-----Original Message----- From: John R Levine [mailto:johnl@iecc.com] Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 1:55 AM To: Hannigan, Martin Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: RE: bad Vonage connection, was Vonage complains about VoIP-blocking

...

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.

...

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 have not tested jitter, but I will now. I had some dropouts when one of my machines was "being bad", and while it didn't usually disco, it did drop call content. I was surprised it hung on to the call for as long as it did. Longest I can attest to is about 25 seconds. I haven't gotten around to figuring out why it held the session at all.

...

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.

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.

Have you experienced any blocking on Vonage? -M<