Vonage Hits ISP Resistance

Thu Mar 31 18:17:54 UTC 2005

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Steve Sobol wrote:

> I have no idea what my cable company pays for their bandwidth, but I am
> certain it's more than the $40 per month I pay for my 3Mbps down/256 Mbps
> up... and I am able to actually *get* 3Mbps on many occasions, and I average
> between 1 and 2 (on HTTP/FTP transfers, fwiw).

Oh, you might be surprised how cheap transit is when you're buying it by
the multigigabit/s.  Also, I know that at least some of the bigger cable
co's peer with each other...and exchange large amounts of traffic.  Couple
that with the fact that most customers are not geeks/power uers (i.e. our
parents who do some light web surfing and email) and most of the customers
use no noticable bandwidth, subsidizing the ones who do.

> Yes, I know the connectivity cost is shared between several thousand customers
> in this area, but what happens if large numbers of customers start using VOiP
> on a regular basis?

VOIP with the better codecs doesn't use PIPE.  It's just lots of PPS,
which may require provider hardware upgrades to deal with the PPS.  I've
done VOIP over v.90 dialup using older Multitech proprietary gear which I
think was doing some flavor of g.723.  Quality wasn't perfect, but it
really did work.  As others have said, PTP is what eats PIPE.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis                   |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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