Vonage Hits ISP Resistance

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Bill,

I understand completely what you are saying, but QoS is
not ubiquitous in the end-to-end sense in the Internet.

And that is a problem.

Once _any_ traffic which you might deem "quality" leaves
your administrative control (e.g. the boundaries of your
network), you have no guarantee that the "quality" handling
of that traffic will be honored (or, in this case, carried
at all).

I agree with whomever said it earlier -- remember that the
global Internet is nothing more than a bunch of interconnected
private networks.

- ferg

2

[Deleted]

I agree with whomever said it earlier -- remember that the
global Internet is nothing more than a bunch of interconnected
private networks.

Yep.. And when you are dying of a heart attack in your house, and every
second counts, how are you going to feel when the 911 operator says..
"P...e.a...s...c....a...y......s....a..d..a?" Or better yet, when you get
a fast-busy because your Cable Modem is down?

VoIP is great. VoPI (Voice over Public Internet) is great when it works,
but I wouldn't bet my life or my business on it.

3

I've been using voice over the public Internet for a long time, and the only times it has been unavailable (at a time that I tried to use it, and hence noticed) has been when my DSL has been down. When my DSL has been down, by and large, my analogue Bell Canada line has also been down.

When I get around to plumbing in the $24/month cable modem in my basement in a half-sensible way I'll be multi-homed, and I predict that in terms of availability the VoIP phone will then be more reliable than the analogue Bell Canada line.

The requirement for QoS is over-stated by most people, in my opinion. Extreme example: I made several SIP calls from Uganda over a congested satellite link during one of the AfNOG meetings within the closed INOC-DBA network, and the call quality was perfectly acceptable; wildly better, in fact (even with 20% packet loss) than using a GSM phone to call the same people over the PSTN. It had the additional benefit of not costing about $10/minute.

I wouldn't bet my life on the availability of VoIP service from my home office, but I wouldn't bet it on the availability of Bell Canada's analogue service either.

Fortunately, probably like everybody else here (and, increasingly, most people within the likely demographic to which VoIP service is marketed) I have a cellphone. The next time someone melodramatically collapses in my living room clutching their chest and mouthing "call an ambulance" I suspect we will be ok.

Joe

(No disrespect intended towards Bell Canada, who are probably the best local phone company I have experienced to date, based on personal experience on three continents. It's no accident that all telcos exclude the copper residential access network from their declarations of five-nines reliability.)

4

I've been using voice over the public Internet for a long time, and the
only times it has been unavailable (at a time that I tried to use it,
and hence noticed) has been when my DSL has been down. When my DSL has
been down, by and large, my analogue Bell Canada line has also been
down.

just last eve, we noticed that voip from our hawi line was
dead, allison did not answer our hawi phone. investigation
(dialing the fax number:-) made us suspect that all phone lines
were out. but users complained that voip was the problem!
they did not seem happy when i said that, considering it was
verizon phone lines out (both lines, voip and fax), it would
still have been dead without the voip kit. verizon fixed the
lines this morning at 06:30 hst.

Fortunately, probably like everybody else here (and, increasingly, most
people within the likely demographic to which VoIP service is marketed)
I have a cellphone. The next time someone melodramatically collapses in
my living room clutching their chest and mouthing "call an ambulance" I
suspect we will be ok.

i also have the voip adapters' dialplans (that's bellhead for
configurations) set so 911 and 411 short-circuit directly to
the local pstn. this lets the blame fall appropriately, and
also means that 411 will get local directory assistance, not
the one from nyc.

my son, a luddite, got rid of his pstn voice and took his ip
provider's voip service. he did the install using their csr
support, and even got his 802.11 network back up. so it can't
be all that bad.

a few years' experience, from my very small view of the world,
is that voip is about as reliable as pstn, except
  o be careful of layering, i.e. pstn-voip-pstn etc. adds the
    unreliabilities
  o it was all designed by bellheads, so it is disgusting to
    configure

but
  o it can be really cool, like being able to make essentially
    free calls from my laptop in very strange places in the
    world
  o it sure lowers the costs, e.g. six cents a minute to china
    without even hunting for prices

so, i am sure it does not meet everyone's needs, seems poor
quality to some, ... but it's deploying at least a decimal
order of magnitude faster than ipv6. so, rather than pretend
it sucks so badly it can be ignored, i suggest we work on what
it needs to be better and to scale really well.

randy