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

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.

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

Too late.

[Seumas]

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).

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.

PSTN, not POTS.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.