AT&T Callvantage Review

AT&T CallVantage

And Whole House Wiring

I recently decided to try VoIP in my home. When I built my house I was sure to wire the entire house with 2 runs of Cat5 cable to each room. This allowed me to have voice and data throughout the house. Before you ask why I didn't just go wireless, lets just say that I am tired of the interference on my laptop from my cordless phone and my microwave, our baby monitor, the neighbors wireless router and every other 2.4/5.8GHz product on the market. Besides I run a true network in my house for file and print and media sharing so really there is no alternative but to use a 100Mb network. 11mb (I have Macs that are not ready for Extreme cards) just wouldn't get me the stable bandwidth I needed.

So back to my wiring. All of my voice/data/AV runs terminate in a wiring panel in my garage, as seen above.

It's a pretty nice system. The blue cables are data, the grays are voice and the white are AV. Comcast (AT&T Broadband at the time) provided all my cable TV, phone and Internet. When the installers first came out they were prepared to run lots of wire through my house to provide all three services. I showed them that all they had to do was run the two cables to the panel in the garage, one for TV/Internet the other for digital phone.

The installers were not quite sure what to make of this or how it worked. I am not sure what kind of training these guys get but it didn't seem like any of them had ever worked in the Telco/data world. I quickly directed them where to plug in each cable in the panel and then walked around the house testing each TV and phone. They were amazed, the entire install took 10 minutes. They lingered for a few minutes in front of the 65" HDTV drooling over the picture (which was provided for free over the air not by the cable) and then were on their way to the next install.

I have recently been looking for ways to eliminate any services that I could from Comcast. I used to work for AT&T Business so was pleased to pay for the service before it was sold to Comcast, I am not happy with the way Comcast raises prices EVERY year on all of their services. I am also not very pleased with the slow roll-out of HDTV. So the quickest and easiest service to replace was the Digital Phone. Now to this point I have been very satisfied with the service. In the 3 years I have had it I have only had one brief outage. But, I am looking to save some money.

I decided to go with AT&T CallVantage, primarily because of my experience as an employee. Every field office at AT&T utilizes "T's" Internet backbone to provide VoIP between all the offices and to the PSTN. The call quality was always fantastic, granted they provide the network, where I am using Comcast’s network (which I suspect rides the AT&T backbone) but with a 10Mb/768Kb internet connection I was confident that it would be fine.

The question that I had for everyone but no one could answer: Would I be able to place the TA in my panel and connect it via a punch down to my whole house system. The answer is yes. The only thing I had to do was strip the RJ11 that comes out of the TA and punch the single pair down onto the demark block. Worked great. I was initially concerned that the ring voltage would not handle the 6 phones I have in my house and that the ring would not work properly. No Need to be worried, it works great even providing enough voltage to ring 2 old Western Electric rotary phones. there is one problem however with these old phones. The TA does not support pulse dialing so the rotary phones are only good for answering calls or joining calls in progress. Oh well. I am looking for a solution however and I'll update this if I find it.

The quality was what I expected, very clear and never a problem with drop out or garble. I did have a real problem early on with my internet connection dropping off on a regular basis, almost daily. It coincided with when we switched to VOIP, I was stumped as was AT&T tech support (not hard to do by the way). Another symptom I was having was that the phone would ring and when you went to answer it, it would disconnect immediately. Turns out that it was my cable modem. An original RCA model from 7 years ago when cable internet first came to Portland. My modem had actually been bad for a very long time, I just didn't notice. We would occasionally lose internet connectivity and have to rest the modem and router to bring it back. But since we only used the internet intermittently, we never noticed the intermittent disconnects. The new modem is perfect and we have only had one incident that required a reboot.

One suggestion I would make, get a backup UPS system for your internet connection. Plug your cable modem, router, and VOIP TA into it and you will not lose phone service if the power goes out. Another benefit is if you have a laptop and wireless you will still be able to surf the web as well.