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?"

Comments

um...

[zxflash]

"will Comcast's VoIP quality be better than their competitors such as Vonage, which relies on third party Internet connections to carry their VoIP?" how about "will a human be able to notice???"

Re:um...

[WushuJim]

A human will notice dropped packets or dropped connections. A human will notice greater end to end delays. Vonage uses the internet as the network medium. Vonage has no control of the routers on the internet and cannot provide quality of service (QoS). If Comcast did it right, they could potentially have a superior service compared to Vonage. They can provide QoS via packet prioritization on their routers, resource reservation (RSVP), or other means of QoS. Vonage cannot do this, but Vonage does offer a cheap price. QoS minimizes end to end delays on congested networks and reduces dropped packets or dropped connections.

Disadvantages of owning the network

[bookemdano63]

Comcast has a major disadvantage that the other VOIP providers don't have, that you can't move your box and phone to any IP connection, you have to be on the Comcast network. And since VOIP only requires about 90kbps any broadband connection should be able to handle it.

Re:Disadvantages of owning the network

[Johnny_Law]

Comcast has a major disadvantage that the other VOIP providers don't have, that you can't move your box and phone to any IP connection, you have to be on the Comcast network. And since VOIP only requires about 90kbps any broadband connection should be able to handle it.

This might be true for the early adopters of VOIP, but the VAST majority of this potential market only travels to two places, home and work.

I work for one of the major phone companies, they understand (whether their service record shows it or not) that all 95% of consumers want is a dial-tone when they pick up their phone, a clear picture when they turn on their TV, and a stable internet connection at their preferred speed.

The company (or companies) that provides those services for the best cost on one bill is going to win a lot of people.

Competition

[xThinkx]

Hi, I'm the phone company, I've decided that you have no choice but to use me for phone service, so I'm going to screw you. Oh wait, you suddenly have a choice... I TAKE THAT BACK, I'm your best friend, look here's some free stuff, here's a discount, just don't leave, PLEASE!!!

I love competition

Too Expensive

[popo]

FROM THE ARTICLE:
"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."

$40 Bucks a month? I could have a 2nd line (with a virtual London area code), and a separate fax line from Vonage for the same price.

Doesn't seem like much of a CallVantage

Up time

[Punchinello]

I cannot recall in my LIFE picking up my home phone and not hearing a dial tone. Even with a power failure the phone keeps working.

By contrast, every month or so I will sit down to use the internet and find my Comcast service completely down or the service degraded significantly. When the service is down it can be for minutes, hours, or in a few cases, days.

How sucky would it be to have unreliable phone service? I just can't risk it right now.

VoIP not really ready for primetime

[hpj]

I have been a VoIP user for about a year now and must say that I don't think it is really ready for prime time by the masses.

For my purposes it's great since I'm a Swede located in California for now and I still have a Stockholm phone number that I can call (And get called) by all my friends from back home. The problem is however that the VoIP traffic is very sensetive to high loads on my cable service. I have no doubt I'm an above average user of my network, but it can't be unheard of that people actually saturate their cable modem.

As long as you don't run a quality of service setup (Which can never saturate the cable modem since they are usually set up with really weird buffers giving you around 3 second ping times if you start filling with both up and downloads at the same time) you can't use your VoIP solution. Pretty much any P2P application will cause your VoIP to go down as soon as you start it for instance.

Setting up QoS is not something that everyone will be able to handle and in that case I think they will be disappointed with their VoIP experience.

VoIP Isn't all it's cracked up to be.

[serith]

Until Comcast upgrades their infrastructure, and has oodles of bandwidth to shovel out to its customers, I'd be hesitant to switch. I have VoIP myself with Time Warner - Roadrunner in central New York, and it's nothing to write home about. With VoIP sucking on my modem's limited upstream bandwidth, (thank you again Time Warner for the mammoth 384kbps upstream) you start to notice the packet loss in your conversations, along with the frequent disconnects, and the nice lag you notice on your cell phone but shouldn't have to worry about on your land line. Before you jump ships and think VoIP is some sort of messiah, just take a closer look at what you're getting yourself into.

Comcast user..

[sinner0423]

As a Comcast user for about a year now, I've had my fair share of problems with the service. Most notably :

1) DMCA letters
2) Outages at exactly the same time every night
3) Prompt, yet horrible, customer service

I expect VoIP from the same company to be on par, if not worse, than their cable service. If I could afford a decent DSL package that offered me 3mb/sec I'd do it. I have a feeling a lot of people use Comcast because they have no other HSI choice in their area, which is really sad.

The market is just begging for competition right now, and companies just can't dole out the cash to provide & maintain a competent, COMPETITIVE residental high speed network.

The only other option I have (greater chicagoland area) is SBC - which is about 1/3rd of the bandwidth Comcast offers for the same price. Looks like I either have to move, or stick with Comcrap for the rest of my suburban life.