[PLUG] Vonage and Comcast

[Brent Jones]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Daniel Herrington <herda05 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone here use Vonage (VOIP)?
>
> For the past month or so we've been having problems with our Vonage phone
> service. Someone calls, or we call them, and we can hear them clearly, but
> our voices break up to them. I'm hesitant to call Vonage because I think
> they'll tell me it's the network.
>
> I know it's not a download issue, becuase we can clearly hear people on the
> line. If anything, it would be the upload from our house out to vonage.
> SinceI saw that Comcast is playing with their network ports and just
> generally screwing with us again, maybe they're messing with the packets to
> push people to their own VOIP? Does anyone else use Vonage and have you seen
> any problems?
>
> thanks,
>
> --
> Daniel B. Herrington
> Director of Field Services
> Robert Mark Technologies
> dherrington at robertmarktechnologies.com
> o: 651-769-2574
> m: 503-358-8575
> _______________________________________________
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> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>

I use Vonage, as well as IP phones for work. We had been using
Comcast, but their network throttling that got put in place last year,
network quality dropped so far it was nearly unusable.
I would call, complain of the speed, and they simply say "ok, try
now", and boom my downloads would go from 40KB/sec back up to
1,500KB/sec... for about 2 days.
I would routinely get flagged for usage and throttled. I work from
home very often, watch Netflix On-Demand, and 3 others use the
internet in this house.

We finally dumped Comcast and went with 12Mbit down, 1Mbit up Qwest
ADSL2+, and surprisingly it's been really great.
I notice some tiny fluctuations here and there in call quality, but
like I said, others here use the connection too, and they could be
uploading to Flickr or watching Youtube...

Hopefully you have an option of another provider besides Comcast, but
yes, their network throttling is real, and very damaging!

-- 
Brent Jones
brent at servuhome.net