American Idol and Vonage

Posts: 1123 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1123

Ok kiddies, it's 9:15pm EST here and my Vonage has got "All lines temporarily busy." I wonder if American Idol voting is swamping Vonage. That's kinda hilarious. Very Happy

Posts: 605 · Posted: Tue May 23, 2006 9:43 pm Post subject:

heh...i dont see how people can watch shows like that Very Happy

would be funny if that was the case with the network. anyway...back to my discovery channels Very Happy

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 03, 2006 Posts: 3

navydavy2001 wrote:

Ok kiddies, it's 9:15pm EST here and my Vonage has got "All lines temporarily busy." I wonder if American Idol voting is swamping Vonage. That's kinda hilarious. Very Happy

Well, the last four weeks I've been trying to vote for my favorites on Idol and have gotten through using my Vonage phone ONCE... in hundreds of attempts. It really p!sses me off because I can't participate along with folks who have REAL phones and phone service. VoIP has a long way to go before it can be used by most. It's always "Lines are temporarily busy. Please try again later." Or sometimes it rings deceptively and after 2 or 3 rings it switches to a fast busy signal. And I can't use it to fax unless I purchase a special line, and my TiVo won't dial in even though I did everything Indian Customer Service assured me would work... acted like I was stupid.

Wondering if I made a bad decision.

Posts: 33 · Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 2:06 am Post subject: Prior to January 1, 1984

Prior to January 1, 1984 when AT&T Communications was the only game in town, it was Mothers day that was responsible for most of the network congestion resulting in the all-circuits-are-busy message.

Giving credit to the overwhelming response to the "American Idol", there is no doubt in my mind that the Vonage infrastructure capacity is being exceeded while votes are being cast.

I am not aware of any Telco which engineers their network for all of their customers to be using the infrastructure at the same time. In the case of Vonage rapid growth, I doubt that they could even handle 30% of their customers using the service at the same time.

Posts: 1123 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1123

>?.

Posts: 1123 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: May 26, 2005 Posts: 1123

Man, I hear ya! I'd love to get my hands on some of the post-Katrina reports from the major telco companies to see just what something like that does to the rest of the network.

Posts: 37 · Posted: Wed May 24, 2006 1:01 pm Post subject: Re: American Idol and Vonage

jdhuskey wrote:

navydavy2001 wrote:

Ok kiddies, it's 9:15pm EST here and my Vonage has got "All lines temporarily busy." I wonder if American Idol voting is swamping Vonage. That's kinda hilarious. Very Happy

Well, the last four weeks I've been trying to vote for my favorites on Idol and have gotten through using my Vonage phone ONCE... in hundreds of attempts. It really p!sses me off because I can't participate along with folks who have REAL phones and phone service. VoIP has a long way to go before it can be used by most. It's always "Lines are temporarily busy. Please try again later." Or sometimes it rings deceptively and after 2 or 3 rings it switches to a fast busy signal. And I can't use it to fax unless I purchase a special line, and my TiVo won't dial in even though I did everything Indian Customer Service assured me would work... acted like I was stupid.

Wondering if I made a bad decision.

I prefer to look at it the other way. VoIP as the name says was built for voice. It was not built for fax, tivo, alarms etc. The issue is that all these other devices have a long way to come in order to have native Broadband support. It is backwards that we are still converting data to analog signals in order to send it over a VoIP line. The Internet was built for data. Vonage and all the other VoIP providers should start supporting Fax-over-IP and the mfgs should start selling fax machines with built-in Ethernet and Fax-over-IP support. Alarm systems should support Broadband out of the box etc. We still have a long way to go until all these things have caught up. The voice providers are actually quite far ahead in comparison.

Posts: 11 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: May 19, 2006 Posts: 11

jdhuskey wrote:

Well, the last four weeks I've been trying to vote for my favorites on Idol and have gotten through using my Vonage phone ONCE... in hundreds of attempts. It really p!sses me off because I can't participate along with folks who have REAL phones and phone service. VoIP has a long way to go before it can be used by most. It's always "Lines are temporarily busy. Please try again later." Or sometimes it rings deceptively and after 2 or 3 rings it switches to a fast busy signal. ...

i don't think this has to do with vonage. when i saw this msg, i picked up my phone and dialed one of the american idol numbers to cast my vote and got the 'all lines are temporarily busy' msg. then i dialed one of my friends and the call went thru. so i don't think u can make the generalization that people with REAL phones were able to get thru.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 03, 2006 Posts: 3

spankme wrote:

jdhuskey wrote:

Well, the last four weeks I've been trying to vote for my favorites on Idol and have gotten through using my Vonage phone ONCE... in hundreds of attempts. It really p!sses me off because I can't participate along with folks who have REAL phones and phone service. VoIP has a long way to go before it can be used by most. It's always "Lines are temporarily busy. Please try again later." Or sometimes it rings deceptively and after 2 or 3 rings it switches to a fast busy signal. ...

i don't think this has to do with vonage. when i saw this msg, i picked up my phone and dialed one of the american idol numbers to cast my vote and got the 'all lines are temporarily busy' msg. then i dialed one of my friends and the call went thru. so i don't think u can make the generalization that people with REAL phones were able to get thru.

Of course it has something to do with Vonage. They have to have conversion lines into the analog network somewhere, and apparently, at whatever point our calls exit the Vonage digital network onto the analog network, there's a major bottleneck. This could be specific to toll-free numbers. It depends on how they route different calls, but part of the problem is on Vonage's side. Cingular is also part of the problem as they seem to have a bottleneck coming into their network because my roommate was able to get through better than 75% of the time using his Cingular cell phone. My Nextel cell phone could only get through about 5% of the time. I'll only concede that the greater part of the problem could be Cingular, but it's Vonage's message that I was getting.

Posts: 3 · New Forum Member Joined: May 03, 2006 Posts: 3

superswiss wrote:

jdhuskey wrote:

navydavy2001 wrote:

Ok kiddies, it's 9:15pm EST here and my Vonage has got "All lines temporarily busy." I wonder if American Idol voting is swamping Vonage. That's kinda hilarious. Very Happy

Well, the last four weeks I've been trying to vote for my favorites on Idol and have gotten through using my Vonage phone ONCE... in hundreds of attempts. It really p!sses me off because I can't participate along with folks who have REAL phones and phone service. VoIP has a long way to go before it can be used by most. It's always "Lines are temporarily busy. Please try again later." Or sometimes it rings deceptively and after 2 or 3 rings it switches to a fast busy signal. And I can't use it to fax unless I purchase a special line, and my TiVo won't dial in even though I did everything Indian Customer Service assured me would work... acted like I was stupid.

Wondering if I made a bad decision.

I prefer to look at it the other way. VoIP as the name says was built for voice. It was not built for fax, tivo, alarms etc. The issue is that all these other devices have a long way to come in order to have native Broadband support. It is backwards that we are still converting data to analog signals in order to send it over a VoIP line. The Internet was built for data. Vonage and all the other VoIP providers should start supporting Fax-over-IP and the mfgs should start selling fax machines with built-in Ethernet and Fax-over-IP support. Alarm systems should support Broadband out of the box etc. We still have a long way to go until all these things have caught up. The voice providers are actually quite far ahead in comparison.

Good point. I'd have to agree with you there, but that's going to take along time and backward compatibility is very important for new technologies.