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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?"
"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???"
All the torrents you could want.
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.
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
Let's get one thing perfectly clear, I did not vote for George W Bush, and I do not endorse what he does or says.
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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
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Comcast has been advertising VoIP service in my area for about two years. I called up four months ago and asked them about it, because I wanted to add it to my internet service.
The woman on the phone responded with nothing more than "what are you talking about?". She had to speak with a supervisor, who eventually just said "We don't offer that in your area. Or any area, actually. And I doubt we'll even have such a service for a couple of years".
Didn't explain why they've been advertising it for eons.
Anyway, they've lost money here, because I went with Packet8.net. Great quality, cheap prices. Unlimited long distance to the states and Canada for $20/mo, including all of the features that most companies would charge a hefty extra fee for (call return, caller ID, call blocking, call forwarding, voicemail, conferencing). And rates to other locations are typically between two and four cents per minute. Can't beat that.
Comcast would have to beat that service by at least 20% to make it worth my time *and* provide the adaptor for free (since you have to buy one with most VoIP providers for about $50).
In the article it entions trial areas of Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Springfield, Mass.
However, I got a flyer a few weeks ago for this service - and I live in Denver! In fact I signed up for the service today and have an installer coming out next week.
Mainly I was motvated by a desire to user snyone other than Qwest. I am also hoping to get some kind of price break from also using Comcast for my ISP, though they said nothing about it while signing up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comcast has the advantage of having the last mile connection to the customer. Although Vonage has some great deals on phone service, the quality of that service rests squarely on the shoulders of the customer's internet connection. That connection, BTW, is provided by a company that likely has a competing offering (like Comcast) which lowers their desire to make sure your Vonage connection is good. Unfortunately, I speak from experience...
I'd be pretty surprised if comcast can do anything better than their competitors
That's the glory of having a virtual monopoly and charging me a hundred bucks a month for internet and basic digital cable.
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.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's why for a while most service providers will probably require a fixed service address, so they can hardwire 911 calls from your phone.
Companies are working on it but the issue is tricky. You'll be happy to know that the solution to this problem will also enable companies to make sure of your physical location on the network before watching things like canadian TV in the US...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
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Cablevision and Time Warner have been offering VoIP for a long time now and I can personally attest that Vonage is better then both.
I was a low level net admin at Cablevision when they rolled out their VoIP product. Sure out network was great but no one had any idea how to setup a VoIP infrastructure. Mind you Cablevision spared no expence with equipment, all high end Cisco stuff throughout. We brought in Siemans and they set everything up for us. We had four guys on staff 24-7 just sitting around working on it.
NOTHING WORKED RIGHT EVER. They would blame our BETA IOS, they would blame Corporate IS, they'd blame our Software Engineering, etc. No matter how "perfect" (by their definition) we made the environment it still never worked. When it did there would be god awful distortion. This was blamed on freak RF anamolies.
Vonage only does VoIP, they do it realy well. It works the same as when other companies (Like earthlink) Piggyback another Cable Co's modem. Once you get passed the UBR you hop onto another network entirely. If your "On Demand" works ok and your screen doesn't pixelate you should be fine. From the RF point of view all things are created equal. The only differences that you see will be directly attributable to the VoIP provider.
For the record I understand that Cablevision's VoIP is still crap and Time Warner hasn't done a full blown release yet. If the submitters point of view was accurate these companies would have a far superior product and they would have released it full blast by now without hickups. After all the have network insight that no other company posseses. It would seem obvious that they would be able to make the better product.
Another side issue is that most Cable Co's have trouble handling the overhead outbound of all these VoIP calls. Think how many Cable Providers Cap uploads low, or cap people after long periods of heavy upload. Guess what happens when you hand out VoIP modems like candy. With TCP/IP an insane network up screws up everyone's down.
Has anyone seen a Cable Co launch a VoIP service successfully?
I boycott signatures
Does anyone have any suggestions for home alarm systems? the alarms that are monitored by ADT and the likes seem to need a telephone line, but i would rather not have one. Is there a way to do this over VOIP or something else without a POTS?
- 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.