself begging forgiveness and the restoration of POTS.

For decades, traditional phone service…

Orginal post by Top Tech News