Ahead of IPO, Vonage Faces User Complaints

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Internet phone-service provider Vonage (whose planned IPO was mentioned on Slashdot last week) is confronting complaints of poor sound quality, dropped calls and other glitches, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Customers who try to leave are complaining of bureaucratic hassles and snafus, particularly when they seek to switch services and take their numbers with them. Ironically, Vonage has long complained that local phone giants drag their feet in releasing the phone numbers of customers who want to leave.'"

Comments

Traffic shaping in linux

[pigeon768]

I've been using an old pentium 2 with 2 nics I bought for $5 as a router for a few years now, rather than a traditional cable/dsl router. It does traffic shaping, and works very well.

With my old router, I'd have to turn off bittorrent whenever I wanted to play a multiplayer game. Now, I just leave my client running full speed all the time, and don't notice any extra lag, either in games or in teamspeak/ventrilo.

IMO it's not worth the effort for linux novices. But if you have a bit of experience I'd thoroughly reccomend it. It's cheaper and works better; but administering it can be difficult.

One thing to note is that you can't do anything to shape your download traffic. You can't control the modem sitting on your ISP's end. This is fine though, since download speed is almost always vastly in excess of your upload speed. Other people not understanding what you were saying is evidence of that.

You'll also, in general, decrease your total uploading bandwidth. One of the goals of traffic shaping is to keep the buffer in your cable modem empty; most modems have rather large buffers, which generally makes for a bigger number they can advertise as your uploading bandwidth. However, when the buffer fills up it makes for awful latency.

I can't speak for its effectiveness in reducing Vonage dropped calls or latency or other problems, as I don't have Vonage, but it works great for Teamspeak/Ventrilo, which does pretty much the same thing.