is it safe to go back to Vonage?

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: Jan 06, 2007 Posts: 4

I just read this article on dslreports.com

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Comcast-Says-Theyll-Play-Nice-With-Vonage-95954

I always had the feeling Comcast was messing things up. I had spent MANY hours trying to get things running smoothly. At first things were fine and we had Vonage for a year, but after a few months of bad quality, we had to switch. It was right around when Comcast got their phone in our area too... lol. We switched back to ATTs land line. Would have gone with Comcasts phone service, but the guy who came was saying he would have to run cables along the walls and ****, then said it wasn't 100% yet...
So now that I read this article, is it safe to go back to Vonage? Everything was fine until Comcast got their phone service heh

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

perhaps you should post a poll question and have those with comcast chime in. i've heard of comcast's decision to shape their internet traffic and of course, they will favor their own Voip solution. that's a no brainer. but now that the fcc is investigating, i'm sure they will be nicer than they were b/4.

Posts: 66 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jul 20, 2006 Posts: 66

mundy5 wrote:

perhaps you should post a poll question and have those with comcast chime in. i've heard of comcast's decision to shape their internet traffic and of course, they will favor their own Voip solution. that's a no brainer. but now that the fcc is investigating, i'm sure they will be nicer than they were b/4.

Is Road Runner available in your area?

I have had no problems with RR for about a year now.

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

nope. charter has a monopoly for cable internet here.

Posts: 433 · Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 12:13 pm Post subject:

A few months ago I remember seeing several posts where people were describing sudden call quality issues. The one common denominator was the vast majority had comcast as an isp. I remember even pointing that out in a specific thread. From what I have seen here in the past, I think there was no doubt that comcast was disrupting third party Voip services in some areas. I can't say everyone had problems using comcast and Vonage because that would be impossible to know. In addition, some users here reported no problems using comcast with their Vonage service. But for some, I agree that there was something being done by comcast to disrupt the Voip data.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Jun 23, 2008 Posts: 1

I'm looking to sign up for Vonage when I move down to Fort Lauderdale in two weeks - I was initially planning on signing up for internet with Comcast, but after the above posts, I'm a tad wary. Is there another cable internet provider that anyone can recommend in Fort Lauderdale? I'm pretty sure TimeWarner and Cox are both unavailable here... and DSL seemed to be more expensive (for the same speed) without subscribing to a landline.

Thanks in advance

Posts: 433 · Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2008 4:55 pm Post subject:

Well, I know that everybody using comcast didn't have a problem. If you read the link in the first post, you will see that essentially comcast has been busted on these issues and has agreed to not to disrupt Voip services with their traffic shaping techniques. I'm sure you could find more info on that topic by searching the web. If in the situation, I wouldn't be afraid to try out comcast. At least there isn't a contract with cable services and you can switch to DSL if you think it is not working well with Vonage.

Posts: 1179 · Member of the Week Joined: Feb 28, 2005 Posts: 1179

stacey, another good place is to get on dslreports.com and see the comcast subforum. this should also give you potentially good data on how it is running FL.

Posts: 881 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Nov 05, 2005 Posts: 881

Comcast is my ISP and I haven't experienced or noticed any sabotage on Comcasts behalf with relation to my Vonage service.

Posts: 174 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 06, 2006 Posts: 174

Comcast is my IP service and they purchased the area cable service recently from bankrupt Adelphia. Obviously, Adelphia was not in a position to do any maintenance on the cable system during the duration of their ownership because the owners (father & son team) were busy spending all the corporate proceeds on luxury items instead of maintenance (but that's another story that ends in Federal prison).

Comcast stepped into a maintenance nightmare in this area and had to replace just about all of the infrastructure in my area before either the cable or broadband worked properly.

After much work, Comcast in my area finally got things working and my Vonage works well. This is a testimonial to me that it was the cable, not Vonage, that was the culprit in Vonage's problems.