Internet Phone Comparison

After years of having a POTS line (Plain Old Telephone Service) at home in Austin, TX, I converted to an AT&T U-verse internet phone in April, 2008. I previously switched from Time-Warner (TW) cable/internet to U-verse but AT&T did not offer voice capability with that service then. See my Austin Cable BLOG for a log of my installation experience.

Overall the service is solid and has lots of features - my home phone is now more like the big PBX attached phone I use at the office. The quality is indistinguishable from my old traditional phone and the cost is lower.

Here is a table prepared by AT&T that compares features of all the major Internet phoe providers: AT&T U-verse Competition. Here are some of my comments on the features but without just reproducing what AT&T has already done.

Comparison Summary

Recommendations

Don't schedule your install for a Saturday. AT&T is still developing processes and training their staff for this product. If things go wrong like they did for me there will not be as many people in the second, third, and fourth tier support to fix everything.

AT&T still needs to fix their overly complicated, disconnected web sites. And it would be helpful if the email they sent you to tell you about a new voice mail message had a link to take you to your web site to check the message instead of an email address link that is always "unknown" for sending email to the person that called. I suppose if I added all the telemarketers that call me to my contacts list I could get a valid email address in the message...