time warner cable phone service

i've been reading a lot and getting some anecdotal stories from many people in the security and fire business that these two items are NOT compatible...

time warner swears up and down that they are the same as any other telephone line... the people in the security/fire biz are saying it's a salesman's line...


does anyone have any experience with this? it's my understanding that not all "digital phone" services are created equal.... TWC claims their phone traffic, while using VOIP as an underlying technology, is unlike most VOIP services in that the infrastructure is wholly owned, that the voice traffic never hits public internet, so that the normal "out of order" failures (associated with FAX, Fire/Security) type communications is not anything that needs to be worried about...

they have cable modems with onboard batteries and they tell me they can run for 2 days without electricity, and have certified that all equipment back to the CO where they interface with the POTS is certified for the same amount of powerless operation... having a knowledge of VOIP and realizing that FAX is still all in all very unreliable over internet traversing VoiP services (even ones with claimed compatibility with FAX w/ t.38), yet TWC gaurantees FAXs work with 0 problems (and i havn't heard ANY information with anyone unhappy about FAX over twc phone service), i have the tedency, as well as technical understanding to believe that it can be done....

(i.e. i can fax over VoiP/SIP all day long on my controlled LAN without a single failure, it's only after SIP finds it's way to the interwebz do my faxes fail)


basically i'm trying to find out if the security guys are just spreading FUD and older technologies have left a bad taste in their mouth, or if there is really some concern to be had....

i'm assured by TWC sales and even a TWC installer that's been surveying our sites for install that this is all run of the mill installs.....

as i have ~20 sites switching to TWC for phone service, ALL of which have either a telephone connected security OR fire panel (most have both) i'm starting to worry if this is going to blow up in my face


the install hasn't happened yet and i've sent my concerns to the top TWC sales people i'm dealing with just to have some documentation (this is a bigass contract)


does anyone have any NON-anecdotal evidence that this fails hard?

If it is mission critical (99.999% uptime) TWC is feeding you a line of crap. If it can go down for ~2% of the time it should work out just fine.

I say this having switched a major retailer to cable phone service at 350 locations in 2007.

JayteeBates said:

If it is mission critical (99.999% uptime) TWC is feeding you a line of crap. If it can go down for ~2% of the time it should work out just fine.

I say this having switched a major retailer to cable phone service at 350 locations in 2007.

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well it's as mission critical as a fire alarm is... i mean possibly people's lives are at stake...

that said, our current service with CenturyLink is nowhere near 3 9s... we have CONSTANT problems with their telephone service and their infrastructure seems to be QUICKLY deteriorating...

it's not 2% bad though....


we're getting a PRI with them too to interface in to our company wide telephone system... i'm much less worried about that, we're a nonprofit so even a 98% service is fine for us as long as it's cheap (CFO enjoys not hearing the phone ring, lmfao) but we actually have an SLA with that and i actually expect it to be at least 2 9s.... but would be more than happy with 1....


EDIT: it also may be worth noting that these are all dedicated cable modems... we won't be utilizing coax at any of these locations for anything other than phone service.... our internet service is switching to metroE which is all fiber based (doesn't touch the coax), so i dunno, maybe that will help?

I ran my house security system on a TWC phone line for 2 years without issues. All tests/events got back to the monitoring company without issue.

With regards to the CO, I would think that it depends. 2 weeks ago, I had a 50 hour power outage due to some storms, and when my power came back on, the cable services were down (phone, internet and TV) for a few more hours. My assumption is their batteries ran out...

Well granted my experience with them is from 2007...that said I don't think they push infrastructure upgrades that hard. Could you do a few pilot sites?

to be 911 compliant we must have copper lines in the building, AFAIK

We have our burglar/fire alarm at home on a Time Warner Cable phone line, zero problems.
I have an eye doctor customer with Time Warner Cable business class and they switched over from POTS, also no problems.
I think it depends a lot on the age of the alarm equipment. My friend has an OLD alarm system in his house and tried to hook an OOMA voip box up and it did not work. It actually puts out some simulated dialtone that the alarm system rejected, for lack of a better term.

I would still prefer 2 POTS lines any day of the week, though.

I have some business clients who fax over TWC digital phone service and it works fine. A couple of years ago one of my business clients (a medical practice) switched from a LEC provided POTS line to TWC digital phone service and the faxing (inbound and outbound) had errors jump up to about 50-75% of all faxes (garbled pages, faxes not fully received, etc). TWC said there was nothing they could do. I tried other modems, all kinds of tweaks on the Windows server, nothing would help. The client switched back to the POTS line after a month of issues and the problem went away.

In my part of the state, TWC does not have any battery backups on their cable plant, so even a 1 second momentary power outage is enough to knock out internet and phone service. And it doesn't appear that TWC will be rectifying that any time soon either. Their techs say their plant is not compatible with battery backups. *shrugs*

That said, if this is mission critical, keep it on the POTS lines. If you want cost savings, consider switching *only* the regular voice lines over to digital phone service.

Depends how this "voip" works. We used to offer a "voip" service that was basically voip internally, but POTS for the final loop. That would probably be ok. But if it's some kind of magic jack type thing where you are plugging into the internet then I'd be weary of the reliability. Today nothing beats a standard POTS service. Some of the equipment behind that may be 30 years old (DMS etc) but it's proven, and had tons of redundancy and plain works.

Red Squirrel said:

Depends how this "voip" works. We used to offer a "voip" service that was basically voip internally, but POTS for the final loop. That would probably be ok. But if it's some kind of magic jack type thing where you are plugging into the internet then I'd be weary of the reliability. Today nothing beats a standard POTS service. Some of the equipment behind that may be 30 years old (DMS etc) but it's proven, and had tons of redundancy and plain works.

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TWC is careful not to call it voip....

i just got an email back from my salesman... he's reassuring me this is like-for-like service and that the service can't be differentiated

he's good... i'm gonna go forward with it... at the very least i have this documented now...

Ultimately, you will be getting a Service Level agreement with TWC, right ?

They don't want to pay out SLA breach penalties, so I'm assuming you're covered.

Are they selling you PRI ?

my TWC at my house has been down for 24 hours, i have to wait for a tech to come tomorrow at 10am

i'm looking into Business Class since my wife works from home, at least then i'll have a SLA

*edit* well no SLA unless I go with "Wideband" which is 35 down / 5 up for $199.99 per month, or 50 down / 5 up for $249.99 per month

where is the upload speed? 5 up? that is crap.

i wish we had FiOS.

MurphysLaww said:

Ultimately, you will be getting a Service Level agreement with TWC, right ?

They don't want to pay out SLA breach penalties, so I'm assuming you're covered.

Are they selling you PRI ?

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they are, but these fire/burg panels will not be running on it...

it IS business class, so i do need to look into the SLAs for this stuff...

goodcooper said:

they are, but these fire/burg panels will not be running on it...

it IS business class, so i do need to look into the SLAs for this stuff...

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better ask about SLAs because when I just looked into Business Class from TWC it was only on their "Wideband" stuff which is the 35/5 or 50/5. Anything less doesn't have an SLA, you are basically just paying extra for priority bandwidth and priority service calls.