In this article, I'm going to go a bit off-topic and cover something that isn't directly about computers but is definitely related.
I'm going to talk a little bit about the pros and cons of those unlimited local and long-distance internet plans that you see more and more advertised these days - you know them where you see them talking about combined phone plans with internet services.
These plans come in two 'flavors' - the first is usually offered by the telephone company where they offer regular phone lines plus a partnership announcement connection at a discount to get both together, and the second is usually offered by cable companies or another internet. . Service Provider (ISP) where they offer internet telephone services plus the internet connection itself.
Before continuing, let me briefly explain the difference between regular telephony and internet telephony (also known as VoIP, which is short for Voice over Internet Protocol or Voice over IP).
VoIP is also pronounced "voyp".
The difference between the two types of telephone services is quite simple.
Regular telephone service is the traditional type of telephone service that has been around for a hundred years, where your phone is connected to a telephone wall jack and then through telephone lines to the rest of the world.
Internet phone service (or VoIP) is where you have a phone (either a traditional phone with a dedicated adapter or a dedicated VoIP phone) that is connected to an Internet connection and your phone call goes over the Internet to call any type of phone - - a standard phone or an internet phone.
So what are the pros and cons of getting phone plans in conjunction with internet services?
Well, in either case, when you combined phone service plans with Internet services (Internet plus the phone service), you usually pay less than if you bought them separately - so no real pros or cons in this case, as long as you get it as a package deal.
Traditional phone services will generally be more reliable than internet phone services - it's an older technology, and older technologies * generally * are more reliable than newer ones because they've had time to fix the bugs.
In other words, in many cases, you will get clearer sound on a traditional phone line, and never get the little "dropouts" you can get with VoIP phones.
With dropouts, I am talking about something like when you talk to someone on a cell phone and their words get quite broken with lots of short bits of silence mixed in with what you can hear. If you're not sure what I mean, imagine a radio that someone turns on and off very quickly so that you get a really fast mix of sound, silence, and sound.
This is quite common with internet phone services and is caused when the internet connection has so much activity that the phone call is disrupted.
When you send or receive faxes, they often do not work through Internet telephony.
One supposed drawback of using Internet telephony (which I don't entirely agree with) is that if the power goes out, the telephone service will too, unlike a traditional phone line that has its own power.
There is some kind of funny TV ad. I see the local telephone company running here in Hawaii trying to discourage people from using internet telephony - it has a voiceover saying something like 'this is a recording of a real internet phone service emergency call during a recent power outage' then you will hear the upcoming seconds nothing at all.
The idea is that if your power goes out, so is the internet connection, and so is the VoIP phone service.
Well, that may be true, but think for a moment: what percentage of people still use old-fashioned landline phones today? Not many people do that anymore - most use cordless phones. If the power goes out, a cordless phone will not work either.
Of course, the solution to that (and often the Internet phone shutdown solution) is to use an uninterruptible power supply or UPS, which, as I've mentioned in the past, is some sort of battery backup that provides power when the electricity goes out.
Most people who use a UPS (everyone should protect their computer and other electronics in my opinion) only use it for their computer. But it works just as well for cordless phones, cable or DSL modems, and even lamps, so you can keep working when the power goes out.
I connected my cable modem that provides my Roadrunner Internet service to a UPS, and I noticed that my cable service (including the Internet) is still working fine!
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