I'm doing many different things to the home network now. Right now, I've got AT&T for data and voice, and Comcast for video. Comcast data, in a bundle with video, turns out to be much cheaper than equivalent service from AT&T, and I get to keep my TiVo, so I've decided to go all-in for Comcast.

I've decided to future-proof myself and get a gigabit-capable cable-modem, even though I'm only buying 200Mbps service. If I decide to upgrade later, I won't need a new cable modem.

I'm also replacing my two Apple Airport Extreme's with a Google WiFi trio. One in the wiring closet to act as my border gateway, one in the home theater, where we tend to hang out, and one with location TBD, but all of them will be hard-wired.

Making this all work is going to require more Ethernet ports than I've got available in my closet, so I'm going with a 16-port Netgear gigabit switch. Remember when something like that would have been scandalously expensive? Anyway, that will let me light up every outlet in my house, if I want. (The builder was an idiot in so many ways, but at least he ran Cat5e to every single phone jack.)

This will solve most of my problem, except for my home theater rack, where I've got three devices that want hard Ethernet wires, and which will grow in the future. Right now, I'm using my Airport Extreme to keep two of them working (Bluray & TiVo). When I swap in the Google WiFi, I'll use an older 4-port GigE switch to keep everything going, and my long-term solution (as part of the eventual 4K video upgrade) might end up being a Sony ZA3100ES 7-channel receiver with a built-in Ethernet switch, which doesn't seem to be offered by any other receiver vendors. I'm a bit irked that Sony is requiring you to buy it from a custom installer, rather than offering it through standard retailers, but I'm sure somebody will just sell the damn thing over the Internet.

Whole-house video: I've already got a TiVo Roamio (6-tuner) and one TiVo mini (1st gen). I've now got a second TiVo mini on order, so I'll get rid of the Comcast cable boxes in our house and we'll be doing whole-house video on three TVs. Fun fact: the second-gen TiVo mini comes with free lifetime service, making it effectively half the price of the first-gen unit with equivalent service. That makes it a no-brainer. (The TiVo mini also supports Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. I've got a Chromecast in the home theater and might go with those on the other two TVs as well. The TiVo interface for everything seems to be less annoying than switching back and forth.)

But what about voice? Life's much easier when you keep your voice service separate from your data service, so I've been spending way, way, way too much time reading up about the world of VoIP. Ultimately, it came down to two choices: Ooma vs. Obihai + VoIP.ms, and I decided to go with the latter.

Ooma: You pay more up front for the box ($99 list, $80+ at Amazon with a "coupon" they're offering today, as low as $50 on last month's Cyber Monday discount, but I wasn't ready then to pull the trigger). Basic service is free, which is good, but if you want fancier services (notably, if you want voicemail that forwards to your email), you're paying $10/month. Ooma really has three things going for it. 1) It's engineered to be easy to configure. 2) They have an encrypted tunnel from your box to their cloud provider. 3) If you're talking to another Ooma customer, you get HD voice quality. Newest thing: Ooma is trying to convince you to use their box as your firewall/gateway and sell you security services with a monthly charge. This doesn't interest me at all, and kinda makes me wonder about the longevity of their business.

Obihai 200 + VoIP.ms: The Obihai box is only $47, and is a generic "ATA" (analog telephone adapter) that lets you connect to hundreds of different Internet VoIP providers, meaning it's easy to ditch one and move over to another one. This keeps pricing really cheap. VoIP.ms, in particular, seems to be one of the bigger players and they expose all kinds of crazy configurations. For example, check out the instructions for connecting VoIP.ms to NoMoRobo. In short, if you're willing to learn the lingo of VoIP, you can set up lots of stuff and pay no more than $6/mo for it. Note that this Obihai box can also play nicely with Google Voice, for free, but it's very difficult to intuit whether that's a long-term solution or a temporary thing until Google gets around to killing it. Notably, the Obihai 300 -- an updated version of the same hardware, has a virtually identical feature set and does not support Google Voice. The writing is on the wall for the end of Google Voice.

FWIW, I considered creating a new Google account for the sole purpose of parking my home phone number there, having it ring through to the Obihai box, and configuring Gmail to forward the voicemails to my normal account. Given the flakey future of Google Voice, I decided not to pursue this. Also, it requires a fairly complex porting process, and you have to pay extra for 911 service from a VoIP provider. For now at least, I'll try setting up everything with VoIP.ms and see how well it works.