North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Vonage Hits ISP Resistance

  • From: Randy Bush
  • Date: Thu Mar 31 13:15:37 2005

> 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