Here's a free idea in the wild; a cable telephone modem that automatically switches to cell phone service whenever the cable phone stops working.
Let's face it; cable goes out. And when cable TV goes out, the cable phone services goes out with it.
The local cable company, Comcast, has been trying to improve service and reliability; and for the phone service reliability it seems to be succeeding. But the fact is, the cable does go out. And when the cable goes out, the phone goes out.
I've mentioned this before, that in our semi-rural area 60 miles or so north of New York City, there are still plenty of back-country roads where people live year 'round. These are the way-back places where long-time residents live. The older folks who need better services, but also need bargains. Naturally, the less expensive cable telephone service is attractive.
Unfortunatly, the cable company sales people (Comcast here, but I know it happens in the next town with Time-Warner service too) don't warn these folks about how vulnerable their service is to back-road issues. It's a terrible situation when the service goes out and these older folks have no way to communicate with the outside world.
So here's my idea in the wild to fix this problem:
Cable VOIP modems with fail-over to cell phone service. No extra charge to the cable phone customers because, naturally, they don't use the cell phone service by choice but only when the cable goes out and only for as long as the cable phone service is not available.
Automatic fail over.
People who call in to the cable customer's phone number still ring through to the cable customer's phone. And when the cable customer needs to call out, they don't notice a thing because, as it should, the phone just keeps working.
The way this works is that each cable voip modem has a built in cell phone gizmo that, automatically takes over when the cable's phone service is not available at that modem.
The first thing that this cell phone gizmo can do when it takes over is to send an SMS text message to the cable company's service office notifying them of an outtagle. That's really cool because, not only the the customer's phone keep working, but now they don't have to put up with the stunning frustration of trying convince somebody at the cable company that the service is actually down. Way cool.
So there it is; cell service failover for cable VOIP service. Go forth and make it happen.
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