Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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 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.