Quote Originally Posted by christcorp View Post
So true. Couple other things. Ma'Bell has been sending your phone calls basically voip for over 30 years. You don't think one call on one pair of wires goes cross country to talk to grandma; do you? But again; it's an internal network. Also; one of the reasons the cable company's "Digital Voice" costs more than voip like vonage and voipo, is because they aren't traversing the country over the internet. They use IP basically from your house to their head end or possibly regional, but it's handed off to the PTSN system much sooner. Hence, why you pay $35 for digital voice over the cable company. But you are correct; people have been using some form of "VOIP" for a long time. Especially their long distance through ma'bell for 30+ years.
You are correct....going back to my roots with my telephone company, I remember that we had to use MCI and their microwave network (UGH!) to service a customer in Phila, as that was the only way we could get there at the time. The service was primitive and even though the towers up the coast had self-healing loops, every time there was a storm or lightning, the service went down and had to be reset manually and there weren't too many ways to contact TCG (remember them?) at the time.