RoadRunner with Phone

[Monty J. Harder]

"Robert Kennedy" <erwin_k_r at yahoo.com> wrote:

> to our RoadRunner. Now she's all excited about saving
> a few $$$ thinking that phone service is phone
> service.
>
> Off list, or on, can I please have some pros and/or
> cons about switching from ol' basic Southwestern Bell
> land line service.

  Pro:
You can probably get your phone service cheaper that way, especially if you
use much LD.
  Con:
All your eggs in one basket.  For instance, if the cable goes out, you can't
even use the phone to call to tell them the cable's out.  Sure, you can use
your cell phone, but depending on what plan you're on that might actually
cost some money.
If there is a power failure, and you don't have your cable modem on a UPS,
you've lost your phone service as well, so you can't call the power company
to tell them your power's out.
You may enjoy a service that SBC currently offers, such as Call Notes or
Privacy Manager (I believe both trademarks of SBC) that doesn't appear to be
offered by TWC.

  If I were working for them, I'd be trying to find ways to implement these
features ASAP.  [Call Notes should be trivial, even for folks who don't use
RR for Internet use - for those of us who do, we ought to be able to have
the voice mails encoded as MP3s and forwarded to one of our email addresses,
or better yet dumped into ~/vmail on the RR account, with an email
notification (that could include the cellphone thing we were kicking round)
that the vm was there

  ftp home.kc.rr.com
 . . .
  ftp> binary
  200 Type set to I.
  ftp> cd vmail
  250 CWD command successful.
  ftp> mget 20040529*
  mget 20070829T091225.mp3? y
  mget 20070829T164018.mp3? y
  ftp> bye