More VoIP Problems
from the hold-onto-that-POTS dept
More evidence that VoIP systems aren’t quite as reliable as your traditional phone service. It turns out that AT&T CallVantage customers can’t call VoIP users on certain other cable VoIP systems from companies like Adelphia and Frontier. AT&T insists it’s a glitch that they’re fixing, but it certainly brings up questions of network neutrality. The fear has been that cable providers would harm calls on other VoIP systems in order to make their own VoIP look better — though, everyone insists that’s not the case here. Still, it seems suspicious that the blocked calls involve competing cable companies. Meanwhile, Broadband Reports notes that Vonage is down again, which seems to be happening a lot lately.
Comments on “More VoIP Problems”
More VoIP Problems - try Skype
Problems for Vonage likely will mean more opportunity for Skype, the new internet phone service launched last month. Maybe one big differentiator with Skype is that it’s not really VOIP, more a P2P ‘distributed bandwidth sharing’ system. Whatever. I’ve been using it for the past week and my experience is: excellent connectivity and outstanding conversation quality, better than any VOIP service I’ve tried in the past. More info at http://www.skype.com.
No Subject Given
I’ve had Vonage for a couple months now and it’s worked fine. I have been on the phone for the better part of the day and didn’t experience the downtime that the article suggested. It may be down in some areas, but not in San Diego. It’s always worked like a champ minus the 1 hour down a couple weeks ago. But i’ll stick with it. Freedom from the Bells is a good thing.
Outage vs. Blocking
There seems to be a growing misunderstanding due to the CNET posting about Port 69 versus the Vonage Outages.
First an outage, no matter how small or large is a problem. Port blocking is an issue.
The outage effects customers who actually have working service. The blocking issue, which has far deeper implications than people imagine is clearly a major issue that, if unaddressed, can be an even more significant danger.
Losing service due to an outage that is up and running is no different than having your local cell tower go down (something I recently experienced).
Having Port 69 prevent your ability to connect to the VoIP network is equal to cellular service not being available in your area. That means in reality, you’re not a customer.
While both matters need to be corrected, and like everything involving IP, they will, we need to not lump outages and blocked ports into the same general category as the uninformed reader does not discern the difference.
P.S. Cox’s High Speed Internet service does not block 69 and my AT&T CallVantage works just fine, as does VoicePulse, Packet8, Vonage (when they don’t go down which until two weeks or so ago never noticably happened)
AT&T VOIP & COX CABLE
IN the Last 2 Days My Voip Service has gone down. AT&T claims its a COX Issue with its servers blocking the Voip traffic. Never had any issues with AT&T always with COX. There Tech Support stinks for the most part and it takes too many calls to get the right information and credits to the account. My fear is that they will play games like this to make thier own digital phone service look good..which I will never buy into. AT&T, Vonage and Verizon Voicewing are probably the best Voip choices out there, most likely in that order…Lets just hope these cable company bastards dont ruin our lives any further.