What is the Difference Between Digital Phone Service and VoIP?
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What is the Difference Between Digital Phone Service and VoIP?
In one word, marketing. The cable phone telephone offerings use VoIP to provide digital phone lines to their customers but do not want to be linked with the lower cost VoIP companies.
In fairness to the cable operators, they do offer a higher quality VoIP service as they provide digital phone services over managed private networks. A private network does not experience the delays or echos experienced over the public Internet.
The cable companies such as Comcast, Shaw and Cox also provide proprietary digital filtering techniques to further enhance signal quality.
Technically speaking, ALL such services are VoIP AND digital telephony. In actual usage, the term digital telephone refers to services offered by a cable company and VoIP, to services offered by providers transmitting voice packets over the public Internet.
If you opt for a digital phone service, make sure that you review ALL charges when making your decision between providers. Many cable companies charge a rental fee for the equipment provided that is not immediately obviously from their promotional literature.
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