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Comcast Accused of Blocking VoIP
kamikaze-Tech writes "Comcast, the largest USA Broadband provider is being accused of VoIP
blocking, just days before they release their own VoIP offering.
According to a long standing thread on the Vonage Forums, many Comcast ISP users are unable to use Vonage. Tempers are flaring: 'Although you will see all manner of opinions on this thread, there seems to be a sentiment that - politely put - Comcast could really be doing a better job of carrying Vonage bits.' Looks as though this could be the beginning of the broadband quality wars,
with Comcast taking the first step."
All these ideas are entirely possible but it could simply be that Comcast doesn't provide the kind of broadband consistently necessary to use VoIP.
My experience with Comcast has been extensive and I am nothing but a little dissatisfied with how consistent my connection broadband width was. I'm not complaining that I lost connections (though I know people who have) but I will complain that my upload and download widths were anything but stable.
I eagerly await the broadband over power lines initiative that's inevitably going to be made available to everyone. Imagine paying for broadband but not having to pay also the cost of using an extensive cable network. Brilliant idea! Use rudimentary piggy backing techniques to deliver two signals through one line. It's actually not that difficult, I'm not sure why this took so long to develop and why it's taking even longer to make available to the public. Yes, I've heard of security concerns but there's got to be some encryption you can use.
If I ever live to see the day where cable is obsolete, I'm going to uncap my modem and host something huge to my friends. Anyone care to take a guess on how long I'd be able to keep that up before they shut me down?
My work here is dung.
ConCash sucks balls. I've had them for years. Raising rates for cable non-subscribers from $3/mo to $20/mo, knocking down the bandwidth at the @home transition, killing off our newsgroups, killing my static ip and wanting money for me to get it back. All very gay.
The last few days I've been having real problems with OUTGOING Vonage calls, but incoming Vonage calls have been ok.
Outgoing calls are extremely choppy and cutout in the middle of words, but I can hear the other person without a problem.
It is does not surprise me they would block access to their competitors. Soon I expect them to begin survelliance of their customers and reporting their "un-American" activities to the alphabet agencies.
For all the mud slung at them, SBC has given me nothing less than great service. VOIP works great, I get better-than-advertised throughput (5 Mb down, instead the listed 3 Mb), and I've asked them repeatedly if I could run small servers off my connection and always been told "yes".
Now the rumor is that they're trying to bring fiber into homes and deliver television signals over the phone system.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I was in on the second test in the -world- for Cable Modems, and back then it was a full 10mbit up and down.
Today it's a full 10mbit down, 768k up for the "higher" tier of service for a little more money than back "in the day".
I'm pretty satisfied with my speeds now, just been having Vonage problems lately.
Penn Jillette, in one of his books, wrote about how his ideal society would have all roads privately owned and managed. You'd pay as you went rather than paying for the road as part of your taxes. Those who used the road the most paid the most in tolls.
However, such a situation generally assumes that road operators would be willing to build roads out to remote areas where only a handful of customers would ever drive. It also assumes that these so-called "liberated" road owners would be unprejudiced individuals who weren't concerned about the any color but green. Unfortunately, both of these are just about impossible in the real world. You'll always have that last mile unpaved, and you'll always have owners who don't like a certain type of customer.
The solution is to mandate that the roads be publicly accessible, and if the owners are not willing to do so, that the government own the roads outright.
Blocking specific packets is not the role of the road owner, and if it ends up that such is the case, then that owner should be put out of business.
How is this legal?
Or is it that Comcast has full control of what gets sent through the bandwidth they provide?
Inquiring minds want to know.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
These companies need some good old fashioned competition. When I buy unlimited internet, I don't expect security decisions to be made for me or any ports to be blocked. I want raw network access, no value added crap and I want to be able to do with it as I please.
I think it is time the gub'ment to step in and finally classify ISP's as common carriers that provide a raw network level service.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I had Comcast and Vonage. Comcast's lower lever service has a limited upload cap which is not quite enough to get consistently clear calls, especially if you are doing anything else with the computer at the same time. It is not clear that this is a problem because they don't talk about upload bandwidth on the Vonage box, only total bandwidth, which Comcast technically meets. I cancelled Vonage after a couple of months, when I encountered almost comical ass-ness from the Vonage customer support. Those guys are complete bastards.
If I remember, about a year ago here on Slashdot, I read about a DSL ISP who got busted by the FCC for doing exactly this. They got fined a heap of money. I pay for Internet and WANT Internet, NOT just port 80 for web browsing. So Far both Cox and Verizon DSL do NOT block VOIP - a good thing for me, as I have both of them.
Citation? they partnered to buy Adelpgia, but time warner does NOT own comcast....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Comcast probably did this blocking to sell their own service.
They could justify the block with this part of their TOS.
http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp
"You shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, or degrade any other user's use of the Service, nor represent (in the sole judgment of Comcast) an overly large burden on the network. In addition, you shall ensure that your use of the Service does not restrict, inhibit, interfere with, disrupt, degrade, or impede Comcast's ability to deliver and provide the Service and monitor the Service, backbone, network nodes, and/or other network services."
I have worked for ISP's where if someone is using to much bandwith we cut their connection. Most of the times ISP's oversell their network and hope that people dont use it up.
But i belive in this case this was just a shot to sell their own service, the main question is since its their network are they really ALLOWED to do this?
string sig = llGetSig("dimentox"); llSay(0,sig);
I have been working with one of their local spot advertising reps, and was informed that "They may not be willing to work with me, because I have a competing product." Its too bad this kind of thing is even legal--From an economic standpoint, competition benefits consumers. Their rep has been shady, she said a 30-second spot (with my parameters) costs $3,000 to produce, but when I spoke to the producer, he laughed and said at most $500, and sometimes they do the first one for free. When I ask the rep questions over e-mail, she says "Call me on this one." Obviously she wants to go off the record... All in all, its really shitty dealing with them. My product is local, and they are the best tool to reach my audience--so I really need them, but I have been looking into other avenues, including local broadcast advertising...
The solution to these kinds of games by telcos and cable companies is to remove whatever legal protections the perpetrators may enjoy under common-carrier or similar legal theories. When they suddenly become criminally liable for the unsavory activities of their users they'll rethink this idea.
-- Old Man Kensey
Oh come on, Comcast wouldn't be anti-competitive. They're in business for the good of their customers, and so is Vonage.
Have you ever tried to switch your service away from Vonage? Can you port your number to another provider? No. Should you be able to? Yes. Is Vonage just as guilty as Comcast? Yes. Will both companies hose customers if they can make more money? Yes. What can we do about it? Expose them and recommend that people switch.
Perhaps this is what's happening to everyone else?
To be honest, I don't think its VoIP they're blocking. Since their nationwide "upgrades" last week, no one in my town has been able to use any remote tools or VoIP, including PCAnywhere, Remote Desktop, or remote access to their IP of any sort (if you have a webserver setup, for example). They're definately having problems, I just don't know if they were done on purpose.
Purposfully degrading the quality or blocking certain network trafic to hinder a competitor's ability to compete with you is clear cut anti-competitve behavior and illegal in the US. This type of underhanded "cheating" to make your service look better by making someone elses look worse must be wildly tempting for a company that both provides connectivity and competes with others to provide services on top of that connectivity but no ammount of tempation makes it any less illegal.
Any Comcast employee asked to do something that would cause this better make damn sure they document who asked them and why to make sure when the FTC comes knocking and the fingers point at you, you have a way to point the finger at someone else.
And stop it! Compete by serving the customers needs as best you can, not by hindering others ability to do the same.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Why should Vonage get special treatment? After all, it's not like Comcast does a decent job carrying *anybody's* bits.
But this is how it works in a truly free market, if the victims want to they can switch to another ISP, nobody is stopping them. The alternative is socialism and all the ills that come with it. I for one would rather not be able to use VOIP than be ruled by socialists.
You have given me another reason not to keep your service when I move. Between the constant blacked out and pixelation of tv channels, the high price of said cable channels, the moronic tech who said my surge suppressor was the reason some of my channels were snowy even though I had the device for years and had no problems and which said problems were fixed a few hours after I reattached the suppressor, your usurpation of the last 7 minutes of CNN Headline news at the top and bottom of every hour (which means I miss the interesting stories) and your continuing bombardment of ads for your shitty CN8 channel as if the high schoolish production quality is offset by your idiot hosts, I can and will laugh in the persons face (via the phone) when they try to convince me to keep your service.
This, if true, is a completely unacceptable practice and just another indication of what a waste of resources you are.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
COMCAST should concentrate their efforts on blocking the
outgoing SPAM from their domain and leave VONAGE and the
other the VOIP companies to do the VOIPing.
What Comcast actually blocks is a rewarding customer experience, and the desire to continue paying them money. I've never had a pleasant experience dealing with Comcast, but unfortunately, they are the only cable company available to me currently. Verizon FIOS will be here soon, and the noise you hear will be the sound of my cable modem shattering on the driveway.... Not that I expect Verizon to be nicer or anything, but it will be good to have competition and a new set of foreign national customer service reps.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Cable modems are based on TV channels being used for data.
Each channel is something like 6 to 8 MHz wide. They can be dedicated, time sliced, or done like Ethernet. Different channels are used for up and down.
The down channel tells your cable modem where and when it may transmit.
If you get a channel to yourself, great! They are allocated based on demand, more of less. An idle computer doesn't need a dedicated channel for hourly DHCP updates.
Latency varies. If you need to wait for a transmit window, well, you wait. If you have a dedicated channel you don't wait.
Someone mentioned the idea of privatizing the public roads. Why? It's worked as it is and promotes commerce and free enterprise. In fact the public roads have benefited us so much, the wires to our houses should also be public. This would promote compeition among internet carriers and cause a bunch of other services such as VOD and VOIP to florish. It wouldn't prevent others from connecting wires or building wireless networks, but it would ensure competition.
...Michael...
It needs some tweaking, but here is the plan:
http://michaelsilver.us/?p=1
This is not new to greek ADSL users...
The company OTE is Greece's main telephony and adsl provider. However, the adsl lines (which are by the way extremely expensive) are crippled and it is impossible for many subscribers to use any voip service (skype, voipbuster etc.). This is done as follows:
The advertised bandwidth is provided on a packet rate basis! (of course not officially, but very easy to test) assuming a maximum MTU of 1500, which of course means that any application that uses small packets (see voip etc.) is doomed not to work as the bandwidth plummets. This is blamed by OTE to network congestion, not able to guarantee bandwidth and other bla blas that you have signed for when getting the adsl line. It just happens that it is very convenient for the major telephony provider in Greece! It is ridiculous but true.
For anybody interested there is a very long thread where we, the victims, discuss our frustration (in greek)
I've been doing some troubleshooting on my comcast connection. I wrote a python script to ping comcast.net and google.com 10 times every 5 minues, since I was having a lot of intermittent problems.
It seems that every 6 hours or so (like clockwork), my average ping times go to 600+ (from under 100), and my avg. dropped packets go to 10%+. I'm not convinced this is comcast shaping vonage -- but rather that they generally suck.
Unfortunately, my only other option is Bellsouth -- which does sell business class DSL here w/o a telephone subscription. I don't think in 6 months they will be any better given their recent comments.
Any suggestions?
I live in the North Texas area. Charter communications has been the big cable internet provider in this area for seemingly forever. And, in the last few months, they have had their service for cable internet degrade horribly.
Many of my neighbors used VoIP, and were unable for hours at a time to use their phones. It's the major reason I never went to VoIP.
Just about a month ago, Verizon threw down fiber optics, and within a few weeks, offered their FiOS service. For basically the same price as Charter's fastest service of 3Mb down / 384KB up, I got 15Mb down / 5Mb up. The best part is I have better stability of my internet service. In less than 2 weeks, 25% of all of Charter's customers in one neighborhood switched, and another 25% will go in the next month.
I am still seeing interruptions at times, making me wonder if something is going on with the backbone somewhere in this area. But everything is sure flying, now. And all my immediate neighbors say their VoIP is much better with the switch.
It's just when you oversell your service, everyone ends up with shitty QoS - and since Vonage's protocol likes bandwidth (skype has much, much lower bandwidth reqs), naturally, their stuff doesn't work all that well.
/ex-victim of comcast //Now I wish someone would go on a shooting spree at Shaw ///Would be ok if the same thing happened to some of the Comcast folks.
That said, they have been jacking their rates while at the same time killing off features - newsgroups, static ip addresses, and of course, the ever decreasing transfer limit (I don't believe there is a place in the USA where you are allowed to transfer more than 80 gigs combined up / down monthly and some areas have a much lower transfer limit) which is usually magically secret.
Just be glad you still have an alternative and that DSL is available and has slightly friendier terms of service - I've recently moved up to Canada where the Cable and DSL offerings are virtually the same - both pretty much useless - 30 gigs combined transfer, high latency and very slow speeds during the day.
In fact, just a couple months ago, Shaw decided to cut speeds, and then, at the same time, brought out a "Extreme" package for another $10 a month. They advertised it a lot, but forgot to mention that the speed "increase" was just "increasing it to what you had before we chopped it".
And just like in comcast's case vonage doesn't work all that well..
All I'm saying is that this ever decreasing level of service is inevitable, you have Bell South playing games, and, of course, comcast. These big ISPs have finaly realized that they are the only broadband providers out there for a majority of their customers and can do pretty much anything they want and people won't switch because they can't.
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vonage sucked with comcast, my bandwidth was very consistant and MMOs and other more-intensive (even 2 way intensive) apps worked fine. my new connection is about 1/6 the speed and Vonage works great, I cannot play MMOs because my bandwidth sucks so bad.
Seems to me it's definitely time for a new round of "fierce" competition in the ISP space, since the .COM bubble burst it seems that we're getting more and more consolidation in the residential space. I liked the idea of community (city) built/owned networks, however it appears that the big players have moved to kill off that idea as well (and have had some success).
:(
Perhaps WiMax will open things up a bit or neighborhoods getting fiber to the curb, and I think it's sorely needed since it's no surprise at all the Cox is making moves (or perhaps will make moves) to inhibit other VoIP services on their network, after all they want to sell their customers on EVERY possible service they can and milk every dime out of them (hey they are in business to make a profit after all).
As far as Cox Internet goes, they've been getting more and more restrictive as time goes by, I remember getting a Cox broadband subscription pretty early on their deployment (late 90's) and you could run any service you wanted on a residential subscription, not to mention the bi-directional speed was only limited by the number of subscribers on your segment.... well those days are LONG gone
I wonder how long it's going to take them to implement a "pay for QoS" levels on top of their current tiering packages...sigh.
It seems every 3 months or so ISPs forget they're common carriers. You can't limit traffic beyond the tech specs and then say "we're not responsible for what the traffic represents".
Being immune from prosecution is a privilege extended because you're enabling the citizens to live peacefully and freely.
Otherwise the MPAA and RIAA may want to have a chat with you.
That and if Comcast is really doing this then fuck them. Make it expensive for them to suck. E.g. share connections with your neighbours, call tech support all the time, fight over every line of your bill (even if there is only one), etc...
Seek out competitors if possible which sadly is not always possible (hey, you need monopolies afterall!).
But most importantly don't buy Comcast VoIP at all. Go back to a POTS if you have to. Giving them more business just encourages this radically stupid behaviour.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Think of it as cheap insurance against flood attacks. I can't deal with a 10 megabit/second flood coming my way. The provider sure can, though not for every customer at once. Floods are rare enough that the provider should be able to tolerate them, protecting my normal-speed connection from occasional multi-gigabit blasts.
Of course it would be nice if they'd let me adjust the settings via my account web page. That's a bit much to ask for from a company that has to deal with so many idiots and their spyware-infested Windows PCs.
Just like to point out you can configure Vonnage to use lower bitrate codecs. Just most people leave it at 64kbps. IIRC you can go all the way down to GSM CELP at 8kbps.
Even a dialup modem can handle 8kbps reliably.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
According to the FCC, Internet service providers are "information services", not common carriers. They exist under a different but related set of legal regulations (see In re Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service, 13 FCC Rcd. 11501 (1998)).
-- Old Man Kensey
I had been using Vonage with my Comcast cable modem with no problems for over 2 years. Last last summer, I started having severe problems with Vonage. Calls sounded like very poor cell phone calls and a 4 to 5 second delay from when I spoke and the person acknowledged they heard me.
I called Comcast to complain. After 3 service calls in 2 months, I finally was tired of the problems and went with Verizon DSL for 2/3rds the cost of Comcast broadband.
Vonage works perfectly again.
This agrees with my own experiences with Comcast. I was testing VoIP through my own local company and for the first couple of weeks it worked great. However, in the past month or two things changed dramatically. Now VoIP calls are 100% guaranteed to disconnect during a conversation and are very choppy even when they work.
Running mtr shows lots a significant amount of packet loss though and lots of jitter; it may not be enough to affect e-mail or web browsing, but it's plenty enough to disrupt VoIP.
That's what quality of service is all about and why putting intelligence in the network is stupid and wrong. No matter how fast your equipment gets, decisions take time that could better be spent just moving the data. No matter how good you make yourself look, you are never your best. Common carriers should never engage in net shaping other than routing around damage or pulling the plug on spambots and infected machines.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've been a Comcast internet customer for 4 years. I've seen it go from 1.5 Mbps to 6.6Mbps with only one $3 price increase. In 4 years, I've only had service interruption twice and both times were within a single day.
I've been a Vonage customer for a few months and have had no issues with them except some weirdness now and then with the phone not ringing when someone calls. In those cases, I do get my email notification that there is a voicemail. We've also had a couple issues where someone could not reach our number at all. That hasn't happened since the first week after the transition, so it must have worked itself out.
I will certainly be keeping an eye out for problems.
Let me guess - you're a PHB or work in marketing, right? You're clearly no an electrical engineer or you wouldn't make such uniformed statements. There are actually several issues (eg. transformers) that make it more difficult than providing data over phone lines or television cable.
They were the only viable ISP for a while in my area. I couldn't get DSL, satellite was prohibitively expensive, so I was stuck with them for several years. I adopted the "Comcast is evil" slogan, and spent way too much time trying to find something different. They've done nasty things like had spyware their "required" software for connected PCs and other assorted privacy violating fun. Their service was clueless and suck. They didn't even try to support linux. They didn't supply static IP's or a service to allow me to stand up servers legally. Service dropped often, robbing me of important gaming time. They made me hate.
When DSL finally rolled out in my area, I cancelled my internet service with Comcast. The following is the shortened version of my call to Comcast to cancel my service:
Me: I want to cancel my broadband service with you guys.
Phone Jockey: May I ask why you want to cancel?
Me: Because Comcast is evil.
PJ: We're.... evil?
Me: Yes.
PJ: (hesitantly)Well, is there anything we can do to keep you as a customer?
Me: Nope. (kicking myself for not replying "Not be evil")
It wasn't much, but damnit it made me feel better.
The 'alphabet agencies' were set up to provide work for the millions left unemployed after the 1929 stock market crash, stuff like building roads. They weren't in the business of spying on 'commies' or dealing with 'unamerican' elements. Most (if not all) of them don't exist anymore.
*takes the pedant-points and runs*
FGD 135
I'm not surprised that VoIP doesn't play well over ComCuss or RoadRunarounder. I was with Roadrunarounder for 3 years. The first year and a half was flawless. Then came the packet loss. They claimed it was "signal strength". They replaced our cable drop with RJ6 but the problem came back. Then they replaced the hybrid splitter transformer but the packet loss reared it's head after a few months. Then the packet loss went away for 4 or 5 months and it was smooth sailing. It reared it's head again and RoadRunarounder denied there was a problem. Then they had techs measure it. It was so bad I couldn't ssh to a shell account. I showed them this and their response was that they don't support that. At first, their tech support didn't understand what ssh was. If it ain't web or email, they don't understand it. I gave up and switched to DSL with a small local company 3 years ago and it's been smooth sailing since.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Agreed.
I get tons of spam (for reasons I cannot control), and the volume from Comcast and RoadRunner servers is so great that I filter at the server level all email from IP addreses owned by Comcast and RR. In a typical 24-hr period, 20-75 spam messages reach my inbox, and another 50-150 get filtered at the server as sourcing from Comcast/RR.
(On a side note, since I have no communications with anyone outside the U.S., all email from foreign IP addresses gets blackholed immediately.)
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
On the issue of suspected throttling, some companies are saying they should be allowed. I don't know how it works for all companies, but, I pay for tiered service already, tiered service should be for bandwidth only, not content. I pay for extra bandwidth and I pay a lot for it. So far my internet provider has not tried to stop or limit voip, however they did call to offer me their more expensive voip, which coincidentaly offers less than what Vonage gives me. For now I will assume this is US issue as I don't know anyone here in Canada that is on voip and having bandwidth problems, except that Newfie on dialup that subscribed to vonage.
piss off
Yeah, that is true, and I was going to mention it. But I had problems with Vonage under Comcast (and with my new connection up here) even when I set the bitrate to lowest quality. Besides, a good chunk of the problems is the voip box having an intermittent connection with the server.
I don't want to sound like I'm advertising skype, but I've been on 3 way conference calls with people on dialup lines in Germany and haven't had any issues with sound quality and I've used skype quite a bit when my vonage service was out and I just felt like making a call and not screwing around with the voip box again.
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Where can I easily get a list of foreign IP blocks? I'd like to add something like that to my webserver to stop a lot of comment spam I get, but I can't seem to find a list of IPs.
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
I think your ISP just sucks.
... it's pretty decent.
... stupid cold ... arrg.... day go faster!!!!
I use Vonnage as my home phone and it's 95% of the time just fine. I do get the occasional "unrecoverable 1.5 second lag" bullshit. But I'd say the vast majority of calls are crystal clear.
Coupled with the fact it forwards to my cell phones and I can call anywhere in North America for unlimited time
Skype is ok too. I don't have anything against it. And I don't represent Vonnage.
I just like the service is all.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I have 8M/768k sevice with Comcast and have had Vonage service for about a year. Works fine, always has. I have a unique setup though. I opted to setup one of linksys PAP2 units behind my router (a freebsd box). I also have the freebsd box using QOS so I can be downloading 3-4 torrents without getting any echo or anything. These accusations smell of anti-Comcast marketing FUD. I've always had all the bandwidth I've been allotted. I'm actually getting comcast's phone service as soon as it's available in my area so I can take some rules out of my firewall and expect that it'll perform better then the Vonage. In addition, it seems that Vonage shouldn't be using any more than one sixth of the 384k upload that folks get with the basic comcast service, maybe that's just me though. Why would 384k be insufficient for Vonage when the phone comanies have been squeaking QUALITY voice through significantly less for years.
This has got to be the most ass-backward wrong thing I've heard on Slashdot in some time... Do you really want your ISP breathing down your neck about what you do with the bandwidth you paid for b/c they're afraid that they'll be sued for what you do? What you suggest will have the exact opposite effect from what you seem to think.
No, it will have exactly the effect I think -- ISPs will either quit messing with packets to and from their customers, or customers will become so harassed by ISPs that do so and fear lawsuits that they'll leave in droves. It's a tough cure, I'll grant you.
I suspect that perhaps you don't understand what common carrier status actually means. (Your choice of the word "legal theory" to describe it seems to back up that suspicion).
"A common carrier is an organization that transports a product or service using its facilities, or those of other carriers, and offers its services to the general public." We all know about Wikipedia, I think.
What's wrong with the term "legal theory" to describe "common carrier" and similar concepts? It's an idea that's arisen through legal practice -- it's not really a natural concept like "freedom of speech".
In any case the idea of common carrier status as applied to utilities and particularly to telecommunications is still being formed (see key FCC decisions as late as 1998, together with the fact that we're still debating the proper role of ISPs in relation to providing service to the public). So no one really "knows what it means" in any kind of absolute sense.
-- Old Man Kensey
This was bound to happend someday.
Maybe we can get a end to end QOS solution. I for one 'd be happy to pay for my bits arriving in time.
At the edge of a cliff, a step forward is not always progress.
Almost a year ago when I got Vonage, it would never work consistently well with Comcast. When I switched to FIOS over the summer, magically it started working again.
However, my observation is that FIOS offered significantly higher bandwidth back (it's 5/2 as compared with 4/512k) which seems important for VoIP. Plus, I found Verizon's bandwidth to be more consistent. FIOS offers 5/2 and it *always* works that way. Comcast seemed more inconsistent.
In any event, Vonage never worked consistently well under Comcast and it works consistently well under Verizon FIOS. So it's not recent.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
They want $39.99/month to switch to 'digital' voice. I told the gentleman that our conversation was taking place over a VOIP line (Vonage) at a much lower rate; he spouted some ridiculous sales-speak about how that wasn't possible. Since that call, I've kinda been waiting for something like this to take place. How can they sell a service at $39 with so many other options out there?
Your monitor is staring at you.
I've had Comcast for the past 5 or so years and never really had a problem. My connection has been solid - I would guess around a 95-97% uptime and the speeds have been consistent as well...until recently.
About a month ago I signed up for Vonage, connected it to the home network and it worked great. Call quality was perfect, no drop out, no jitter, absolutely no packet loss - it was a thing of beauty.
Last week I started to notice my network was slowing down - dramatically. I checked all of the usual sources, no Bittorrent/p2p, no viri/worms, almost no activity on the LAN. I cracked out Ethereal and started sniffing, no real interesting traffic - actually not much traffic at all. I ran some speed tests from DSLreports and was getting ridiculously low numbers, we're talking about ~900/120 and I believe my service is 6000/384 (it might be 4000/384). I ran some Speakeasy speed tests and got better numbers ~1400/190 but still a far cry from what is 'promised' and what I have been getting. I tend to rely pretty lightly on these speed tests because of many factors out of my control, but this was way off, and the results replicated themselves multiple times, multiple locations, during different parts of the day. Obviously the VOIP started to suffer and the home phone was unusable, you couldn't decipher anything.
It had been a while since I updated the FW on my Linksys, so I cruised over to DD-WRT and grabbed their latest v23 and performed a clean update - factory reset. After setting up the router to my liking, I went back to the speed tests. Same results. I know it wouldn't really help in this case, but enabling QoS actually made the results much worse. With my PC connected directly to the cable modem the results were exactly the same.
I finally broke down and called Comcast and spoke with one of their Tier 1 guys, who basically reset my router, did a traceroute, and some pings and finally told me that was all he could do and would send someone out to take a look. So we'll see what happens tomorrow when the Comcast guy comes out.
I'm not trying to insinuate that Comcast has been monitoring my traffic for SIP/h.323 packets and throttled my connection, but it's this kind of weirdness that makes you wonder.
Verizon is running fiber in my neighborhood right now, and the second it's available I'm dumping Comcast for good. I'll get television, internet and phone thorough my very own piece of fiber
When I moved into a new house six years ago, we had AT&T cable. We got a flyer on the door about broadband internet. I called them up. "Sorry, it's not available in your area yet." I asked when it would be available. "Twelve to twenty-four months."
Twelve months later, I called back. "Not available in your area." When? "Twelve to twenty-four months." But that's what you said last time. "Sorry, my hands are superglued to the laminated 'lame answer' card."
Another twelve months, another call, same lame answer.
Then Comcast took over, all over Chicagoland. They started upgrading infrastructure immediately to support internet. They improved cable TV service. They started offering video on demand, with many shows for free (I don't know how I could get through a day without free kids' shows whenever I want). They started offering digital phone service. Now I find out they're going to offer VoIP.
I have been a satisfied Comcast subscriber since they took over from AT&T. I know cable companies get a bad rap, and I know many deserve it. But Comcast's past history, at least around Chicago, has been great.
Just so you know.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
...for locking equipment owned by its customers. The PAP2.
Not convinced that blocking is actually going on, however, it sure will be telling if Comcast's VOIP service works better than Vonage's.
I have a vonage phone in addition to an sipra box connected to my co-lo'd asterisk box. I have found bandwidth issues with my vonage line from time to time, whereas my asterisk line has no issues whatsoever.
I have had issues with my Vonage line in the past, though, when I travelled and linked it to bandwidth issues at Vonage, and not Comcast. Considering how fast Vonage's user base has been expanding, I certainly would suspect them before going after Comcast.
in case the link gets blasted at the host, synopsis is that a chanhassen MN guy had Vonage, and they put his 911 call on hold for two minutes. there are two issues... one, customer has to populate the 911 data instead of the carrier... and two, the IP outfits have their own intercept desk that gets the call instead of the emergency provider.
::= http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S14441.html?ca t=1
I will never give up my wired landline with CO power.
magic linkfest
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Oh, I completely agree, my ISP does suck, comcast sucked and the "competition" here also sucks, even if all 3 of those do beat dialup.
I'm just saying that as ISPs try to mooch as much as they can from their customers (lowering speeds, packet shaping and the such), eventually there will become a point where you're going to have to spring for a "premium" package in order to get some things working.
To me, especially since I know that X,Y and Z worked once upon a time, and the only thing that has changed is the level of service provided by the ISP, it feels a lot like extortion. In fact, when you call in and complain to Shaw about poor VoIP quality, they will suggest that you order their "Extreme" package.
I don't recall if it was Comcast or Verizon (I had both while living in the same house in Portland) who suggested something similar - but I do recall that when the agent bumped me to the next tier of service everything started working as it did before their service level changed. I really can't tell you whether it is intentional or accidental, but I do know it pisses me off.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Switch to RoadRunner!! Oh wait, that's right, YOU CAN'T!!!
Everyone gave Skype a hard time when it first came out for being P2P (not that anyone's stopped giving them a hard time for it, really) but this is probably just the kind of situation that being P2P might be a answer to. As long as its possible to do P2P, it should be possible to do your phone calls. Or so I think if I understand the system correctly. Not to say I don't have problems or dropped calls occasionally but the quality is surprisingly good according to my parents and my sister. The prices don't hurt either. I just woke up so I hope this is cohereant. :P
--bornagainpenguin (who admits to having an Skype account and a year's subscription to Skypein)
PS: Not that this excuses Skype in their BS they were pulling with the whole AMD\Intel crap. I have AMD everything escept for my laptop so I wasn't exactly impressed by that move....
I've had lingo for 16 months now and make over 6000+ minutes of calls to the UK each month. I don't have these problems. *touch wood*
I'm assuming some areas are just way oversold and Comcast can't handle the latency that VOIP needs there.
It does seem like the internet is going to get slowed down by the major ISPs. Its just too good from a marketing and profiting point of view. But maybe if the internet becomes too locked down some college kids could put together a small network and slowly connect all of their friends and their friends' friends. Would it be posible for the internet to be reborn? Consider the option of everyone having wireless access. All that is needed is the access point but it could be done like a giant Ad-Hoc network. Especialy with cities starting to provide wireless to everyone. How soon untill we can remove the middle man ISPs?
Mod others as you would have them mod you.
It'll be interesting to see what happens if they block a VOIP call to 911 and it's provable. Oh, that'll be a good lawsuit.
I think when Comcast rolled this stuff out, the infrastructure was new and worked well. But unlike verizon, they don't really employee people to properly maintain this equipment and things are starting to fall apart. Maintenance is expensive.
The reason I say this is a few months ago, my TV picture on comcast got really fuzzy and poor. I called them, and the first thing they did was put a signal booster on the line coming in. That more or less fixed it. And in his truck the guy had dozens of these.
So they're essentailly putting a bandaid "booster" in customer premises to make up for problems in the infrastructure. That to me is a symptom of improper maintenance.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I can go to DSLReports and get a general idea how well my cable is performing. Vonage (or preferably an independent source that can work with all VoIP providers) needs the same thing. A number you can call that simulates a connection, measures the current quality, and e-mails you the result. Without hard numbers to back up allegations of Traffic Shaping, this lack of network neutrality is a hard argument to make.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
i'm a network engineer and lemme tell ya... the technology is not going that way. Fiber and Wimacs are emerging, which will win, who knows. Verizon has already covered most of Tampa with fiber, up to 15-30MBPS. If vonage isn't working with your broadband, it's related to speed. 500kbps DSL connections are just barely there. 1mbps and up will NEVER have a problem call. If so, your provider is blocking ports. See, your vonage box which is a router will keep picking new ports but your service will be VERY MUCH interrupted. Of course they are doing this, no one can prove it. That's why they are doing it. They can stop at any time with no trace.
It would be legal under the guise of their TOS.
Well, given all the hubbub about Vonage and 911, wait until someone tries to call for help but finds out that Comcast has throttled their connection... I'm thinking intentional throttling (if that is the case) of a person's phone line could make Comcast liable.
It's time to start calling these kinds of schemes (selectively degrading Internet service to companies the ISP dislikes) by some kind of simple name that encapsulates the negative impact to the customer. I suggest "Internet Minus". It's the Internet, minus the sites and services people really want.
-- Old Man Kensey
They are selling Broadband Internet Service, but are actually *not* providing the broadband and deliberately violating the Internet Service portion (should be called limited IP service). So the day they turned on the VoIP filters to favor their own service that comes with another fee, will they be giving all "Broadband" users a discount since it is no longer Broadband IP service?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
I had all kinds of trouble using Vonage yesterday morning. Voicemails were not forwarded to my email and logins to their web page timed out. But that was a Vonage problem not an ISP problem -- I tried from different providers with the same result.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
You guys suck. Laugh at my AOL now, punk!
I think it's time to apply this to our friendly ISPs. My how history repeats itself.
What?
They can go suck eggs in hell, after drilling that fucking gay song from Kill Bill into my head with their homosexual commercials. Go Comcast!
$20/mo for cable internet + $15/mo for Vonage beat the pants off of traditional telephone company charges.
Our Vonage service has been fine, although our cable connection in general started fritzing out this past weekend. Intermittent internet, scrambled captioning and noise on our TV signal... but hey, it's cable in Central PA, what can I expect?
I am Leviathant and I approve this message.
Wins no one does...
Greed to the dark side leads....
The path of dark is great....
One leads and others will fallow...
The end all will lose....
Begun the Router Wars have!
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
I'm a Comcast customer. I promise that if they institute filtering for traffic to attempt to control what I can and can't do with the network I'm paying for, I will switch to another provider. (Yes, I already went through this with port filtering, I did switch, but unfortunately I lost...at least they have a good argument for port 25, and they're not blocking port 80 anymore.) The only way to stop the big companies from doing asinine things like this is to make it affect their bottom line. So you too should promise to switch to providers with better policies when ISPs make decisions that hurt their customers.
If Comcast and other ISPs begin using filtering technologies and/or packet shaping which makes decisions based upon the content as the packets flow over the network aren't they in danger of losing their status as a common carrier? They argue that they are a common carrier to avoid liability for services like Kazaa, eDonkey, and Bittorrent being used to trade copyrighted materials across their networks while at the same time filtering competitor's VoIP traffic to gain a competitive advantage for their own service. It seems to me that they cannot have it both ways and if a court decides that they are no longer a common carrier they may come to regret the day that they demonstrated the capability to filter competitors' VoIP traffic.
If you live in Texas you don't have to wait too long for this to come true: TXU to offer Broadband over Power Lines in 2006
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Everybody blast cablevision for their uplaod caps but I have never had any problems like this. I have cablevisions voip service wich is 10 times better then verizons phone service in the area. Always had lines crossed with verizon. Never had a voip problem .
It could be a number of reasons;
... Call sounds like a conversation with M-M-Max H-H-eadroom-room-room
:o)
1. Poor upstream B/W
Could be a number of factors - bittorrent, trojans ending email etc
Results in the other party not being able to hear you (properly/at all)
2. Poor downstream B/W
Could be torrents, downloads, windows updates, some arse pingflooding you
Results in you not being able to hear the other party
3. Poor Provider B/W
Caused by overselling bandwidth, overloaded routers, cr*p hardware
I think this is most peoples troubles, as comcast seem to be about as good as buying BB direct from BT here in the uk. You can get away with setting jitterbuffers on your phone/VoIP server if you can, but you'll get odd artifacts!
Any kind of latency will make the call sound echo-y and packetloss will make things stuttery.
4. Using a stupid codec.
Codecs are very important, use G729 if you can - if not try GSM/speex or other low bandwidth codec that is supported - don't use ALAW/ULAW unless you have lots of bandwidth to spare. Three A/ULAW calls can saturate a 256K upstream ADSL most cable providers only supply 128K here in the UK (iirc)
5. Using NAT
SIP over nat = bad idea in general. OK, you have STUN to help out, but the best solution IMO is to get your VoIP server to realise you're running over nat, send keep-alive packets, and ignore the ip & ports sent in the headers, instead to send the data back to the ip&port it was sent from.
As for Vonage, I have no idea what the settings are there
Any ISP who blocks ports, is not providing unrestricted access to the internet. If i caught my ISP blocking ports without good reason (filtering CIFS/M$SQL Server to stop worms is acceptable) I'd drop them in a heartbeat!
I've been fighting comcast's and other ISP's blocked ports for a few years now:
http://rebrandsoftware.com/portblocking.asp
Check out the visitor-submitted "Complaint List by ISP" at the bottom of the page, Comcast has the longest list of all.
On a side note, since I have no communications with anyone outside the U.S., all email from foreign IP addresses gets blackholed immediately.
This is utterly stupid. Even leaving aside the stupidity of assuming that only Americans will legitimately want to get in touch with you (which if your attitudes are as parochial as that may actually be accurate), what will happen if one of your American acquaintances wants to email you from an internet cafe abroad?
Oh, maybe your friends are all equally racist and have no intention of setting foot outside God's Chosen Nation. I didn't think of that.
If Comcast is hamstringing Vonage users to foster growth of their own VOIP, that would be tortous interference in a major way. The first VOIP-war would likely end up in court really soon. It would be pretty easy for Vonage to show how only Comcast users have a problem by IP.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
g.711 encoding (ie. no compression) is 64kbit PAYLOAD. You'll end up with 77kbit on the WAN link, due to RTP and IP overhead.
g.729 encoding (ie. good compression) is 8kbit PAYLOAD. You'll end up with 21kbit on the WAN.
Assuming 30ms packetization time and voice activity detection(VAD) turned of.
These number are for routers not supporting header compression. Header compression saves you around 10kbit on both g.711 and g.729.
The GSM codec as implemented in your gsm cell phone is 13kbit PAYLOAD. Just checked the ETSI spec...
TCAP-Abort
Let's not lose sight of this: http://www.vonage-forum.com/article1716.html
The postman hits! The postman hits! You have mail.
Their customer service pissed me off... though I miss downloading iso's in under 10 minutes: http://jasonbowen.org/download.jpg
Who would have thought that Comcast would use such evil and underhanded tactics. What do they think they have, a monopoly?... Oh wait, in most areas, they do.
I was surprised to find out that Bell Sympatico rewrites all the headers in SIP messages as it goes through. I only discovered this because in certain circumstances it does it wrong and it caused the softphone I'm working on not to work.
I'm sure this is the start of some traffic shaping experiments for VOIP on that network. Whether they have started degrading service yet I couldn't say, though.
Very worrying...
I have Vonage with Comcast and I have never had a problem with it , except sometimes the internet goes down completely and I have to just reset the modem and its all back up.
Vonage sucks in prices and features... their architecture has long term profits goal in mind... nothing unusual you say.
I am also sunrocket customer... and the happy one for almost a year now. Comcasht is my ISP but I am splitting it with my neighbor and I am running about 250ft of wire from neighbor's router to my router... have a lower end quality and noise on the line... due to the length of the wire but sunrocket's VoIP service works just fine.
Plus dude its only $17 per month.... do you get this with your beautiful Vonage evil VoIP provider... I'll bit not.
my 2 cents.
Here's the deal: I provide IP packets to you, and you see that you make a best effort to deliver them to where they're intended. You also make a best effort to deliver IP packets to me that are intended for me that you receive.
What's the problem here?
Yes, yes, we know what the problem is: instead of acting like an ISP, many ISPs deliver "that thar intarweb".
That's why I only deal with ISPs without bullshit TOS. Granted, I pay closer to US$70 a month instead of $19.95 for my 1.5Mx384k service, but at least I know what I'm getting.
You could've hired me.
I have an opeser server that I'm still working out basic service issues on. It turns out that different firewalls/routers/whatever impact sip service differently.
The same problem experienced by many different users, (My SIP phone doesn't work) has many different solutions depending on their network set up. This would very easily be way outside the usual scripted tech support.
Now, there's some skype magic that resolves all of this, but I just wonder if their magic doesn't work in every instance.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I would like to test the claim.
/.er's come up with a well designed test that can definitively confirm/deny the claim, then I'll provide a small number of SIP (not vonage) accounts to the test pool.
Is setting up comcast customer accounts and then placing a number of calls to others a good enough test?
If fellow
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Comcast does a LOT of blocking. If you download more than Comcast wants you to download, you will find that new downloads are interrupted by the company's system, even if they are very small.
Comcast is a VERY aggressive company. Stay away if you possibly can. Every Comcast advertisement I've seen contains at least one sneaky statement.
--
Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?
I forgot to make my point. Comcast seems to block or slow or extinguish ALL traffic besides light browsing. It doesn't matter if it is BitTorrent or any other technology.
I have Comcast regular cable as well as high speed Internet. The cable picture is awful, they blackout major network affiliates if there is already one present (i.e. we used to get 2 NBC's and 2 FOX's, now we get one of each and two channels of a blue screen). They have the stranglehold on us - no other cable providers are in the area. How is there supposed to be free enterprise when people like Comcast come along? And that's right, Comcastic is not a word, I can't stress that enough.
Plus dude its only $17 per month
Apparently they are running a special that if you renew prior prior to your year running out, they'll give you 13 months for the $199 (which then puts the price around $15.30/month). I'm not sure of the exact details though, my wife took care of this a couple weeks ago.
Vonage evil VoIP provider
I'm not against Vonage or any other VoIP provider myself. The competition can only help us, the consumers. Vonage certainly does a lot of marketing that SunRocket hasn't so they are doing a lot of the promotion to the masses. In fact, I don't remember exactly how I found SunRocket (likely a just a random search for VoIP information back when we were considering to switch).
Oh...I hate to feed the trolls...but, can't...help....myself.
I'm not sure why the racist card was thrown...no mention of anything to trigger that. And as far as the cutting off of fellow Americans contacting him abroad, I'm sure he'd try to be on the lookout for messages from friends he knew was travelling out of the US.
But, I think possibly the deeper reaction here is how maybe Europeans don't understand why we in the US aren't more world travellers. I'd dare guess that the majority of US citizens never leave our borders in their lifetimes. Often, it just isn't required...the US is such a large and diverse land mass...you can do so much in the US without leaving the country. We have snow skiing and other winter sports areas...desert...pick your ocean to go to the beach...etc. This maybe is lost on other countries that are used to travelling so much. In Europe, there are SO many countries all bunched up together. You can drive less than a day in some areas and hit 2-3 countries. In the US, you can drive a whole day and never get through one state (TX for example)...unless there is a real compelling reason, many US citizens never need to leave the country.
I wouldn't say I'm well travelled...but, I've been out a bit. I've been to Paris and London, Cabo San Lucas and other places in MX, and in the Caribbean. But, frankly, I'm not really too hip on travelling outside the country much anymore. The political climate out is just a little 'hot' for me. There seems to be a great deal of anti-US sentiment out there...and I'd just soon avoid a club bombing, kidnapping, etc.
It's too bad really...I used to really want to explore places like Thailand and all...but, these days...just would not feel safe travelling in that area of the world.
I would venture to guess, this is a thought that weights heavy on other Americans that might be considering travelling abroad.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Using 64kbps is useless anyway, unless vonage does end-to-end between 2 vonage customers. Because if it has to go over POTS at any point, it has to be kicked down to 8kbps as that's all that POTS can handle.
If you notice, phone calls sound incredibly shitty on FM radio shows. Why? Because FM is at 64kbps and POTS is at 8.
I don't get it.
They've called me a few times to try and sell me their VOIP service.
First call they offered FREE installation and 34.95 a month.
Second call they offered me FREE installation and 19.95 for three months, then 34.95 a month
Third call they offered me FREE installation, three months FREE and 34.95 a month after that.
Each time I asked them, "How is it that Comcast can not compete with the other VOIP folks regarding price?" I have Packet 8 VOIP and i LOVE it!
Two of the responses were, "I'm not sure about that sir, thanks for your time"
The third guy actually said to me, "Well. We can offer better quality service because we designed it." I said, "So Comcast is not using the standard VOIP protocols?" and he said, "Umm. I don't know about that but I do know that our service is better than what the other companies can offer."
Oh Ok.. Whatever that means. Comcast also does NOT offer all of the features that the other companies offer so I'm not sure HOW they are better.
Screw comcast. The only reason I have them is because they are the only game in town that can offer the volume of HD programming and 6MB down on their net connection.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
I have had Comcast for years and Vonage for about 8 months. I've never had a problem. I had to put a little QualityOfService stuff on my OpenWRT router so I could talk reliably while eMuleing, but...
I dunno what anyone is talking about. I love my Comcast connection. I do pay $10 extra a month to get the 8mbit/768kbit service, but it worked fine before that - I only upgraded cuz I was able to expense it off to my employer and figured "why not?".
I am not astroturfing! I could not ask for a better broadband connection!
(I have been on my Vonage phone for at least 10 hours over the last 3 days - no blocking here)
Forget Qos just let the packets have a go at each other and may the best connection win, this method has worked on the internet for years. YES my quake game is more important than your 911 call HA!
I can confirm Shaw being shit for Vonage. A friend of mine just got Vonage after I got it here in BC, I'm on DSL and other than an issue with the Linksys modem I was using (switched to a D-Link 300G and things are solid) my Vonage works pretty good 95% of the time, about as expected.
... coincidence?
Now, my friend in Saskatoon decided to do the same after I was calling him on it, he is on Shaw. So, he gets his hardware and calls me, wow, breakups like crazy, you couldn't really talk to him. He calls Shaw, of course they give the speech about Extreme service and how that will fix everything. So, he signed up for that, it did drastically improve his calls but still not perfect. Now there are only minor drops but they are still there.
Meanwhile I just spent 65 minutes on the Vonage phone with a client in California also on Vonage, the call sounded excellent, not a single drop and it sounded like he was next door. He is on Verizon Fibre apparently.
Shaw are a strange beast to begin with, I run a gaming server for a bunch of us and a guy in Edmonton on Shaw gets a 20-30ms ping to this server in Seattle, even better than some people in Vancouver are getting, and yet my friend in Saskatoon on Shaw gets 100-130ms ping. Nice routing there.
Shaw's Vonage issues strangely got worse when they started to introduce the Shaw Digital Phone bundle too
You don't have to be the only ISP in the country to enjoy monopoly status. If you have no choice of ISP, then Comcast is a monopoly to you. As such, they are restricted by law from abusing their monopoly privilege.
If they are imposing bitrate limits on a competing service, sue their ass! Buy a Vonage phone just to get in on the class action lawsuit!
A well-regulated capitalism is great. In an unregulated capitalism (such as Somalia) things don't work the way Penn Jillette seems to think they will. That is false, or at least a gross oversimplification, to the point of misrepresentation. Even Hill's Great Northern Railway had significant investment from local governments, and most railways in the USA recieved titanic subsidies directly from Washington. The US federal government has given unbelievable amounts of tax money, public land, and land seized from private owners to railway profiteers from at least 1862 (look that up) to the present day (all aboard, Amtrak!).
Eventually private industry destroyed the US rail business, in order to reap profit at the expense of the very people who paid tax dollars to create it, by creating a gasoline and rubber based transit system dominated by Standard Oil. Look it up. The men who did it were popularly known as the "Robber Barons" and they are idolized by the Ayn Rand gang.
Neither private industry (with the exception of the aforementioned James Hill, a great man) nor the US government has anything to be proud of where railroads are concerned. US railroad history does not serve as an example of the right way to do anything.
Second of all, broadband will *never* *ever* be free. We may see a radical overhaul and change in the way traditional phone companies work and perform business, but don't fall into the trap that it will someday be free. Telephone calls won't be free either, as once (if) the telephone companies fold they'll simply charge more for the pipe. And this isn't even taking into account the fact that they'll most likely have to improve their network in order to support the increased traffic, passing the cost onto you.
Quote: BTW, Wimacs is WIFI long range, 20-30 miles or so.
Erm, incorrect again Mr. Expert. Real-world tests show around 3-5 miles of connectivity. Theoretically, it can cover around 30 miles with a direct line of sight, but it'll be hard to get this (IMHO) in the real world.
-plasticmonkey.
Tax dollars paid for the right-of-way development that allows Comcast to reach their customers, and continue to pay for the (expensive) maintenance of the infrastructure that allows access to that right-of-way.
I believe this is the argument for the creation of "Common Carrier" status, which the Supreme Court has ruled does not apply to Internet delivery systems (one assumes the Justices are controlled by radio signals from Pluto nowadays, since their decisions don't seem to have much to do with mere human concerns).
Taxation to fund private, profitmaking industries is coercion, right? So I'm coerced to pay for Comcast's monopoly, even if I'm not a customer.
Comcast's monopoly on cable access to my area probably could not exist in a truly free market. Only government sponsorship prevents local entrepreneurs from being able to compete on a fair basis.
They must be specifically targetting Vonage - and if thats true, they will get an earfull from me - however ...
;)! (Bittorent absou-fucking-lutely will melt your router!)
I use VOIP on it all the time - but my provider is a much smaller\less well known carrier. The only issues I have are when I'm running assloads of torrents
The other obvious possiblity is that the peering point at which Vonage is connected to Comcast is simply getting overloaded - i.e. Vonage is a victim of its own success
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
The only reason that the ISPs can engage in application based service provision and traffic shaping is that we're allowing it!
If we all start using Encapsulated Security Protocol (ESP, part of IP Security), all they get to see is the IP addresses in the IP header - the rest is ESP with an encrypted payload. No more traffic shaping on an application basis because they can't see the transport protocol in use (e.g. TCP, UDP), let alone what application is in use. All they can do is traffic analysis, and shaping based on who you're talking to, but not what you're saying.
A well-regulated capitalism is great. In an unregulated capitalism (such as Somalia) things don't work the way Penn Jillette seems to think they will.
Excluded middle fallacy. It is false that if we do NOT have government interference, then we necessarily have Somalia.
Why didn't you compare government interference to say, pre-PRC Hong Kong? Don't you think that Somalia, considering ALL the factors that make it a shithole, is a poor example to hold up as representative of something free from government interference? The Somalian government doesn't seem so keen on interfering with the pirates which plague their coastline!
The US federal government has given unbelievable amounts of tax money, public land, and land seized from private owners to railway profiteers from at least 1862 (look that up) to the present day (all aboard, Amtrak!).
I'm with you so far with the government being the bad guy.
Eventually private industry destroyed the US rail business
It seems like from your own reasoning above that it was government interference which was screwing things up all along! It's not like the "railway profiteers" could have gotten far without the deadly force of government, correct?
The men who did it were popularly known as the "Robber Barons" and they are idolized by the Ayn Rand gang.
Show me:
1) these evil men whom you call "Robber Barons"
2) what they did that infringed on other individuals' rights to life, liberty, and property
3) how what they did is consistent with objectivist ethics
Parroting the "Robber Baron" rhetoric proves nothing.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I agree. Living in California I don't even have to leave the state to experience an entire range of climates. We have amusement parks here. We have got it all. Lots of high tech industry corps are head quartered here. Life is good being a Californian. Go bush! Go Arnold! Go USA!!!
Charles Wyble System Engineer
I talked my parents into converting to Comcast from a local dial-up ISP. They loved it, until we realized that they could not use Skype anymore. The quality of the connection dropped severely. Clearly not a bandwidth issue, since the local dial-up ISP worked fine, and for all other uses the cable connection was much faster.
Just one little data point.
The whores get mad when the sluts give it away for free.
Hi Loundry! I mighta known you'd be a Randite Libertarian (I assume you won't take that as an insult).
Since I've been voting libertarian for at least a decade, it amuses me that you'd call my reasoning "anti-libertarian". But that's neither here nor there. Anyway, to take a stab at your points:
* I didn't state that Somalia is the only alternative to "government interference". In fact I never mentioned "government interference" I said "regulation" which is a less rhetorically loaded word. But in any case your accusation of logical fallacy is at least as well directed at your straw man here. It is impossible for me to list all possible outcomes of a nearly infinite spectrum of activities so providing a single illustrative example of one possible outcome is perfectly valid logically. You are welcome to submit counter-examples, as you have with pre-communist Hong Kong. In turn I can dispute your counter-example, for instance by pointing out that British Crown Colonies had *lots* of regulations governing trade and property.
* Government is not always bad. It keeps Elohim City terrorists from murdering you in your sleep, for example. Your "all government bad, no government good" absolutism is as overly simplistic as your anti-Islam nonsense.
* The destruction of the railways was wrought by men like Cornelius Vanderbilt who looted the companies' assets while sucking up government subsidies. Look up the Credit Mobilier scandal for an example of the kind of behaviours that I'm talking about (although I don't remember if Vanderbilt was actually involved in that; I think he did his damage much later). It wasn't government interference that made them unprofitable and I did not claim that it was. Your proposal that "they couldn't have gotten as far" without "government interference" is just another instance of you trotting out the "government interference" meme at the slightest opportunity.
You said "show me these evil men you call Robber Barons". Actually everybody calls them that, but let's take Cornelius Vanderbilt as an example. Have you ever heard of the Walker Expedition? Does paying mercenaries to take over another country as a business gambit (perhaps you've heard Vanderbilt's "I shall destroy you" quote, but you don't know how that relates to murder, rapine, and betrayal in South America?). I think that covers the "show me what they did that infringed on other individuals' rights to life liberty and property" pretty well, too, so I'll skip that one. Seriously, read a biography of Walker.
You also said "Show me how what they [Robber Barons] did is consistent with objectivist ethics". Well, I've only read The Fountainhead, We the Living, and Atlas Shrugged - that was enough for me - but as far as I can tell "objectivism" is a schlock excuse for a philosophy that was fundamentally created as a marketing vehicle when Ayn Rand's fantasy of being raped by Frank Lloyd Wright (Fountainhead) sold a lot of copies. Perhaps you can tell me why that's wrong? It seems to me that her winner-take-all-blame-the-victim attitude was mostly just playing up to the anti-communist fanatics (not that she didn't have reason to hate communism, I admit) so she wouldn't have to dig ditches for a living. And in case you weren't aware of it, Rand models some of her heroes (particularly in Atlas) on people who were called "Robber Barons". Hank Riordan is pretty obviously Andrew Carnegie, don't you think? The bleeding heart who has to be persuaded by his peers (Barons Gould, Vanderbilt, Morgan, etc.) that his desire to help others is evil, and that all altruism is bad? Well, maybe not. Carnegie did let Frick and the Pinkertons murder striking steel workers, hiding out in Scotland while all the dirty work was done.
Hmmm. That paragraph probably qualifies as flamebait, but I believe it to be true (and you asked, after all) so I'll take my lumps.
And y'know, I've read a lot of your posts and I've never seen you deviate from your party line - none of which is at all original - so accusing me of "parroting rhetoric" is also pretty funny.
Me: Maybe you don't realize it, but those old private roads were often closed to minorities such as blacks, irish, chinese, and unaccompanied women
Rene: So. What part of "private" don't you understand?
Me again: Uh, dude, I just demonstrated that I understand "private" quite well, and furthermore I've shown why I think private ownership of the roads can be a bad thing. Ever read "The Wealth of Nations"? Adam Smith proposes that increasing the number of interconnections between people and places increases opportunities to create wealth (oversimplification, look it up if you want more). Restricting travel to the privileged classes pretty clearly restricts trade and thus decreases the opportunities for people to better themselves.
But I'm not going to debate you if you are going to defend racism. That battle's just about over where I live, thank god, and I can quite cheerfully blow the fucking head off anybody that tries to burn a cross in my yard.
But I live in Florida. I can tell you that the 1,000,000 plus people that lost power and phones here last year would have been seriously impacted by HAM radio interference. Your faster web surfing is not worth peoples lives.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A. They don't block ports
B. Your signal levels coming into your house are probably bad, or you have a bad split in the house somewhere. Keep in mind, every time you split that coax that your signal gets cut in half depending on what type of splitter you put on the line
C. From what I understand, their VOIP service isn't like vonage, and it runs over their private network
D. If you have an issue, don't complain about it here. Call them and tell them exactly what's happening. I let my lower channels stay fuzzy for three years without calling, blaming it on them. They came out an reran the line to my house and I haven't had any issues with cable or net since.
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
There is a paucity of geek-friendly ISPs.
I remember reading something, years back when dial-up was still common, about how there was an ISP in California and another in Hawaii that offered dial-up service for only $15/mo instead of $20/mo in exchange for not having any technical support. You can sign up, cancel service, and get a few basic numbers (phone, DNS, etc, and that was it). I thought that that was just the greatest thing ever.
I'd love to find an ISP that offers multiple static IPs, that doesn't block port 25 (so I can run my own mail server instead of having to buy commercial service) and various other incoming and outbound ports, but it seems that geek-friendly ISPs are scarce as hens teeth. Telerama, a Pittsburgh-based ISP, really made me happy when I lived in Pittsburgh, but now I live in New Jersey and am stuck with Comcast. Anyone have suggestions?
The problem is that a libertarians refuse to recognize the existence of natural monpolies. Well, some libertarians do, but the Libertarian Party does not.
Regulation *can* be bad. Regulation is not *always* bad. Until the LP decides to accept that, they're not going to go anywhere as a political party.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
towing the neo-con line.
"Toeing the line". Almost every time that someone tries to use this on Slashdot, they misspell it. I don't know why -- it's not *that* unusual a phrase.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
i was setting up a vonage competitor box for a customer and could not get it to work... a call to bellsouth and i find out that they are blocking port 161 which this box relied on for the call quality management. the bellsouth supervisor came right out and said that they do it to keep out competition.
any dead, unregistered cellphone can call 911, that's a federal requirement. plug in the charger and power it up.
a dead landline won't. I'm unaware of any place where they have to be left connected and powered at the CO for a 911 call. have you any examples?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Hi Loundry! I mighta known you'd be a Randite Libertarian (I assume you won't take that as an insult).
I don't, but it's inaccurate nonetheless. I'm a Eudaimonist. I vote Libertarian, but I am not a member of the party.
In fact I never mentioned "government interference" I said "regulation" which is a less rhetorically loaded word.
They are both equally rhetorically-loaded. Obviously, you think that government's interference in the actions of free indivduals who are doing no harm is sometimes good. Obviously, I strongly disagree.
But in any case your accusation of logical fallacy is at least as well directed at your straw man here. It is impossible for me to list all possible outcomes of a nearly infinite spectrum of activities so providing a single illustrative example of one possible outcome is perfectly valid logically.
My accusing you of a logical fallacy was valid and continues to be, as your implication was that no government interference leads to the shithole of Somalia. I don't expect you to examine something worthy of tens of thousands of words. I only ask you to own up to the fact that it's not fair to hold up the Somalia as necessarily what follows from lack of government interference. I only held up Hong Kong as that which was minimally necessary to show that you were bifurcating.
Government is not always bad. It keeps Elohim City terrorists from murdering you in your sleep, for example. Your "all government bad, no government good" absolutism is as overly simplistic as your anti-Islam nonsense.
Government cannot protect me from terrorists, and I understand that the Supreme Court has held that citizens cannot sue the government for failing to protect them. I never argued that government is always bad, so your accusation of my absolutism is a straw man. My antagonistic feelings toward Islam are not nonsense, and I am happy to discuss them with you. You may begin by explaining to me why the violent verses of Sura 9 are not binding upon Muslims today. As a gay parent, I think I have good reason to be greatly concerned about Islam.
Your proposal that "they couldn't have gotten as far" without "government interference" is just another instance of you trotting out the "government interference" meme at the slightest opportunity.
This borders on ad hominem. You yourself admitted that the government plundered money from taxpayers and seized property from other individuals to give to the men that you hate. It is the government's actions here (and in countless other examples in this and other countries) that you have admitted to which causes me to distrust government. Do you agree that the government was party to the wills of the evil individuals that you deplore?
You said "show me these evil men you call Robber Barons". Actually everybody calls them that
No, everyone does not call them that.
Have you ever heard of the Walker Expedition? Does paying mercenaries to take over another country as a business gambit
No, I have not. And this was the very point of my third question: show me how their actions are consistent with objectivist ethics. You mentioned that "Randites" would love this man, but if his actions are inconsistent with objectivist ethics, then why would they?
as far as I can tell "objectivism" is a schlock excuse for a philosophy that was fundamentally created as a marketing vehicle when Ayn Rand's fantasy of being raped by Frank Lloyd Wright (Fountainhead) sold a lot of copies. Perhaps you can tell me why that's wrong?
It is wrong because it is an attack on Ayn Rand's character rather than a philosophical criticism of objectivism.
It seems to me that her winner-take-all-blame-the-victim attitude was mostly just playing up to the anti-communist fanatics (not that she didn't have reason to hate communism, I admit) so she wouldn't have to dig ditches for a living.
"Winner take all" is not part of objectivist ethics,
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Ok everyone. Now this isn't really a news story but I am so frustrated with the terrible weekend I had attempting to complete a VERY simple procedure with Vonage's Customer Service/Technical Service that I wanted to share and warn other users.
Jeffrey Citron-Chairman
Michael Snyder-CEO
John Rego-CFO
Louis Mamakos-CTO
Sharon O'Leary-Chief Legal Officer
Michael Tribolet-President, Vonage America
Louis Holder-EVP Product Development
Bill Rainey-President, Vonage Canada
Kerry Ritz-Managing Director, Vonage UK
All of you listed above, You Suck! I am so tired of not being able to get anything but the most simple tasks or questions answered because Vonage uses overseas outsourced call centers. Now, I work in IT so I understand the need for many companies to use these, however these aren't even "good" outsourced call centers. They are all heavily accented and all completely unempowered to work outside the given script.
I spent 6 hours Friday with another Vonage customer attempting to move a Vonage telco device from his service to mine. It wasn't until we were finally connected to the advanced support center in Holmdel, NJ that someone actually knew what the heck they were talking about and fixed the problem. The sad part was it took Mark at the US call center 5 minutes to actually do what we needed, but it took us 6 hours to get there.
If that wasn't frustrating enough there isn't even anywhere to go and complain about this problem. They have absolutely NO QUALITY CONTROL devices such as after call surveys, operator numbers or even a simple email address I can send my frustrations to. As a result, I had all the classic bad customer service experiences rolled into one:
The classic phantom disconnect after being on hold for 17 minutes.
The repeated transfers to 'other departments' which all seem to have the same phone queue--Not surprisingly none of the people we were transferred to could fix the problem either.
The, 'What you are asking for is not possible' idiotic response.
Flat refusal to be connected to a supervisor by a CSR.
Other CSRs who said they were connecting us to a supervisor, but simply rerouted us to the back of the hold queue for the same call center.
Refusal to be connected to advanced support in Holmdel, NJ.
Being told that based on the MAC address on the bottom of my device that the device did not exist.
Being told the only way to complete this would be if the other party terminated their Vonage service.
Listening to literally hours of terribly distorted hold music because they have the bandwidth dialed down so far on their customer service lines.
I am so frustrated with vonage at this point I'm looking around at other VoIP providers. I have both a home and business account with vonage and I am frankly tired of their terrible customer service. The competition for this type of business is simply too tight to do this to customers for long and Vonage seems only to be getting worse. There are many other companies out there with very similar or cheaper pricing structures. Frankly, price isn't everything to me at this point, though. Who knows, I might just call back my ILEC and order a land-line again. At least I can understand what they are saying when they answer the phone.