Comcast Sends Phone Users Scrambling for Service Residents Can Choose the New AT&T or Sign Up for Voice-Over-Internet.
By TIMOTHY J. GIBBONS
Jacksonville residents who have been getting phone service from the cable company since the days when AT&T Broadband had the local franchise are going to have to switch to a new sort of technology if they want to keep getting voice service along with their television shows.
Comcast is shuttering its legacy phone system over the next few weeks, limiting it to 911 calls come Sept. 4 and turning it off for good a month later.
That will require customers of the service – which Comcast picked up when it merged with AT&T Broadband in 2002 – to find a new provider, either switching to the new AT&T or signing up for Comcast’s Voice-over-Internet-Protocol service
The closure of the service is an end point to the mergers, name changes and technological innovations that have been going on since the turn of the century.
It began in 2000, when telephone company AT&T bought cable company MediaOne, which offered phone service in Jacksonville.
After the merger, cable division AT&T Broadband was spun off from the parent company but still offered phone service here and in several other cities, a service that Comcast picked up when it merged with the spin-off in 2002.
That service, like the competing service offered locally by BellSouth, is traditional circuit-switched phone service.
Two years ago, though, Comcast rolled out its Digital Voice service, which routes phone calls over the Internet, a technology known as VoIP. Unlike regular telephone service, which requires a dedicated circuit, VoIP telephones send the calls over the Internet as packets of data and then turn the packets back into voice and put them on the traditional phone network at a switching facility.
(Meanwhile, last year, AT&T bought BellSouth, returning that venerable name to the local market.)
Keeping both networks operational was getting expensive, Comcast spokesman Bill Ferry said, leading to the letters that have been going out this month letting customers know of the shutdown.
“For us, being the high-tech company we are,” Ferry said, “we see the future in digital voice and other broadband products.”
Customers shifting to the digital service from the legacy one can sign up for $20 a month for the first year promotion, or go with the $99 a month for a combo pack of broadband Internet, phone and cable television.
After the promotional period, the price will jump to $39.95 a month for customers who also get cable and Internet service and $44.95 for standalone phone service.timothy.gibbons@jacksonville.com (904) 359-4103
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