OT, but NANOG is almost always good for quick clue ...
For those who have residential VoIP, what provider {features | bugs} are most vexing?
For those who provision residential VoIP, what subscriber {expectations | behaviors} are most vexing?
Thanks in advance,
Eric
Some provider woes:
FAX over VOIP is a PITA. I've not yet seen an ATA or softswitch that handled it reliably.
E911 for mobile devices sucks. Regulations, and the E911 system, do not seem to have the flexibility for handling this in a seamless way.
Call routing (on a more global scale) sucks. Keeping calls pure IP is sexy, but the routing protocol for it is nonexistent (and please don't say ENUM).
Power supply!
Old POTS is remote-power-suplied,
so the phone will work for hours, days or even weeks
from remote battery power.
In my area, one mobile network was off after 4h,
the other after 10h,
but my good-old analogue telefone did work all the
time during an 40h power outage (it was 11 years ago).
Juergen.
Simplicity.
POTS lets me plug almost anything in from the past who-knows-how-many-years and it just works. When it breaks, I can go next door and borrow a telephone.
When I can pick up an automagically configured VoIP device from a huge selection down at the local electronics shop and when it just works at my house and my kids houses then it will be interesting.
VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother.
Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year!
I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not
to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On
the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV
these days - if VoIP is "too niche", how are those two making any money?
Very true, remember that VOIP includes Packet Cable (as opposed to SIP from Vonage etc all) from cable providers which is largely a POTs replacement service from the end users stand point. Comcast is now a top 5 phone provider in the US. This is anecdotal, but most of the Magic Jack (which is SIP AFAIK) purchases I see are non-technical people.
And how many grandmothers do you think are responsible for this downturn? Not many I'll bet. The downturn will be down to cell phones and the odd person who gets cable and finds they can do with skype or something.
People are not, en-masse, going away from POTS and towards plugging a VoIP device into the back of their router.
I do not live over there, I have never seen a Vonage or Magic jack or any other VoIP service ad on TV in the UK, ever.
It is quite a different market here. I can get POTS services over the same copper from, I'd say, about 5 different companies. Maybe more, I have not counted. I guess the competition already available on the copper would largely preclude anything but the cheapest VoIP service.
They are in the US.
Comcast tallies 8.6 million household telephone service accounts, making it the United States' third-largest telephone provider. As of February 16, 2011 Comcast has 8.610 million voice customers.
VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother.
Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be
whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year!I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not
to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On
the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV
these days - if VoIP is "too niche", how are those two making any money?
It's more cellphones than VoIP or cable provider services, but the latter two are still eating POTS' lunch in the US - even if you don't count something like FiOS where Verizon tears out your copper POTS and moves your line to their ONC.
It is quite a different market here. I can get POTS services over the same copper from, I'd say, about 5 different companies. Maybe more, I have not counted. I guess the competition already available on the copper would largely preclude anything but the cheapest VoIP service.
Sounds very different indeed. In the US, it's basically "your local Ma Bell derivative, or something not-POTs." Anecodtally, as of this morning we just dropped one of our POTS lines for the cable company's alternative. Cost dropped from $69/mo to $29/mo right there.
With say, Verizon POTS you're looking at nearly $30/mo just for dialtone, with everything else (outbound calls, LD, caller ID...) extra. Now there is some added value in real POTS, but it's awfully hard to justify the cost difference.
Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic.
Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page:
vex |veks|
verb [ trans. ]
make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.]
Alright, now that that's out of the way...
I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are all our customers, we do not do residential)
- Seemingly complex.
- Worried about the "What if the internet goes down" scenario.
- Call quality.
- Price
- Location
- Outages
Responses:
- Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you want it.
- What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same downtime as the internet.
However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages.
For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works.
- Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx.
- Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better service. Who would have thought?
- Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX.
- Last mile:
In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a whole other topic.
-PBX:
Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an enterprise backend.
-Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. The customer plugs in phone lines into the router and if the internet goes down, they can make emergency calls or calls to the world limited by the number of lines the router can accept and are plugged in of course. Now in all our experience going on 7 years now, 90% of the time WAN outages happen, guess what also dies, the POTS! Who would have thought that when cables get cut, that the phone lines were also part of the cables?
There you go, some common worries, with some answers to hopefully sooth the vexed VoIP user.
Bret Palsson
Sr. Network & Systems Administrator
www.getjive.com
Yeah I am thankful for the competition we have over here now!
I think that if I were 'over there' then I would be using VoIP as well.
Another vexation for VOIP in the SMB environment is that it rarely works particularly
well (if at all) in light of a multiple-external-address NAT pool.
You simply have to map all of your VOIP phones in such a way that they consistently
get the same external IP every time or shit breaks badly.
Owen
We haven't run into that issue and have very large clients.
I'm interested to find out where you may have run into that issue?
-Bret
Sorry I didn't include this in the last email...
We have large clients who have phones registered on multiples of public IPs from the same location. Works no problem. We do some trickery on our side to make that happen, but I thought all VoIP companies would do that.
-Bret
Odd - do the phones just randomly egress from different IPs in the pool if you don't? Is this perhaps a too-long registration interval issue? Short registration timers seem to deal with keeping the state table appeased on most firewalls. Any chance the NAT device has some god-forsaken ALG agent installed that's trying to proxy the SIP traffic?
(Yes, I hate ALGs. They are evil.)
Nathan
Ahhh yes... ALG... Turn it off.
-Bret
I've found that sip alg on devices is badly broken and must be disabled. This is true of ios and various consumer electronics devices. Nat traversal for multiple devices is not an issue in any case I have seen.
Turning off "smart nat" usually solves it.
Jared Mauch
Any idea how to workaround the uverse broken alg? I've had to do some fun hacks to work around it. Sometimes I can reboot or crash them with the cisco notify for config check.
Jared Mauch