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Comcast Begins Rollout of VoIP
rufey writes "Comcast is beginning their rollout of their Internet phone service, according to a press release released today.
It seems that the increased competition has gotten the attention of the baby bells, who "have realigned their attention to target cable's success and plan to invest billions of dollars of their own to upgrade their decaying copper network with speedier fiber-optic lines". With Comcast owning the network that the voice calls will traverse (until it gets to POTS, if needed), will Comcast's VoIP quality be better than their competitors such as Vonage, which relies on third party Internet connections to carry their VoIP?"
Comcast pushes VoIP to prime time
By Ben Charny CNET News.com January 10, 2005, 9:54 AM PT
Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, on Monday began selling its version of Internet phone service in three markets, kicking off one of the most significant challenges traditional local phone companies have ever faced.
Initially launching its Digital Voice service in three cities--Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Springfield, Mass.--Comcast plans to reach 20 markets by year's end. The Philadelphia-based company says it intends to make the service available to all its 21 million customers six months after that.
Aside from an aggressive rollout schedule, Comcast has a lofty goal for the number of subscribers the service will attract: 8 million customers in five years, or eight times the number of Internet phone subscribers currently in the United States, according to Rian Wren, Comcast's senior vice president of voice services.
Comcast is the latest, and perhaps most important, addition to the roster of companies selling unlimited domestic dialing to any phone number using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), which sends calls over the Internet or private network. The technology is cheaper for consumers because it avoids the heavily taxed and regulated traditional local phone networks built and controlled by the Baby Bells--the four regional operating companies formed after the breakup of AT&T. While other cable companies and a host of upstarts such as Vonage Holdings have been selling VoIP since 2002, Comcast is considered the most daunting for the Bells because of its size, financial backing and political muscle.
Wren acknowledged that Comcast is introducing its product months, if not years, behind the rest of its cable competitors, as well as VoIP start-ups such as Vonage and copycats such as AT&T, with its CallVantage service. But the wait was worth it, he says.
"What we've been trying to do is come out with equivalent or better service than traditional phone competition," he said Monday. "You only get one shot at this, when it comes to quality of service." Michael Sims is a worthless piece of shit.
Comcast's long-anticipated push into VoIP illustrates the cutthroat competitiveness between cable and the local phone providers. Both sides are trying to become the primary pipelines for delivering an array of entertainment and communications services into households, including broadband Internet access, multichannel television, high-definition programming and voice calling.
After investing an estimated $75 billion upgrading their networks during the 1990s, cable companies are reaping the rewards for selling their "triple play" of voice, data and video into homes. The local phone companies, realizing their disadvantage, have realigned their attention to target cable's success and plan to invest billions of dollars to upgrade their decaying copper network with speedier fiber-optic lines.
Later this year, regional phone providers such as SBC Communications and Verizon Communications plan to introduce their own video service in hopes of stealing customers from cable. But with Monday's announcement, Comcast hopes its VoIP service, cheaper than unlimited calling plans offered by the local providers, will keep customers from defecting.
At $40 a month when purchased with Comcast's cable and broadband service, $54 a month on its own, Digital Voice is more expensive than what competitors such as Vonage or AT&T offer. Unlimited domestic dialing plans from other VoIP providers often costs as little as $25 a month.
While it remains to be seen whether the price will be lowered, Wren said "we're not trying to focus on niche or cheap priced phone service."
It's that lower cost--as little as 50 percent of traditional landline rates--that has made VoIP a threat to the traditional phone companies. Already the Bells have seen
Being able to keep your existing number is key. Verizon sent me a flyer advertising their VoIP offering, called Voicewing. I'm already a Verizon DSL subscriber, so I have broadband. I'd like to dump my local phone connection, for which I pay close to $50 a month and don't use a whole lot. So what are my options with VoiceWing, I wonder. I check out the web site.
Turns out that since I have DSL, I must retain my existing POTS line as well. So I can get VoiceWing for $30/month, but I have to keep both POTS and DSL. And the new service will have its own different phone number! Great...I get to pay more and tell everyone that I have a new phone number.
With Comcast owning the network that the voice calls will traverse (until it gets to POTS, if needed), will Comcast's VoIP quality be better [...]
PSTN, not POTS, please.
POTS = Plain Old Telephone Service. It's an electrical and signaling specification: Two wire, 24v DC supplies, ringing, pulse/tone dialing, cabling and line impedence standards (typically CAT3), etc. RJ and other connectors. POTS, and customers attached to the PSTN by POTS, are a (large) subset of the PSTN but far from all of it.
PSTN = Public Switched Telephone Service. It's the whole telephone ball of wax. Customers attached by POTS, ISDN (basic or primary rate), Tn with SS7, and several cellular standards, etc. Common numbering plan. Division of effort between long-haul, local, and cellular system providers. International carriers and standards. I could go on.
POTS is a wire connection standard. PSTN is The Telephone Network.
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They weren't advertising VoIP. It was digital phone. Without getting technical, digital phone is similar to POTS except it goes over the cable line(usually in the 700+ MHz range) as opposed to using a normal phone line.
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i get great service with Comcast. like i said my average is about 4 mbps. i peak out at 5 sometimes and rarely if not at all below 3.5. a while back they doubled everyones speed. but i wont be spending any more money with them. $55 for digital cable + $42 for cable internet + taxes is about $104 a month. sorry thats enough for me.
from Betting a Billion: Bob's Predictions for 2005
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As a user experienced with a cable companies(Time Warner) VoIP offering and with Vonage, I can clearly(pun) state that Vonage wins hands down. Odd since it is still carried over Time Warners cable network.
I really put the blame on the cruddy Scientific Atlanta equipment they chose to use. I went through three "modems" in the course of a month. I quit after the third died, went with Vonage that same night, and I haven't looked back. The calls are ten times clearer on Vonage.
Yes, IP networks were not designed to transport real time data such as voice. However, there are means around this problem such as using the real time protocol (RTP) on top of UDP. The real problem with VoIP is quality of service (QoS) which is not a problem when you own the IP network the VoIP system is on. To say something is "technically impossible" without even providing a reason is a pretty broad statement.
- Internet: Mediacom 3Mbps down, 256K up cable modem. Quite reliable, down probably for 10 minutes a month, maybe less. About $45 for that.
- VoIP Provider: BinFone Service through Binhost Technologies, a company I'm a part of. We're small but we know our shit, we're cheap, and we have geeks running the entire show. We are more into reselling VoIP but also do individual IAX and SIP accounts. Rates are $0.03/min for USA, $0.05/min for Australia (wife is Australian, we call there a lot). More info here.
- Phone: Grandstream Handytone 486 SIP phone adapter. A very cheap ($65, I believe) phone adapter, but has a web interface, good features, and does what I need it to. It is plugged into the network via CAT5 and into the phone patch block via standard POTS wire.
- IAX Server: I run my own IAX server (Asterisk) in-house. It talks to Binhost's server through the IAX protocol (Asterisk proprietary) which is very efficient. I have an X100P FXO PCI card in it that allows connection to the PSTN (my landline) and a NIC to talk to the network.
- Firewall: All of this sits behind the firewall, a simple Pentium 233 running Slackware 9.1 and using iptables and QoS scripts to regulate traffic. The QoS designates packets by the MAC address of the Grandstream as highest priority so my VoIP packets always get through quickly.
All right -- big deal, you say. But wait, there's more!The phones in the entire house are connected to the phone patch block through the patch panel and a 66 block. The VoIP adapter is also connected to the phone patch block as well as the network. The Asterisk box is connected to the network and to the PSTN landline. So. When I pick up a phone (any of the three in the house), I simply dial a number. The signals from all the phones run through the Grandstream VoIP adapter to the Asterisk box. The Asterisk box figures out if it's a local call or long distance. If local, it uses the FXO card to send out the call on the PSTN. If long distance, it communicates via IAX to the Binhost server and places the call over the Internet. No intervention is required on my part as to where it goes, it just does it right.
If the Internet connection is down or otherwise inaccessible, it automatically falls back to the landline so calls can still be placed.
The end result is that I get much cheaper phone calls than I would if I used my long distance on the landline (7 cents US/12 cents Australia vs 3/5), yet I don't have to inconvenience myself with having to worry about which phone I have to use for a phone call.
Incoming calls are received by the Asterisk box. Assuming I haven't turned on call forwarding or do-not-disturb, it rings through the VoIP adapter to the phones in the house. If nobody answers, Asterisk picks up the line and gives a message and allows the user to pick either my or my wife's voice mail box and leave a message. Very handy.
Costs:
Monthly VoIP service: About $20 for the calls, $5 for the line.
Internet: $45/month
Asterisk: Free
Asterisk server: Free donation
FXO Card: $15 on eBay
VoIP Adapter: $65
Wiring: out of some old box
Firewall: Free donation as well
Landline costs: $17.95/month
So total? $80 in startup, $87.95 monthly for all my phone calls and Internet service. I call that a *deal*.
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I have the basic Vonage 500 minutes/month plan for $14.99. Cox internet service (4 Mb down,
So for $64.99 month I get my internet access and Voip.
Start up fees for internet were free, for the Vonage VoIP Service it was 29.99 + 9.95 shipping/handling. So lets say $40 for startup.
The linksys RT31P2 VoIP router was included in that price (I understand there is now a wireless version available!). I simply unplugged SBCs line outside, and plugged in a cable from the router to the phone jack in the wall and wallah, phone service using my normal phones throughout the house. For me its nice that the RT31P2 just works, no maintenance, no problems, no ext2 file system to crash, whatever.
So total set up fee $40. Monthly fees for Vonage, $15 (+ some tax so like $16.50 a month). Monthly fee for cable $49.95. So for $67.00 month full internet and phone.
Cable outages happen about once every 2 months. So reliability hasn't been an issue. Voice quality is great, actually there is a setting in the router to adjust the Quality of Service settings for the voip. When a voip call comes in, it automatically adjusts my bandwidth allocation to provide for the phone service, when I hang up, my download speeds/torrents/whatever go full rate again.
Now I just wish Tivo or someone would allow me to have a TV Subscription service, watch what I want, when I want, and only pay for what I view. That'd be nirvana.
All in all I'm pleased with VoIP and would recommend it to anyone.