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Comcast Lying About Vonage
jehnx writes, "Apparently, Comcast is trying some new tricks to get people to sign up for its version of VoIP, 'Comcast Digital Voice,' according to Wang (of WangScript fame). From the blog post: 'Today my wife received a phone call from a Comcast representative who had called to promote their new "Comcast Digital Voice" service... Ordinarily, we don't mind Comcast calling us from time to time with new offers... [but this time] they proceeded to tell LIE after LIE in an attempt to convince us that Vonage was not as good as Comcast Digital Voice. Imagine how many people would be scared into using Comcast Digital Voice because Comcast makes them believe that Vonage is insecure and only works when your PC is turned on.' Is Comcast going a bit far in their techniques to lure in new customers?"
no encryption at all. Man in the middle attacks are very possible.
...to hear of Comcast lying about a competitor's product. Next thing you know, they'll claim that satellite TV goes out every time it rains.
do you really think this is Comcast, or some jerk rep that's trying to meet his quota or make an extra few $ on commission!
(Why did this posting make it through?)
IANAL, but it sounds more like a case for a libel suit, rather than false advertising, if the claims are true.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
In this case Comcast is partially correct.
They are selling a full DQOS phone service. This means that that there is full QOS when on their network. You are guaranteed that you will have the bandwidth for the telephone call. This cannot be said when you are using Vonage. Vonage over a DOCSIS connection is strictly best effort, meaning that you voice packets have no more priority on the line than you neighbors downloads. This will (if it does not already) mean that you will have inferior quality on a Vonage phone vs. the Comcast solution. Also with DQOS from Comcast you get priority for any 911 call. You cannot get this from Vonage.
Disclosure - I do work in the cable industry but for a equipment vendor not Comcast.
And when I compare our VOIP service with Vongage, I use the following facts.
"Vonage requires an internet connection, we do not"
"Vonage routes their calls over the public internet, which may result in poorer quality or dropped calls, we route calls over our private cable network"
"Vonage has a national 911 call center, we route 911 locally in your county"
"We are a local call center, where with Vonage, you may get routed to a call center in East India"
While I'm not exactly a fan of Comcast, its all too easy to get a lone CSR (in any company) who really doesnt know what he/she is talking about and will say just about anything to win back customers.
Heh, the confermation/security word I had to type to post this was "exploit".
The auto industry does this from time-to-time. Why, here's a pull quote:
"Hi, I'm the electric car.
I can't go very fast or drive very far.
And if you drive me, people will think you're gay.
Gay men: 'One of us! One of us!'"
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
The lies you were told were nothing! The sales rep from Comcast told me that Vonage causes cancer, stole my girlfriend, and wrote the screenplay for Firewall!
Not that I'm completely sure of everything, but those old analogue phone lines that got replaced by Vonage service were insecure as can be, and Vonage didn't sell their service because its secure, they sold it because its CHEAPER! I'm also reasonably secure in thinking that Comcast has done more than just lie, I think they have done what they can to mess up how Vonage service routers work. Since Comcast changed to TimeWarner in my area, service has been much better, no dropped packets or dropped Vonage calls.
Comcast has every reason to be underhanded in their dealings with Vonage customers, and not much reason to be worried. Lets guess who spends lots of money in Washington D.C.? Vonage? or maybe its Comcast that spends more?
Verizon is also not trying to play nice either. They only want to offer good deals if you buy bundled services. This is business in the USA.
The whole argument about security is false, misleading, and only made to confuse customers... trouble is the media gets confused too.
It doesn't matter what voice service you use, it is susceptible to interception, end of story. The only thing that you can hope to do is make it more difficult to intercept it. Military grade encryption end-to-end is not available, and the US government won't allow it to be used anyway if they can at all prevent its use. (think of the children, or think of the terrorists) So the argument about which VoIP service is secure is a totally mute point.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Companies often stretch the truth in advertising, sometimes to the point of outright lying, since they know the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) will likely do nothing; when the FTC does act, penalties (if any) are usually very light; $100K or whatever fine is nothing to a company taking in billions.
... with that said, at the moment, Comcast holds the winning hand regardless, since it has its own networks and has the ability to prioritize VOIP unlike Vonage which is basically at the mercy of the telcos, cable companies, etc.
...
On the bright side, Vonage is a big company too, and thus they can afford to play the deceptive ad game too
Old fashioned POTS (plain old telephone service) providers have Vonage beat, since POTS works even when the cable, internet, power, etc go out
Ron
No, they send the information down a different tube
When I hear things like this, I always wonder how much of it is the company and how much or it is the phone operator. I mean, I ahve heard sales people say some amazingly stupid things in the past. Often not because of any intentional malice but simply because they have no clue. Now, think about the person on the other end of the telephone. They are likely fairly young and are being paid ~$8-$9 an hour to sit in a chair and read a script to people on the phone. They have gotten all of an hours training on any given service if they are lucky. Maybe all they got was an e-mail or memo saying what the new spiel was. That, plus some comments overheard in the break room, are all they have to go on and they are being judged on how many people sign up. So, sure some of the time it is intentional corporate lies, but my guess is that it is an issue with the operator more times than not.
PacketCable, which is what is used for these Cable/VoIP lines doesn't (intentionally) work like that.
DOCSIS has excellent QoS support. It supports what are called "Service Flows" when the modem is provisioned in DOCSIS 1.1 mode. Essentially, a service flow creates a secondary pipe to the CMTS that is completely independant of the other ones. Thus, there would be a second service flow, provisioned for 64 or 128Kbps, used only for VoIP, which has a higher priority than the data flow.
When using cable modem service, traffic from Vonage unfortunately falls into the "data" pipe, and therefore gets jumbled with the rest.
I don't feel that Comcast is being anti-competitive at all, they're using a feature of the DOCSIS specification that cable operators devised and use. Perhaps you need to take your case to CableLabs (and get laughed out by them).
-- Joe
In the US, it is _illegal_ to lie about a competitor's product.
IANAL, but _these guys are_
http://www.poznaklaw.com/articles/falsead.htm (horrid seersucker background, but they're spot on)
If this is true, then Comcast is _hosed_ and I would cheer on Vonage's lawsuit.
--
BMO
Ok, not entirely, but Vonage is a completely unencrypted service. It is the same as sending a standard email. If you are ordering things over a Vonage phone line and saying or dialing your credit card number, it is just like emailing it. Grabbing these packets off the internet and replaying them is exceedingly simple. As your voice travels across the internet, any router along that path could be used to dump those packets and a malicious tech or hacker who has gained access to that router can very easily steal your information.
Comcast probably suffers from the exact same problem, although the traffic is probably not traversing multiple provider's networks the way Vonage is and therefore the danger should in theory be less.
From the BPI+ spec: So an HFC network with BPI+ implemented affords more security than a POTS/DSL line since it is encrypted from end to end.
You've obviously never had static/poor call quality on your POTS line. You are lucky.
Also, PacketCable can provide clearer calls.
I personally work for a cable company and can confirm that some in the call center are misinformed about products we provide. I would not put this in the 'malicious lie' category by any stretch. Do you honestly think large telco and cable companies only hire CSRs with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science? Of course some will get it wrong.
This is FUD and I call shenanigans on his wife. I'd bet money the CSR said something about the phone not working when the CPE(customer premise equipment) is not powered. That would be true. That's why cable companies provide batteries for their eMTAs(phone adapters) for when the power goes out as well as UPSs for the CMTSs upstream.
This isn't news to me. On no fewer than three separate occasions in about four years with Comcast, I have had service outages long enough to cause me to brave their call center. Here's the record on this:
1) Called and was told they were doing work in my area; that service would be restored in "a couple hours." The next day it was still out. While heading out to the car I noticed that the line to the house had become disconnected. I got a ladder, plugged it back in, and it worked fine.
2) Called and was told, again, they were doing work in my area; that service would be restored in "a couple hours." Called again when service was still out the next day. Was told they would send a person out -- this entailed a ten day wait. When the service guy arrived, he told me that the line splitter on the street was not only corroded but had been installed backward. Not sure how that's possible, but there it is.
3) Called and was told, yet again, they were doing work in my area; that service would be restored in "a couple hours." Ten minutes later I reset all my equipment and everything worked fine.
Fact is, "work in my area" is apparently a lie common to call center vermin. And Comcast doesn't care that they do this. Lovely.
// This is not a sig.
I am the technical director for a VoIP provider I won't name (it's not Vonage), and I can tell you that Comcast has been a thorn in my side for a long time because of this nonsense.
Whenever a customer calls complaining about voice quality, it's almost always latency or some other issue with their connection; VoIP is, as you can guess, very sensitive to connection quality.
Comcast has been one of the worst for us, though other cable providers aren't much better (Time Warner, I'm looking in your direction). I cannot prove it, but I'm certain Comcast is doing some sort of traffic shaping for VoIP packets not their own, and it wreaks havoc with my company and many others, because we can't do anything for the customer except tell them "take it up with your ISP".
I think we all know what the ISP's invariable reaction is. Some tier-one flunky goes "Yup, signal looks good! No problems here!" and the customer comes back to us and there's nothing we can do about it. It doesn't matter how many pingtests, traceroutes, or other measures you offer them -- the cable companies have been notoriously unhelpful in getting their act together. Worse still they'll offer outlandish suggestions to the user, like "getting a static IP might help" or "upgrade your connection to six megs", neither of which will do a damn thing (well, the latter might, but it's not likely that bandwidth is the problem).
Now I admit that part of this is that VoIP over public residential/business connections is purely "best effort", especially the RTP stream is delivered via UDP which most ISPs and backbone providers consider less important than TCP. Contrawise, Comcast and other integrated providers can QoS their own VoIP packets any way they like. But for an ISP to leverage this fact to spread misinformation or misrepresent what is actually going on is totally ridiculous.
Part of the problem is that most people really don't know anything about computers or the internet. They'll tell you "but I have a fast connection! It's three megs!" because they don't understand the difference between latency and bandwidth, or they'll point out that their email and websites load really quickly. From this end-user's point of view there's nothing wrong with their connection that should cause their VoIP phone to suck, because "everything else works", and I partially agree with them -- they shouldn't have to constantly harrass their ISP to stop screwing around. (My disagreement is my cynicism of caveat emptor, and it wouldn't kill people to know a little something about how the service works, at the very least so they know to whom to complain when something goes wrong. In essence they're bringing a car to the mechanic complaining that the ride is bumpy, when the problem is the road outside their house is full of potholes.)
But even my cynicism has limits -- as a matter of fact I had to go through this same crap with my home cable provider, Charter, and it took nearly two weeks for me to get them to deal with the problem. Keep in mind that's someone like me, who knows what he's talking about, who is in IT, who can provide useful information about where the problem lies, and knows to whom to speak and how to phrase the problem to get results. What is your average user supposed to do, when they don't know anything about this stuff?
When it gets to that point, and the ISP is telling them things like "reboot the computer!", the user sees only a few choices -- get a new ISP, or get a new VoIP provider. And here comes Mr Comcast Droid with his promises of high quality, one bill, blah blah blah, and the user thinks that sounds pretty good, so they make the switch.
Also, for those of you griping about security of VoIP, I get that question a lot too. It's not particularly secure, but I find it amusing that nobody asks that question when they're getting a copper line from the local Bell, which isn't secure either. At least to eavesdrop on VoIP you'd have to have access to one of the routers along the path, whereas any ten-year-old can plug a handset into the phone interface on the outside of your house (my friends and I did it all the time to bug my sister).
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