Charter Cable Company Phone Service

[dvs4man]

Has anyone got their 3CX working with Charter Communications Phone Service? If so, could you share the connection information with me? Thanks.

 

[leejor]

I'd be surprised if a cable company would share the SIP info for your service. I've found that because they generally supply the modem, which usually has VoIP ports built into it, they are usually VERY reluctant to have a customer use a different device on their network. Having control of the SIP device AND the network gives them complete control over call quality.

 

[slinc]

I'd like to know about this as well. We are looking at signing up with Charter Cable to run VOIP since it is much faster and cheaper than a T1 in our area.

The sales person at Charter said they did not care what VOIP provider we used and there were no limitations of what we could do. The problem I am having is finding anyone actually using cable for VOIP to determine if it works well.

 

[leejor]

Using a secondary VoIP provider over cable, as opposed to DSL or Fibre, makes no difference whatsoever as long as the connection speed is sufficient to handle your traffic. A high speed connection is a high speed connection is a high speed connection once it comes out of the modem and on to your LAN. Of course, this is as long as your ISP isn't blocking any necessary ports, preventing you from using VoIP.

Trying to use a cable companies VoIP offering (or a DSL providers VoIP offering) using your own equipment (3CX in this case) is where you may run into problems. As I posted earlier, because the company is both the carrier (ISP) and the VoIP provider, they usually supply the ATA, which you are expected to use, at least for most users. They may allow business that require more than two lines to connect using their own equipment, you'll have to ask. I'm sure that each company will have a different response.

 

[jelliott52]

slinc,
In our area, we don't recommend that a business run voip as there primary means of communications. The Broadband provider here is not that great. The DSL service is ok. Still I wouldn't want my business depending on the internet for a client call.

Just my 2 cents worth,

Jay

 

[leejor]

Reliability is the big issue when thinking about moving your service over to VoIP. If you have been using a particular high speed service at your office, , for a while for internet access, then you probably have a good idea about whether or not you'd want to risk running your phone service over it. You also have to take into account the AC power reliability in your area. Even though your business may have battery backup or a generator, that doesn't guarantee that the cable service won't go down. DSL tends to be more robust in the cases of power failures as most use lines that go right back to a central office or to a piece of DSL equipment (closer to the customer) that is powered from the central office. Perhaps something to ask both companies before deciding between cable or DSL.

A number of companies use VoIP for outgoing and long distance and then use gateways with PSTN lines for their "published" local number (incoming calls). Of course, those lines can also be used for outgoing if there is a failure of the VoIP lines. Later, if the VoIP service proves to be stable, the PSTN numbers could be ported over to the VoIP provider.