Wayne D's Blog

I keep hearing about people who don't have a home phone and after looking at the cost of my home phone service I'm wondering if I should ditch my phone wired too. I pay $25.87 a month for a bare phone service with no features. I get perhaps four calls a month from people I want to talk to, the rest are hang ups when we let them roll over to the answering machine. I already have a minimalist cell phone plan paying $11.50 a month. We only have a cell phone in case off car trouble. Both my wife and I drive cars older than five years and having something in case of unexpected breakdown is pretty much required.

I'd drop the home phone entirely except for the times when the kids are home by themselves so what are the options? Rogers home phone is out of the question, they really don't have anything reasonably priced. Their baseline price is $36.31 a month before taxes because they don't offer a phone without call display. They also don't include their $5.95 system access fee in their published price of $29.95 a month. Even with their $10 off a month promotion for 12 months their before tax price is above what I currently pay. Strangely they also have a $1 fee for the 5 cents a minute long distance plan that I currently get for free. Call display is an absolute necessity if you don't have a physical answering machine because otherwise you can't avoid the telemarketers.

I decided to search through some of the options for internet based phone services. Skype costs $2.95 a month but because Skype hasn't worked out a deal with a Canadian telco they can't offer Canadian numbers for incoming calls. I suppose I could give people my cell number for incoming calls and only use Skype for outgoing calls but that seems unnecessarily complicated. It also means if someone calls and wants to chat I'd have to get them off the phone and call them back so I didn't use up my scarce wireless minutes. There are a couple of different services that offer an incoming Canadian number which adds from $5 to $15 a month to the price and adds the complexity of having to deal with two companies. The added issue of Skype's proprietary protocol makes using a standard VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) to ATA (Analogue Terminal Adapter) box that allows you to use your current telephones with your internet based phone service problematic. There are workarounds but they require using two boxes based on my limited research. I don't think the extra complexity is worth the $2 a month it saves. If you want to use internet based phone services a VOIP ATA is almost a necessity. Without this handy little box you are dependent on your computer if you want to make or answer calls.

There is a free VOIP service offered under a number of different names including clearpointtel.ca available that has a Windows only software phone program. They offer but discourage the use of hardware VOIP phones because they are an ad supported service. It looks like the cost for a VOIP ATA is about $150. I am looking to replace my home phone service and a software only solution isn't really what I want. There are a large number of VOIP phone providers that offer service at different price points with different packages. I looked at another providers website and one of the prominently featured testimonials mentioned how the provider had given a different area code than the user had requested, not a good sign. I found the reviews at whichvoip.com to be helpful. ITP provides a 500 outgoing minutes a month plan for $9.99 which includes an ATA adapter for your phone. With their free first month of service and free 12th month of service you can get phone service for $99 a year including many of the additional services that other providers charge for.

The risk you take going with a low cost VOIP provider is that they company will fail and you will be without phone service. The other thing you need to keep in mind is that 911 services vary between VOIP providers, 911 calls work but some VOIP providers provide E911 services which send your address details to emergency services. With E911 you are responsible for updating your address details with the provider. Without E911 emergency services can't locate you if you can't tell them the address so it's important to read the companies 911 disclaimer carefully.

The other question is whether to take my current phone (port) number or not. I'm leaning towards not porting but instead getting a new phone number, that way the two dozen people who do call me get it while the thousands of telemarketers who currently have my current number don't get to call me.

I recently posted a for sale ad on Craigslist and as an afterthought I posted the same ad on Kijiji. I only tried Kijiji because I saw an ad for the site when I logged into Yahoo because I was impatient to approve my Craigslist ad and couldn't wait for Gmail to retrieve it from my Yahoo account. I'm certainly glad I did since three responses to the Kijiji ad and no responses from the Craigslist ad. Perhaps it's because the Kijiji ad showed up on the second page in a Google search for the manufacturers name for sale. I posted both ads in the Electronics section of the respective sites with exactly the same text.

If you have something for sale I'd recommend you give Kijiji a try. I'm also curious to hear about others experience.

When my 15% bundle discount with my cable company Rogers came to an end I took a closer look at my bill and realized that I was paying $61 for my extended basic cable service. At the beginning of March the rates are going up yet again. I decided that reupping for another two years for a platry 5% discount wasn't really something I wanted to do. I am on a grandfathered anaolog service tier that you can't get anymore, the same package on the digital tier is $61.97 a month for the first six months before tax after that it's anyones guess since I can't find the rates anywhere on their website. When you get right down to it there are only 5 channels that I can't get over the air that I watch in the extended basic cable tier. The strange thing is that when I go to the Rogers website it appears that they have a build your own package option as shown in the screenshot below but clicking on the link takes you back to their package page.

I had lunch with some guys a month or two ago. One of them was talking about how he had ditched his cable, but up and antenna and was quite happy with the over the air HD he was receiving. The quality is better because it isn't horrendously compressed like the through the cable HD is.

I really can't tell whether it's the CRTC or the cable companies who mandate this mass bundling of channels that results in these massive package of channels that people don't watch. I think it's really a cozy relationship that lets the cable companies charge more while they carry the CRTC mandated channels. In the past month other than CBC, CTV and Global which I can get over the air I've watched Showcase, Food Network, Space, History and Discovery. The kids watch YTV, Comedy and Teletoon. On Comedy they generally watch Simpson reruns so that one doesn't really count. That's $8.71 a month per channel and I'm not sure they are worth that much for the amount of time I watch them. They spend most of their free time either on the internet or playing video games so I'm not sure that they would miss cable that much.

When the weather warms up I'm going to put up an outside antenna and give over the air HD a try, if there was more streaming video available in Canada I would probably have done it years ago. Now there is enough legal streaming available online that between it and the over the air stuff I should be able to sate my appetite for TV programming. The reality is that most of the time it's the wallpaper in the room while I sit on the couch with the EEEPC and surf the net. Now I need to head off and get caught up on Fringe before it ages off the CTV streaming site. Next time I set my sights on the telephone bill.

TwestivalTO: Can anyone provide an open WiFi hotspot at CiRCA without using the building connection? Need our bandwidth stable for displays. #TwestivalTO
@TwestivalTO If you want stable connections use wires. You put too much WiFi in too small a space and nothing will work.
@TwestivalTO Conference wifi (which is sort of what you are talking about) is a pretty tough problem, good luck. I'm going to rely on my BB
TwestivalTO @wdawe We're definitely using wired connections for our displays, but are thinking abt folks w/o cellular data plans. Hence need for WiMAX.

So went the short twitter exchange with the TwestivalTO organizers in advance of the TwestivalTO. When I arrived at the event my Blackberry was working fine but when you pack four hundred people the majority of whom are using smartphones into a small space and they try to use them you soon see have close to the edge the cellular infrastructure is operating. At a certain point in the night Roger's EDGE network became overburdened and trying to post Twitter updates produced network failure messages. A twitter search reveals that Telus, Fido and Bell users also had problems. What does this say for the future of the wireless internet when 400 people can bring the cellular data network to it's knees? Wifi isn't much better, when I stream video from my family room to to my bedroom via wireless I occasionally run into such problems with wireless network congestion in my suburban neighbourhood that I have to copy the file locally to be able to watch it without interruption. LeWeb, the large European internet conference had a great deal of trouble providing wifi access at the conference this year.

Too much wireless data use in too small a space means trouble and this poses a huge challenge for the future of the always available, ubiquitous internet access that we are growing to expect. How our service providers address this challenge may ultimately determine their success as businesses. Capping data transfer in an attempt to manage infrastructure is a short term solution at best, the old type utilities have learned the hard way that they need to be able to handle peak demand. The new age wireless utilities also need to provide the level of service we have come to expect. They ignore this at their peril.

The genesis of this post was Lisa Bettany's appearance on TWIT 177 (video link) on January 11th. Video of TWIT is live streamed as the program is recorded and Lisa was in the studio and on video with Leo Laporte. Leo streams on Stickam which means that the video stream comes with a chat room. Lisa was dressed nicely and a few people in the Stickam chat room decided to make crude comments about her because she is a beautiful woman and decided to dress up a bit to come on the show.

Jason Calacanis gave up blogging because he didn't want to have to deal with the "haters". He moved to an email list hoping to get rid of the people who think posting something like "You suck" is valid commentary. One of Calacanis' recent post to his email list in response to Micheal Arrington's vacation from blogging for a month after being spit on refers to what Jason calls Internet Asperger's Syndrome (IAS). He goes on to describe, "In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors--checking email, blogging, twittering and retiring andys--combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people." you can read the full text of the post at calacanis.com/2009/01/29/we-live-in-public-and-the-end-of-empathy/. This same lack of empathy for other people was demonstrated in spades when Yahoo Live was still operating. Chat rooms would be quickly filled with groups of people who's only contribution was to make rude and crude comments to the person on video. Services like Facebook and Twitter already help people to create a controlled online environment where the bores can be excluded, the equivalent of an online gated community. As we continue to move to a point where our lives are conducted more online than off what does this mean?

What if this tendency to treat people as objects starts to spill out in to the wider community? I correct myself, it already has as witnessed by the recent global economic meltdown which has its' roots in a quest for personal gain irrespective of the effect on the larger community. Perhaps the question should be what happens if this becomes the norm. Empathy makes good evolutionary sense and we ignore it at our peril. Do you want to live in a world where no one cares what effect their actions online or otherwise have on other people? That would be a scary place and may not be as far away as you think. Now it makes the news when the neighbours don't call police when shots and screaming are heard but what if it didn't?

(updated with video link, changed the spelling of anonymity)