If you are like me, then you’re one of the many millions who have cut the cord with their landline and gone all wireless. However, that doesn’t mean people don’t want phones for their homes. Of course, for them, there are many options — some that use traditional telephony like AT&T and others like Vonage, which provide broadband-based voice service. It’s hard for folks to pick the one that is the best and most reliable.

Keynote Systems recently conducted a study (link to PDF) of some of the more popular services — AT&T VoIP, AT&T Landline, Comcast Digital, Time Warner Digital, Verizon VoiceWing (VoIP), Packet8, Vonage, Lingo and Truevoice. According to their study, AT&T’s landline service was the most reliable service, while in terms of voice quality, Comcast’s Digital Voice came out on top.

I wish Keynote had not been stingy and shared complete rankings instead of these teaser results. Nevertheless, even the very limited data they made available show that pure-play VoIP services ranked pretty low, hinting at poor quality and less reliability.

More importantly, not a single service measures up to being both reliable and exhibiting good quality; and though Verizon VoiceWing is a good enough compromise, it’s not clear if you can actually sign up for the service. I tried on their web site and failed — only existing customers can seemingly log into the site.

These results align closely to my own findings — while AT&T used to work, the quality of the calls was just horrible. I could not make a single call to India without redialing. So I gave up that service and then opted for Comcast. I very quickly realized that spending $40 a month for a voice service when I could easily get nearly unlimited minutes from my mobile phone just didn’t make much sense. Good-bye, Comcast.

I would love to know which service you use and what your real-world experience is.

Hold onto your tinfoil hats because the government is seeking to chip away at your online privacy through the use of deep packet inspection. Despite what I’m about to tell you, there are good uses of this technology when it comes to managing and monitoring a network. So don’t shoot the technology, but feel free to take potshots at those trying to use it to suggest that ISPs monitor your surfing habits for illegal images, even those including child pornography.

MSNBC has gotten a hold of a proposal made by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to AOL that highlights the use of DPI tools from an Australian company called Brilliant Digital Entertainment. The company is pitching its CopyRouter product (PDF) to help ISPs monitor web traffic, compare it against a list of known child pornography files, and if it makes a match on existing traffic, send the offending subscriber a message warning them that they were about to download child pornography. According to MSNBC, the presentation also says Brilliant Digital could then pass the offender’s IP address over to law enforcement agencies.

Wow, that right there would violate the 4th Amendment preventing unreasonable search and seizure, and would put ISPs in the role of web traffic cop — a role none of them relish. Remember in August when the FCC yelled at Comcast for using deep packet inspection to find and block P2P files? During the hearing related to that enforcement order, FCC chairman Kevin Martin compared Comcast’s tactics to opening up a person’s mail and then deciding which letters to send on. Later, Gigi Sohn, head of the Free Press used that same analogy in describing what ISPs were doing when they used deep packet inspection from NebuAD and Phorm to view a user’s web surfing habits.

As much as I viscerally loathe the exploitation of children, I have to say that just because some of the country’s online “mail” may contain child pornography, it doesn’t justify the use of such software by private companies to enforce federal laws. Because while today it may be child pornography, and tomorrow, information on explosives, followed by those communicating with terrorists…and pretty soon wrapping your PC in foil starts to look appealing. Hey maybe aluminum prices will go up.