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Vonage Files Regulatory Complaint Over QoS Premium
xoip writes "A Recent CBC report says that Vonage Canada has filed a complaint with Federal Regulators over a New $10.00 per month Quality of Service Premium that Broadband Internet provider, Shaw Cable has begun charging customers of VoIP.
Noted Internet Legal expert Michael Geist has written an excellent review of the complaint Vonage made to the CRTC and highlights the point made in the Vonage filing, 'that not enough is known at this point about the Shaw service in order to formulate an appropriate regulatory response.'"
This is a good reason for me not to use thier service anymore. I use primus' VOIP telephone and Ive noticed its cutting in and out lately. This is just bogus and If it continues they will lose me as an internet customer. Shaw also recently announced thier VOIP service so this has to be considered anti-competitive.
Vonage and other VoIP providers are getting shafted by Sasktel a major Canadian telco. Sasktel is a crown corporation, and own the lines in Saskatchewan. It was only recently that other providers were permitted to sell long distance there, and Saskatchewanians can't get a VoIP phone number with their local area code because Sasktel charges Vonage too much for a block of numbers. They claim they are selling them at a price that's in line with other regions, but how come in every other Canadian province you can get a local area code for your VoIP phone?
Oh You POS
Yes, but unfortunately it is inaccesible to you unless you sign up to pay an extra $10 per month for the higher-tier service.
Sure... just read a previous article, where hundreds of people pontificate on how bad a 2-tier 'Net is.
In short: It breaks the end-to-end quality of the Internet, and betrays the very concept of the Internet. It's greedy telcos trying to double-dip on website owners: Owners already paid for bandwidth, and I already paid for DSL: These telcos want them to pay again for the continued non-suckage of their connection.
This defensive action by Vonage is a good justification for their somewhat annoying presence in the industry. It would be much more likely to protect the entire industry, including random newcomers, if the various VoIP carriers could get together in an industry association. But they couldn't even get together to grap the pronouncable acronym "VIP". So meanwhile, at least there's an agressive asskicker in Vonage to clear the way for the rest to follow.
--
make install -not war
In other news, telcos announce those who pay a special premium will receive trailers of a new movie! Natalie Portman: Naked, Petrified, and Covered in Hot Grits.
Grammar Nazi
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
I'm a Vonage and Shaw customer, having moved last fall to the Victoria, BC area from Toronto, and want to comment on this.
First off, while I'm as irritated and confused as everyone else, this fee is optional. Shaw isn't automatically charging people who use VoIP this extra fee. Apparantly, this is an added fee that VoIP users can pay to get better guaranteed QoS for their voice data packets.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this, and at this time have no intention to pay the fee. On one hand, giving voice data network prioritization isn't necessarily a bad thing -- most home VoIP NAT routers provide a QoS service to do just this so downloads don't obliterate your ability to use your phone. At the same time, nobody else is charging these fees, and respecting QoS for VoIP packets isn't going to cost Shaw anything, so why should the consumer pay for such a service int he first place?
Shaw called me a few weeks ago asking me about my phone service, in an attempt to sell me on their new VoIP-based service. I told them I have Vonage. They asked me what services I was getting, and listed off the litany of services I'm getting. Then they asked me the price -- and suffice to say, I'm getting way more from Vonage, and am paying less. The phone jockey on the other end didn't know what to say about that, so just said "Uh, thanks, sorry for bothering you" and hung up.
As to the actual quality of service I'm getting -- I haven't had a single drop-out in my VoIP service in the two months that I've had it. Not a single blip. However, I also use iChat AV pretty heavily to take to family back home, and I have been having significant drop-outs in both audio and video conferences with family back in Toronto in recent weeks, where these problems didn't exist before. It's hard to say exactly where the fault lies, but I've been getting drop-outs galore in both audio-only and video conference mode between here and Toronto in the last month. I do have to recognise, however, that I do live on an island, and have no idea what the maximum bandwidth is like between the mainland and here. I can only believe that bandwidth usage is increasing, but at this time have no idea whether or not Shaw is working on running more underwater cabling between the mainland and Vancouver Island. It could just be because (due to time zones) my iChat AV conversations generally take place during peak hours.
So far, Vonage has been problem free, but I'm not a heavy phone user (I'm only paying for the 500 minute/month plan, with another 500 minutes through the soft phone option. I generally don't come even close to the 500 minutes per month). Perhaps I've just been lucky thus far. I have no intention to pay them another $10 a month just to get the service I'm already paying for, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my thus-far trouble free VoIP experience doesn't negatively change in the future.
Yaz.
This defensive action by Vonage is a good justification for their somewhat annoying presence in the industry.
I'll dare to take a contrarian view here on Vonage's position, as well as Shaw's. Having dealt with at least a few dozen Vonage customers who have been escalated to second level support and gotten me, I've encountered a rather consistent situation where nearly every customer was told by Vonage support technicians that "their ISP was having problems - call them" yet the real problem ended up being in the customer's home LAN, home cabling, home equipment, home router, etc.
Troubleshooting home VoIP with non-technical users is a bitch. I won't even begin to elaborate on the horror stories, other than to say they don't have a clue and end up taking you 30-45 minutes to figure out they've got silver satin, brother-in-law wired "straight-thru cable" (non-TIA spec), wifi AP sitting on top of the microwave oven (solved that one yesterday - "damn your Internet! My phone calls quit working every time my wife heats up her coffee - what kinda network you losers run?!!"). I can't tell you how frustrating it is to deal with this, when I've put myself thru Cisco VoIP classes and run a clean, rock solid Asterisk PBX 60 miles away from my home to carry big city dial-tone to my rural BFE home.
Yet in every case, Vonage pushed these people off and blamed something else. They refused to do basic troubleshooting, and made it the ISP's problem. They accuse us of owning the problem, and when the customer calls, they have an "expert" claiming we're at fault. So we bear the expense and end up doing Vonage customer support with no compensation for a level two+ tech's time, at a minimum internal rate of $75/hour and at least a half hour wasted.
All of that for $10 a month? That's a steal. Quit complaining and pay the fee, or expect that the next time you call us, we'll tell you to call that exceptional Vonage tech support back and bother them.
Vonage's network is running on other company's support expertise right now, intentional or not. Don't expect this to last. We added a step in the expert system in February to actually solve the problem and sell the customer into a Vonage competitor's platform where we get a small $25 commission. The result is a happy customer with working VoIP, working support and partial compensation for our effort. Vonage won't last if other providers mitigate their Vonage tech support incompetence risk this way.
Humph, I forgot to push the Post Anonymously button again. Oh nevermind...
I didn't pay the "radio button and interactive HTML" fee!
Netbooks, they come with Linux or a $3 copy of Windows. Either way, Microsoft loses.
I don't have a problem with this IF Shaw is honoring QoS flagged packets and routing them accordingly. If it's just a bullshit fee where Shaw is purposefully degrading service when it identifies VoIP protocols or ports only to restore service when the fee is paid, then I have a problem. I guess what I am trying to say is I think it's OK if you pay to receive an additional service versus paying a fee to restore service you should be receiving in the first place.
I want to believe Shaw is acting in good faith and offering something to customers of value. Their Internet service has always been very good for me; their mail servers suck, but that's a different story.
As someone pointed out, if Shaw only dealt with the SPAM zombies and compromised Windows boxes on their network there would be plenty more bandwidth to go around for VoIP. I am currently on Telus and you wouldn't believe the number of intrusion attempts I receive from Shaw netblocks.
Rogers (formerly a Shaw area) around here has Ultra-Lite, Lite, Express (3Mbit down), and Extreme (6Mbit down). Each provides a different maximum speed and level of service for customers who feel the need to save money and receive a service comparable to just over dialup, to extreme for users who want 6Mbit downstream. You get more capability and pay a premium for the ability to burst into higher speeds, despite most users sitting at idle for much of the time, and still having a total transfer cap.
What Vonage is claiming is that this is different than any other sort of service addition (and that this makes them priced higher than Ma Bell and hence can't compete, or can't compete with similar offerings in the area).
My argument is that they are saying "our service does not guarentee any latency, and we cater more to raw throughput, the traditional measure. We'll give you the possibility to have less latency, which is useful for real-time uses such as voice and video, but for a fee". How is this different than "we'll give you the possibility to have higher burst speeds useful for mass file transfers".
Users with specific uses that aren't a part of 'the masses' will get charged. I pay a few dollars a month extra on my phone line for touch-tone. I pay for the ability to use on-demand with Rogers. I pay a premium for GSM versus using EDGE/GPRS. This is life. You pay for what you use. When _everyone_ has a blackberry- then the standard rates will include it. Until then, the people who want e-mail will pay for it, so that those who don't won't have to.
This of course all assumes that they actually take these into account and that they do benefit their service. If it's a scam, then we have another story.
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Most of us are assuming that providers who charge a extra "VoIP fee" are just looking for more money. This idea is upheld, because users on all the reported ISPs who are charging the fee report problems with voip service when not paying the "protection money".
I think another question comes to the service though. Should a internet provider really be giving priority to conversations? Normally if you want better service (for gaming as an example), you get the best package that your ISP will sell you. Normally this type of upgrade doesn't give you better priority on the network, it just gives you a wider bandwidth. I think it begs the question: why should other users suffer a lower priority connection to help other internet users who are on VoIP?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I mean, really. Vonage is using telco infrastructure to undercut a major telco profit center, without paying a them a dime for the privelege. Packets don't magically wing their way across the globe, you know.
If the phone business goes away, telcos are going to have to make up for it somewhere, and the only place left will be bandwidth...that stuff that we get for a flat rate now.
Metered priority usage paid by the user is the only really fair way to do it. You need a lot of packets, you pay more. You need a lot of fast high priority packets, you pay a lot more.
Tracking all this is a another can of worms entirely....but dammit, this is how it SHOULD work.
I think you are misunderstanding QoS and how it works.
.008 mbps)
VOIP does not take up significant bandwidth; usuallly only 8kbps per call (yes,
The main factor affecting VIOP quality is latency... high latency, or worse, fluctuating latency realy screws things up.
With QoS, you can still use your full 6mbps connection, it's just that the few voip packets you send out get priority, so the call sounds good.
Similarly, if I set up my network so that even when the internet connection is pegged, my SSH sessions get priority, I can leave my connection slammed with downloads, and still comfortably work on remote terminal sessions as if the pipe is clean.
Simply buying a bigger pipe to increase latency for a small fraction of your packets is like killing a mosquito with a cannon, it's wasteful and clumsy.
A game of Counterstrike takes a heck of a lot more bandwidth than a VOIP call.
An internet provider is an independent network that wants to provide you with transit services between your network and other people's networks; tehy should be free to offer you any package they want, as long as they are straightforward about it.
Another point.
The only reason to get a faster connection is because you are already using all the bandwidth. Simple QoS on your home router can deal with prioritizing your own traffic, but only as far as your router. This works great, and lets you download like mad and still use voip or play counterstrike effectively.. . provided your isp's network is not saturated.
Shaw operates a cable network; segments get saturated easily, especially upstream. All they are offering you is the same QoS you do yourself at home, but across their entire network. They are not suggesting reducing everone elses bandwidth.
One could guess that if this isn't implemented right, people could sign up for VOIP QoS and then route all their protocols masqueraded as VOIP, hogging the network, but generally when you set latency guarnatess, you do it for only a certain amount of bandwidth... say 24kbps low latency queue, and the rest queued normally. (so up to 24kbps of matching traffic gets priority, the rest goes normally)
I think we need to examine Shaw vs Vonage telephony for a minute. ***Disclaimer: After comparing the two services side-by-side, I'm a Shaw Phone customer.
Vonage is VoIP running over standard ethernet on the Internet. It's voice traffic competes with every other data packet on the Internet, no matter if it's on Shaw's network, or Telus' network, or the Internet in general. Vonage is portable and available on any high speed network.
Shaw Phone may technically be VoIP, but it runs on seperate hardware (an independant modem with no active data connections), on a seperate channel allocation than Internet (a managed voice network) and doesn't have to compete with Internet traffic. It's routed to the PSTN without touching the Internet so the voice packets don't require QoS. Shaw's telephony is NOT portable, its for home use only.
This is like comparing apples to oranges. I've tried Vonage and although it worked okay, at times the packet loss was unbearable. I don't care what the excuse is (overloaded nodes, Internet traffic spikes, etc), when I use the phone I just want it to work. Period. I also think that 911 is pretty much a required service and there are some significant differences between Shaw and Vonage in that respect, but thats a different debate. Shaw Phone isn't perfect, but its certainly better than Vonage in my experience.
The QoS service definitely isn't a tax because its not mandatory and Vonage works as advertised without it. Besides all that, Shaw can only offer QoS on their own network. Once the traffic leaves their network QoS is meaningless. Would I subscribe to QoS? Probably not, but then again I'm not using Vonage.
And to the earlier poster who suggested that Shaw should reduce the number of customer spambots on their networks to reduce traffic overhead - I couldn't agree more. Turn that bandwidth shaping towards the spam relays and cut their service until they correct their problems. They'd probably gain a significant amount of usable bandwidth for the effort.
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" -- Red Green
If they'll let me pay $10 a month to prioritize VoIP, can I pay them $10 to prioritize my bittorrent packets? Or can I use the VoIP prioritization to sidestep their traffic shaping.
Since Christmas, torrent traffic has been badly shaped on Shaw...when it takes 72 hours to download the just-released Gentoo install CD from their tracker, you know something's wrong. It's not like it wasn't well-seeded....
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
My main problem with Vonage is it's simply not very reliable. People seem to assume the internet connection itself is the weak link, but my experience has been just the opposite. Every time the phone goes out, I check my Internet connection and it's just fine. Sometimes unplugging the SIP box for a moment causes Vonage to start working again. That's just ridiculous. I will give Vonage one thing, at least they provide voicemail that still works when the service to my home is down.
I have Shaw internet, I also have subscribed to their QOS enhancement (as per this discussion), and I use wholesale VOIP (rather than Vonage). I'm actually thinking of cancelling the QOS for technical rather than ideological (*emotional* -- as per this story) reasons.
The QOS enhancement was hidden away inside of the Shaw website, and most of the customer service people I talked to had no clue what it was. This was about 4 months ago when I first signed up for it. I finally did find someone who knew what it was. They said:
- It enhanced service for internet. They didn't really say how much or what I would notice
- Shaw's internet phone uses a separate network or channel, and does not use their regular internet channels
- The QOS enhancement is only applicable to their internet service, and does not put your VOIP traffic over their separate network for Shaw internet phone.
- Cable modems on shaw (at least mine) support DOCSIS 2.0, and apparently (I'm not an expert) it has QOS capability along with the rest of their network outlay.
QOS
- This QOS thing is technically possible from the Shaw end, but the question of performance is a large one
- I haven't really noticed either a degredation or improvement in voip... But then I haven't been monitoring carefully
- I think the time when I need it most -- when Shaw's network is otherwise saturated -- is when it will pay, but I suspect those times are rare.
The two big problems I see:
- The biggest problem I can see is that the QOS enhancement is only valid over Shaw's network, and if your voip provider doesn't peer directly with shaw, your voip packets will be at some other carrier's mercy once they leave shaw
- The second biggest problem is ping times. Some of my VOIP providers are 13 hops from where I am (and three network peering points away), and even with QOS there is no way to keep round trip delay to less than 100 milliseconds -- at which point the lag is noticable and gets irritating. No amount of QOS from shaw will fix the number of hops.
Conclusion
The lesson to learn is that QOS is useful if you are on a saturated part of the shaw network, you call during busy times of the day AND (this is important) your voip provider is a short number of hops from you AND ON THE SHAW NETWORK!
Otherwise save your money. Oh yeah, and write letters to the CRTC to get them to stop Shaw, Bell and Telus from doing this two tier internet garbage!
From their news release section:C -AC99-136A5C2EA420/0/VonageMar8.pdf
http://www.shaw.ca/NR/rdonlyres/A19222AC-750B-42C
From my interpretation, if you want better QoS, you pay the $10/month - so you get a less likely chance that your packets won't get dropped on network saturation.
Also they like to sell there own phone service saying it eventually connects to a phone line so it doesn't go over the internet but only there private manage IP network.
Controlling the QOS on your ISP network is a hell of a lot better than What vonage currently offers. No control at all. But thats what happens when you don't own the infrastructure. the infrastructure provider saw a chance to make your service better and make money off of it. And by god, who is Vonage to tell me what i can and what i can't classify packets on my network as?
See, cable companies can't compete with vonage on price. They actually pay for their infrastructure. What they can do is make Vonage better. For a price. And vonage is bitching because.. why? oh yeah.. the cable companies would be making money off of vonages software platform.. ironic isnt it?