[mikester]

Ed, those are extremely valid points.

The Telco network is based on a 5 9s principal. Which means your phone WILL be up 99.999% of the time. Very likely it is; since the DSL networks ride the phone lines - they typically have extremely good uptime as well.

Cable companies are a much different beast and these are issues they are still grappling with. Cable service has traditionally been "Best effort." That being the case outages and maintenance could be done on a regular basis and frankly it's cheaper to compensate you with a few days credit vs waiting to the maintenance that is needed. There is a lot of ability to separate Business class customers from residential customers based on the supporting head end hardware but when it gets down to the wire so to speak (a break or something) then that will affect all on that node.

I would be surprised if you still experience the contention that you say you used to but I've never worked for Cox cable. Just Time Warner, MEdia One, AT&T Broadband and Continental Cablevision. In those places over subscription rates were carefully monitored and mitigated as best as was able. Typically if we had an ongoing over subscription problem it wasn't "on going" because we didn't want to or couldn't afford to fix the problem. Splitting neighborhoods (nodes) required fiber work in the neighborhood which requires the approval of the local municipality on occasion. Those were our worst hangups. We had one that lasted quite a while in an OC neighborhood a while back. It was very problematic as it was also one of the richest neighborhoods which of course contributed to both ends of the problem (We don't want you tearing up our streets or hanging more fiber but we STILL want our illegal music and movie downloads).

When I left the cable industry my company was in the midst of preparations to launch VoIP. It was a tough sell on the local level for the engineers because we all knew the nature of our service, Best Effort. Best effort does not equate to having a phone line to call 911 on in an emergency. So at first it was planned to sell the lines as secondary lines, that got us around telco regulation issues. That's the rub, the cable companies are doing as much as the can as close to the line as they can so that they are NOT considered telcos and not subject to that level of regulation.

Still; Cable modems rock!

I'm just sayin.