Having trouble in Illinois with COMCAST again

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 13, 2006 Posts: 1

Is anyone else experiencing broken outbound sound in the Midwest?

Posts: 44 · Full Forum Member Joined: Feb 21, 2006 Posts: 44

schaferda wrote:

Is anyone else experiencing broken outbound sound in the Midwest?

YES!

See the Comcast vs Vonage thread.

Posts: 159 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Aug 05, 2005 Posts: 159

It's been absolutely horrific. Ping Plotter is showing exactly where the problem seems to be too. Seemed fine all weekend. What is curious is inbound calling seems fine. Just outbound is horrible.

Posts: 23 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Apr 22, 2005 Posts: 23

Yep... same here. (NW Indiana) The odd part is that my outgoing problems seem to be limited to toll-free numbers.

Not sure if that has any real bearing to the problem, but it makes me wonder.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Feb 27, 2006 Posts: 2

Sometimes Down In Downers Grove. Cannot get to the secure web site. ****

Posts: 81 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Feb 27, 2006 Posts: 81

I'm thinking it's not Comcast. Having same problems. Everything else works great. Getting 6405 down and 356 up. All sites are great EXCEPT the Vonage site. So to make 2 + 2 = 4, Bad phone sound quality +Vonage Web portal being the ONLY site not responding = it's Vonage's problem, not Comcast.

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2006 2:06 pm Post subject:

ShelChgo wrote:

I'm thinking it's not Comcast. Having same problems. Everything else works great. Getting 6405 down and 356 up. All sites are great EXCEPT the Vonage site. So to make 2 + 2 = 4, Bad phone sound quality +Vonage Web portal being the ONLY site not responding = it's Vonage's problem, not Comcast.

www.vonage.com and my dashboard getting typical 1-2 second response times as usual. SusCom (NOT Comcast) in Maine.

So, if Vonage's site is having problems, I'm sure as heck not seeing them.

I think something is fundamentally broken between Comcast and Vonage. I don't know what it is, but there's obviously a bad route or a broken set of routers somewhere...

or if you want a good "grassy knoll" theory, an attempt by one company to alienate the customers of the other (and since Vonage knows that Comcast lacks competition in many of the areas they service, they would gain no benefit from trying to alienate Comcast subscribers from their company. Comcast, on the other hand, sells a competing VoIP product, and alienating Vonage customers from Vonage would be in their great benefit...).

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Nov 18, 2005 Posts: 3

This is the 4th week that I am experiencing inconsistent quality (garbled on my end) from Vonage in Northern Illinois (Elk Grove Village). While it is possible that Comcast is interrupting Vonage service while they rollout their VoIP Telephony service, I can't believe Comcast is doing this. If they were, given the current regulatory environment, Vonage would advise us that they are pursuing legal resolution of this problem directly with Comcast. In any event, it's up to Vonage to get this resolved not us THE CUSTOMER!

Also, if this is a Comcast Issue, why is it that during the Comcast "outages", I can send and receive "perfect" wireline quality calls to a Vonage customer here in Illinois on Wide Open West's cable system. Logically, if it's a Comcast issue I should have the same problem where ever I call. I only have a problem when I call a wireline number. To me this points to gateway issues not Comcast network problems. Think about this, if there was a technical issue with Comcast or anyone else, Vonage should get it resolved and stop pointing fingers.

Vonage just IPO'd and their financials are horrible! Additionally Vonage has been trying to sell the company with no takers so far. Has Vonage slowed their network upgrades and no longer keeping pace with their customer growth? Could this be the source of our problems?

I've been a customer Of Vonage since September. Service was infinitely better back then. Not sure how much longer I will stand for the current lousy quality service.

BTW, worked with the Vonage Techs, no latency issues, I'm set for max bandwidth and speedtest at 7.2mbps down, 358 up.

Very disappointed with Vonage. Tired of lousy service and wasting time talking to Vonage tech support. May have to go back to SBC.

Posts: 81 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Feb 27, 2006 Posts: 81

While I can't completely discount the conspiracy theory of Comcast intentionally trying to sour Vonage customers experiences, it just doesn't make sense to me. If people have a bad experience with the largest independent VoIP provider, do you think they will go to another VoIP provider? Or would they go back to their legacy carrier and sign up for POTS lines again? Logic would tell you that they'll think the technology is "just not there yet" and they call their local legacy carrier. I think Comcast would see it that way too.

I think Vonage is in super cost containment mode, because now they have shareholders to answer to. If they don't get the outages under control by June, I'm done with them.

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2006 2:27 pm Post subject: Re: Comcast vs. Vonage theory...

ShelChgo wrote:

While I can't completely discount the conspiracy theory of Comcast intentionally trying to sour Vonage customers experiences, it just doesn't make sense to me. If people have a bad experience with the largest independent VoIP provider, do you think they will go to another VoIP provider? Or would they go back to their legacy carrier and sign up for POTS lines again? Logic would tell you that they'll think the technology is "just not there yet" and they call their local legacy carrier. I think Comcast would see it that way too.

Several people have reported that when they have reported their issues with Vonage to Comcast, Comcast has attempted to cross-sell them to Comcast VoIP and that Vonage does not work because it is a "low cost knockoff" of Comcast VoIP or somesuch. That sounds like a perfect upsell oportunity, and if they manage to hurt Vonage's (now a competitor's) business in the process with some customers who defect back to POTS, well, no harm done to Comcast.

Quote:

I think Vonage is in super cost containment mode, because now they have shareholders to answer to.

Well, I could buy that, if the problems were more widespread. My brother in Virginia loves Vonage. I love it. Despite Comcast's size, they do not enjoy a monopoly on all customers in the United States, and I have yet to see "SBC/AT&T versus Vonage", "Verizon versus Vonage", "SusCom versus Vonage", "Adelphia versus Vonage", etc etc. Yet, we have several new threads started up each week, all by Comcast customers, mostly in the Midwest somewhere, all experiencing issues with slow access to the Vonage web site and poor access to their Vonage lines.

If Vonage were in "cost containment", don't you think the problem would be a little more widespread?

How does Vonage benefit from targeting Comcast customers? Are they selling competing broadband services? No. Is losing customers in droves somehow going to save them el big buckaroos and make the (future) shareholders happy? No. What possible benefit could Vonage get, even if they were saving money, by targeting customers of a specific ISP? If they wanted to save money, they could just screw everyone over a lot easier and cheaper.

How does Comcast benefit from targeting Vonage customers? They sell a competing product.

I'm not saying Comcast *IS* screwing Vonage customers over. It could be simple incompetence, or necessary growth-related upgrades being done poorly, coincidentally messing up the routers that are located East of them (the gateway to the East coast). But, then, wouldn't other sites hosted on the East Coast be really slow?