All houses have basic analog telephone wiring. It's what the modem does: converts a digital signal to analog. If your rep was correct (not) we'd all need digital telephones. Not digital features...but new telephones capable to receive digital signals.
Mouth is correct. Cox can provision the modem for Voice only. You'd probably need a 3-way splitter. Primary > Cable Box, DOCSIS, eMTA.
You can configure VoiceMail and Call Waiting online (Cox.com).
When I bought the house 12 years ago I had Verizon run new copper lines to the house and that has been my phone service ever since. I have a grey plastic box on the outside of the house labelled "Telephone Network Interface", which I am assuming is the demarc (it has a plug+jack that appears to connect the house wiring to Verizon's service). What gets changed to make it work with packet-switching?
I read about the battery backup of the TM3402 requiring the phone be directly connected to the voice modem (it must go into some "low power" mode when running off battery). I asked the rep if I could just run the 3402 off a regular UPS (a computer sized UPS should power the modem for quite a while) but he said that would not work. That does not seem right.
I don't know what wires get changed. I live in a townhouse community and he was too fast removing and reinstalling wires for me to observe...and it was just a thicket of phone wires.
The manufacturer probably did design the eMTA to not work off a UPS. Manufacturers love to sell the proprietary batteries.
