Help with Vonage / Shaw Issues

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 20, 2006 Posts: 2

I think you late posters are missing the point. The problem is that the Vonage service was working fine for both inbound and outbound calls up until early March. Something happened that is now affecting many users' outbound calls. Problems with people's cable lines and what not do simultaneously occur overnight for users dispersed over a wide geographical area. Something had to change either on Shaw's end or on Vonage's end.

My theory is that Shaw finally actually *enabled* the QoS/Bandwidth management features found on the Ellacoya's. Most likely the Ellacoyas have been installed across Shaw's network over past months, and the P2P limiting has only been selectively enabled in areas where P2P has become troublesome. Now that they have been running across the network for some months, Shaw gained the confidence to enable bandwidth shaping. All users who aren't paying the QoS fee are lumped into a traffic shaping class "bulk", where service is "best effort", whereas those paying the QoS fee are placed in a higher priority queue. Thus, those users' packets take priority over all other data traffic.

These queuing methodologies work great when applied equitably, but as we can see here, may cause significant problems for those using real-time services like Voip which requires minimum latency to work properly (unless you are in the high-priority queue).

I think this is a reasonable hypothesis given the feature-set of the Ellacoyas.

Of course, Vonage could simply be growing their customer-base faster than their infrastructure, and are riding on the publicity around Shaw's QoS "tax" as a diversionary tactic while they perform network upgrades.

I work in this industry, both of the above scenarios are typical. Either way I can't make phone calls.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Mar 30, 2006 Posts: 1

for the first month my Vonage was good no problems
then i got a email from Vonage saying shaw had a quality of service flag for 10.00 and more or less shaw was just trying to rape more money out of us 1 week later shaw released there digital phone here and all when to crap all outgoing calls to alberta were lagged and bad no mater if it was local next door or long distance i called Vonage and we did the usual tracerts and ping all looked good hung up still not working day later i spent 2 hrs on phone to Vonage and talked to 3 or 4 different people the last person said it was my isp and to add a sec router into the mix i did this and it worked for 50/50 on the calls hit and miss got real bad 10 sec delay ect back on phone i go and they still had a open workorder and said nothing they could do finally got fedup and called shaw told them to put the quality of service on my internet to see if that would work well guess what my phone works perfect now

pretty funny how Vonage worked fine up until shaw realised there phone and it when to crap

so for the people in this thread that were asking if QOS made a difference it does at 10 bucks more a month still cheaper then telus or shaw digital phone

just a side note my Vonage always worked good on incoming
calls and calls to the yukon were never lagged

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Nov 17, 2005 Posts: 4

Mustardman wrote:

Your Vonage connection is only as good as your Internet connection and it's gonna be a lot easier to notice the problems with Vonage.

If your internet is flaky then OF COURSE your going to have Vonage issues. Stop trying to blame Vonage or get all Orwell 1984 on Shaw. If Shaw is dropping out then call them and have the guys come out and fix it. It could be your residential cable wiring. Shaw recommends the cable modem have a direct connect to the cable coming in from the street. Do you have this? How old is the wiring from the street to your home? All these are potential problems. I had these problems myself. They ran brand new wiring from the street and put the modem on it's own tap right from where they split it outside the house. All free of charge. I also exchanged my Terayon modem for a Motorola DOCSIS modem. These things completely solved all Internet problems and drastically improved TV reception.

PS: I would be VERY suspicious of a Dlink router!

Are you a Schill for Shaw? Have you actually READ the issues described here?

My cabling is brand new, I've had my signal tested by Shaw technicians when they were out here to replace a defective splitter. It's above spec. I can download at over 990KB/sec from many places, I can upload at 125KB/sec. I get only a 29% QoS rating to Vonage using their test. All my channels come in crystal clear, I've even spoken with the techs at shaw to test my signal strength of the modem itself. And it's well within "normal operating parameters."

I suggest you do as I said and porform a search for "bittorrent" and "shaw" and see that they have invested in packet shaping switches from Ellacoya. These have the potential to be NASTY devices if they choose to set them that way. It would be absolutely NO problem for them to "drop packets" to a specific IP or type of service such as Voip.

Sorry to vent, but to jump in and say "Oh it must be your cabling" is certainly a viable target for heated discussion. Yes, I do agree that if your signal is bad and your cable modem is disconnecting, by all means get it fixed.

You choose to slag a D-Link router? I'd rather have one of those than a LinkCisco product. (with factory firmware)

Posts: 105 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Nov 19, 2005 Posts: 105

Ok, it's Shaw's fault and there is nothing you can do about it other than try dry DSL or Shaw digital phone or go grovelling back to your phone company! Feel better? Cool

Posts: 22 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jul 12, 2005 Posts: 22

Two things:

a) The performance issues with people using vonage/shaw have only been experienced in the recent past, coincidentally with the $10 shaw QoS service. If there was a problem with the network outside of shaw including Vonage's service, this QoS 'feature' wouldn't do anything usefull, which it does...

b) People using Vonage using a DSL package (telus) work reliably and do not experience the same issues as shaw users. But you can't buy naked DSL, so there are few people with this option.

These observations still point toward shaw as the culprit using shady business practices to sway consumers...

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: Aug 24, 2005 Posts: 3

I've had Vonage since August, and up until about 2-3 weeks ago, the service was superb. Nobody could tell I wasn't on a regular landline. Then around the middle of March we noticed that we were having problems with *outbound* calls only. Not only was the quality bad, but we were having problems even reaching our desired party. Sometimes we'd have to dial the number 2-3 times before it would ring the other side. We got errors saying that the other party does not accept unidentified calls (anonymous call block, which incidentally, they don't have on their line), or when we finally did ring through, it would show up on their caller ID as "International Call" or from a 416 area code (all calls were placed to/from BC area codes). Then of course, when we started trying to talk they thought I was calling from Thailand or somewhere on the other side of the world. Of course, when they called me back we were able to talk no problem. I'm at work now, but I will try the link above and post my numbers when I get home.

Posts: 105 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Nov 19, 2005 Posts: 105

jthunder wrote:

Two things:

a) The performance issues with people using vonage/shaw have only been experienced in the recent past, coincidentally with the $10 shaw QoS service. If there was a problem with the network outside of shaw including Vonage's service, this QoS 'feature' wouldn't do anything usefull, which it does...

b) People using Vonage using a DSL package (telus) work reliably and do not experience the same issues as shaw users. But you can't buy naked DSL, so there are few people with this option.

These observations still point toward shaw as the culprit using shady business practices to sway consumers...

For starters, Shaw did NOT just start offering the QoS service. I heard about it at least 3months ago! It only became the conspiracy theory Du Jour on this and a few other message boards recently.

You can apparently get dry DSL but you have to get to the right people at Telus and ask for it. They will try charge you a penalty if they are not getting their greedy little hands on enough of your services dollar for cell phone, LD etc.

Posts: 19 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Dec 20, 2005 Posts: 19

nocmgr wrote:

I think you late posters are missing the point. The problem is that the Vonage service was working fine for both inbound and outbound calls up until early March. Something happened that is now affecting many users' outbound calls. Problems with people's cable lines and what not do simultaneously occur overnight for users dispersed over a wide geographical area. Something had to change either on Shaw's end or on Vonage's end.

My theory is that Shaw finally actually *enabled* the QoS/Bandwidth management features found on the Ellacoya's...

I hope not - I've been paying the $10/mo for 9 months!!! Now that I switched to Shaw Digital phone, my Vonage works great on cable and terrible on calls forwarded to my cell phone.

Posts: 22 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jul 12, 2005 Posts: 22

Quote:

For starters, Shaw did NOT just start offering the QoS service. I heard about it at least 3months ago! It only became the conspiracy theory Du Jour on this and a few other message boards recently.

Well, its funny that they had the forsight to start offering this service just (3 months) before people are starting to experience dips in the quality of the product, and also just (approx 4 months) before they introduced traffic shaping with the bittorrent protocol.

Quote:

Something had to change either on Shaw's end or on Vonage's end.

Remember that the poor results that we get are from www.testyourvoip.com not Vonage.

My opinion of this remains unchanged.

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Nov 17, 2005 Posts: 4

jthunder wrote:

Two things:

For starters, Shaw did NOT just start offering the QoS service. I heard about it at least 3months ago! It only became the conspiracy theory Du Jour on this and a few other message boards recently.

You can apparently get dry DSL but you have to get to the right people at Telus and ask for it. They will try charge you a penalty if they are not getting their greedy little hands on enough of your services dollar for cell phone, LD etc.

But Shaw *DID* just start offering their digital phone service.

The timing is curious to say the least that numerous individuals, suddenly started getting issues on or around the 15th of March.

I have two friends that are able to run bittorrents without issues, so I'm assuming that they are not in the zones in the Lower Mainland that have the Ellacoya switches, they get a QoS testing from Vonage usually around 80%+ their Vonage works fine.

Me? I'm lucky to get above 30%...