Thank you le nubian

OpenOffice 3

Bah - no Mac PowerPC version.

bethB, I'm curious how the AT&T verse thing goes. I'm debating it here, but it wasn't a huge savings. It was partially to thumb my nose at Time Warner

I am saving about 30 bucks a month over what I am spending now. Faster downloads then I am getting now -- and I added HBO as a extra channel. My down loads should not be effected by the after school crowds jumping on the computer. My TV picture and sound will be better without going to HD. My TIVO is out dated ( not hd capable, only one channel at a time ) and that is being 'replaced' at no cost. Plus -- national wireless access at no extra cost. ( DH can be the traveling man) and unlike comcast -- they seem to understand that people work from home. and it looks like it will be easy to change packages up or down in cost

I used to use VOIP as my primary phone and it was fine. You have to make sure to set up the 911 address info, but other than that it was fine. Now we're just using the mobile phones though.

And my mom has VOIP as their primary, but they don't like it as much. They had a several days cable outage that was a tv/internet/phone outage for them and it made them pretty unhappy for a while there.

I used to use VOIP as my primary phone and it was fine. You have to make sure to set up the 911 address info, but other than that it was fine. Now we're just using the mobile phones though.

I am Liese. We still have VOIP service through our cable company (because the Triple Play is cheaper than cable/internet alone), but we only use that line when DH has to do a phone interview at home.

We use VOIP though Vonage. It was a little rough when we started using it, but it has been rock solid the last couple of years.

We use VOIP through Vonage too. It was awful at first, has improved a lot. I'm still getting the occasional echo, and some occasional crackling. The "Vonage Device" (a router) should be set up 4 feet away from the modem, and no cords should cross from the modem to the router, or from the router to the telephone. It's not quite set up like that here (it's on my to-do list!). If you use bittorrent or other file sharing software, there are usually conflicts and the call quality goes down when the file sharing is actually happening. Thankfully, I can now understand their CSRs and they always follow up quickly on any problems.

Yeah, Vonage will degrade if you are soaking up a lot of bandwidth with other stuff while you use it. The cable VOIP service in our area reserves an amount of bandwidth for VOIP so Internet usage won't degrade the connection. For us, I consider this a plus for Vonage since we have full bandwidth for the Internet the 99% of the time we aren't using VOIP.

Canceling Vonage was a complete nightmare experience for me, so that's something to be aware of if it doesn't work out. (Though it's certainly possible that they've improved both call quality AND customer service in the 2+ years since I dealt with them.)