VoIP Gets A Big Backer And Another Lawsuit

Posted by timothy on Monday December 8, 2003 @02:11PM from the be-suspicious-of-buggywhip-makers dept.

Ungrounded Lightning writes "Time Warner Cable has announced plans to roll out a VoIP telephone service. I see two implications. First: ISPs providing VoIP phone service have a competitive advantage over third-party VoIP/PSTN providers (such as Vonage), who must ride on top of a separate broadband subscription for the packet transport. This could lead to consolidation of this industry segment in the hands of ISPs. Second: Cable ISPs have an advantage over Telco DSL operations - where a VoIP offering would cannibalize their own POTS and short-range long-distance revenue. This implies rollout on cable providers first, followed by harder times for telcos, long-distance companies, and third parties." chipperdog writes "In this article it is mentioned that the small rural phone companies in North Dakota are filing a complaint against a local VoIP provider, CallSmart. Interesting to see how this one works out, given what happened in Minnesota a few months ago."

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Home VOIP abyssmal shared performance by tintruder · 2003-12-08 15:44 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Take a look at this review of a home VOIP Gateway by D-Link used in an ATT Beta test.
http://www.bigbruin.com/html/dlinkdvg1120.htm
The tester had a home cable connection where he saw nearly 6000k download rate and almost 1000k upload until he plugged in the gateway.
Simply plugging it in ate up 700k of download speed.
But the real killer came when he actually USED the phone:
Download=75K
Upload=39k
Basically, the use of VOIP ate up 99% of the bandwidth of a very fast connection.
For those with the more typical 1000k-1500k cable connection, the results are not promising.