Vancouver Island BC - anyone else having problems?

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Jun 05, 2006 Posts: 4

Guys, do you have any problems with CID feature?
Since yesterday, I'm having some issues with this feature as the caller name does not show. I'm in Vancouver area.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Jun 08, 2006 Posts: 2

A cost of living on the island is having to deal with bc ferries on a long weekend. The bandwith to Vancouver island is fine and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Vonage isn't being responsible in their support by finding solutions or admitting they can't provide reliable service. It costs businesses money and they sure aren't priced like skype or other viop providers. I chose Vonage for quality, support and features. Currently the features don't matter when I'm on an important call and it breaks up, and support is less then helpful.

Vonage needs to step up and provide a solution or admit they can't service us. I'm trying to find out if my numbers can be transferred from Voip.

Posts: 42 · Full Forum Member Joined: May 14, 2006 Posts: 42

Yaztromo wrote:

[ For the ISPs, there may be only so much bandwidth they can buy (I seriously doubt that Vancouver Island has any "dark" underwater cabling that isn't in use between here and the mainland), at which point there is no more until some company decides to run more underwater cable.
Yaz.

Well I was curious about this Brad, so I checked with a friend who works for Dixon Cable and apparrently there is dark cable between us and the mainland and to Washington state.

Posts: 58

vvoipedout wrote:

A cost of living on the island is having to deal with bc ferries on a long weekend. The bandwith to Vancouver island is fine and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

If you believe that, you don't get around very much.

I was in Toronto last month, visiting family, and connected into their Rogers 3Mbps service with the same laptop I use on a daily basis here on the island. And I was getting download speeds nearly triple that of what I typically get here in Victoria with Shaw's 5Mbps service.

The fact of the matter is, in a city like Toronto it is easier for the ISPs to have a lot of peerages to major backbones going through New York, Michigan, and the Windsor to Montreal corridor, as well as various international linkages. Victoria shows a very stark difference -- everything has to go through either the BC mainland (primarily Greater Vancouver), or through Washington State. We are very much a bandwidth edge case, and it shows.

A simple traceroute to the Vonage Softphone SIP server shows that traffic goes from here, through 5 different Shaw routers, through to a linkup to Level 3 communications, which connects into an OC192 link. OC192 runs at a maximum of 9.6Gbps, or the equivalent of less than 2000 Shaw high-speed customers at saturation.

There are not an infinite number of such links, although 15 minutes of traceroutes does show peerages with Level 3, Bell Nexia, and Allstream. This is still a finite amount of bandwidth, linking through only a few routers that everyone on the island has to go through to get to the outside world.

As such, I disagree with your assertion. Vonage does not control the bandwidth to/from the island, they do not control the limited peerage links, and they don't control the routers. If the service doesn't work to your linking, I personally don't blame you for switching to something that does, but the blame for the problem needs to be properly directed.

(And again, I'm on Shaw with Vonage and don't have any problems. However, I am admittedly a very light phone user, so perhaps I've just been lucky, and use it primarily during the off-peak bandwidth hours).

Yaz.

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

I think that having MORE connections to the outside internet world only opens up the possibility for MORE inconsistency not less when it comes to Voip. As long as there is enough capacity which it sounds like there is, I don't think Van Isle is at a disadvantage. Maybe more vulnerable to catastrophic failure but backbones are quite reliable these days.

Posts: 14 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jan 20, 2006 Posts: 14

Considering that problems with Vonage on VI as I have experienced them are limited to:

Calling OUT from my phone to PSTN, Calls in are absolutely perfect.

It would seem to preclude any issues related to the bandwidth between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland.

A call from a Vonage # to a PSTN # is not any different from a call from a PSTN # to a Vonage # in terms of the bandwidth consumed. They may be routed differently, but the bandwidth consumed should be identical.

Correct me if I am wrong.