Re: Vonage Hits ISP Resistance
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 -- Bill Nash <billn@billn.net> wrote: Obviously VOIP needs QoS to function well on oversold, commodity broadband networks. Why not just paint VOIP with a broad QoS brush (as in, prioritize all of it, not just your own service) and defang the folks just looking for an excuse to step in and take the option away from you? - billn -- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg@netzero.net or fergdawg@sbcglobal.net
On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote: [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. -- Vice President of N2Net, a New Age Consulting Service, Inc. Company http://www.n2net.net Where everything clicks into place! KP-216-121-ST
On 31 mars 2005, at 10:36, Greg Boehnlein wrote:
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.
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.)
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
participants (4)
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Fergie (Paul Ferguson) -
Greg Boehnlein -
Joe Abley -
Randy Bush