bad Vonage connection, was Vonage complains about VoIP-blocking

Wed Feb 16 14:20:09 UTC 2005

At 01:54 AM 2/16/2005, you wrote:

> > Odd regarding the Vonage connection. Their sitting on UU from where I
> > can see and I have excellent transit to them from Comcast.
>
>I'm on Sprint, and the service was fine for a year and a half.  In recent
>months it deteriorated to the point where more often than not I couldn't
>understand the other party at all, even though they always said they could
>hear me fine.  Since my connection is symmetrical (t1, not dsl or cable)
>and my stats always say I have spare inbound capacity, I'm sure it's not
>at my end.

Hmmm, despite a fat cable modem connection (6Mbps down, 768K up) I got 
substantially improved results with Vonage when I instituted prioritization 
of traffic in the firewall box I use at home, allowing the Vonage to have 
higher priority for a small portion of the total bandwidth.

What caused that issue was file transfers and other bursty traffic 
overwhelming queues, resulting in vonage traffic being stomped.

> > I've tested Vonage, only because I had it, with the Semena NE2000 Network
> > Test Device and introduced multiple error, path, and latency issues and it
> > stood up very well. At one point, I jacked up the latency to 4000ms and I
> > was still able to place, communicate, and drop calls effectively. I was
> > very surprised at how it handled that large introduced latency.
>
>It wasn't latency, it was jitter and mostly dropouts.  I think they have
>vast amounts of buffering so latency is tolerable if you can stand the
>talking to the moon effect.
>
> > I don't know about Vonage support. Never tried it.
>
>That's the problem.  It no longer exists.  E-mail is auto-acked and
>ignored, phone calls go through the usual voice jail tree until you get to
>the point when it would queue me for a person, where I always got a busy
>signal.

When I last called support, it sucked. Voice mail system now takes 20 to 30 
seconds to ask you for your password. Clearly they have outstripped their 
capacity on all but perhaps the actual voice gateway systems.

>Calling the number to cancel was no problem getting through, but by then
>it was too late, I'd already ported the number to Lingo who is slightly
>cheaper and has a much larger local calling area, roughly Honolulu to
>Helsinki.