Survey Cable or DSL

Posts: 38 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Jan 24, 2009 Posts: 38

Hey Guys / All

Hopefully this thread will be useful and not cut.

Please post feedback on type of service, area (high density, apartments, house) and Voip issues.

Service: Comcast cable
Setting: Apartments
Issues: QoS, frequently unusable
Date 01/2009

Comment: My service USE TO BE be transparent / no issues, good Voip service - Not the case now - not sure what happened maybe a torrent Guru moved in around me?

Cheers

Posts: 38 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Jan 24, 2009 Posts: 38

I hope your feed back will assist others in deciding what type of service to set up or change to, with respect to all your feed back.

Thanks

Posts: 183 · Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 2:23 pm Post subject:

I don't intend to sound like a jerk, but this is going to be hard to assess companies without knowing the physical location of the service. You can be in the same city with the same provider and different switching stations can provide less quality service than others. (e.g. - Comcast may stink in one city and be outstanding in another region. Likewise for other providers.)

Typically speaking you can get a larger "pipe" if you will from cable internet than DSL but usually the cost is higher as well. In my regional area DSL, Cable Internet, WiMAX and Point-to-Point Wireless internet companies are available. The price for each of these services and the amount of amount of bandwidth they provide varies greatly.

I utilize Comcast's cable internet currently with minimal interruption. Generally speaking it is transparent and I do not have any issues.

Posts: 48 · Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 2:23 pm Post subject:

Service: Comcast 16Mbps service (Sacramento, CA USA)
Setting: Planned Urban Development (Medium-high density)
Issues: None! Been rock-solid for three years. Voip has been every bit as solid as a POTS landland. Cable downtime has been close to nil.
Date: 1/2009 (Vonage since ~6/2005)

Other info: Router is now a VDV21-VD which seems faultless. Prior routers were RTP300 (no problems) and WRTP54G (many problems). In all cases, the Voip router was only used as an adapter and was plugged into my network router. The Voip adapter connects to the house telephone wiring. Even DishTV (for pay-per-view) is happy with this installation.

Posts: 23 · Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2009 8:24 pm Post subject:

My location is in Leominster, Massachusetts. I switch from Comcast to Verizon FiOS. I have two Vonage phone and one Vonage fax line. My service under Comcast seemed to get worse. I purchased DOCIS 3.0 service two months ago and never got near the speeds they promised. When I used their live chat customer service, I got someone in India who kept telling me all of my problems was with my Linksys router. Anyway, I got Verizon FiOS a week ago. All of my Vonage lines are now rock solid using this new internet service. I got 20 Mb up/20 Mb down service and the speedtests from three different web sites all say I am getting around this speed.

Vonage rocks with FiOS!

Posts: 38 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Jan 24, 2009 Posts: 38

Thank for Your Feed Back and Reply.

Clearly this thread is useless - I have checked out Broadband.com and another decent forum for (ISP) and type of service feed back, but not much to report back on.

Posts: 656 · Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 7:48 pm Post subject:

You ever heard of the saying "One man's junk is another man's treasure"?

Well that's exactly how the ISP game is. Depending upon each person's way of usage(VoIP, Gaming, Video Chat, etc) a different experience will be had. Two people could live next door to each other. One being a power user, the other just the occasional web browsing and e-mail. The power user could say the ISP stinks and the other could love it.

Then you could have 2 Power users using the same ISP only separated by train tracks and one could have an awesome connection while the other guy is stuck pulling his hair out waiting for a web page to load and wondering why his girlfriend can only hear every other word.

This is the exact same for the Vonage user. While most have perfect quality and never worry about the reliability factor, there are those that want to see Vonage burn in hell because they blame Vonage for all their woes. Based upon each individuals modem, router, wiring, phones, etc and the local ISP all factor in to the equation of whether or not you will be happy with Vonage.

There is just no way to say one ISP is better then others because you will hear horror stories and fairy tales from different people you speak to.

Posts: 183 · Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 12:23 pm Post subject:

Well said... this was my point, I didn't get it across as well as you did.

Posts: 38 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Jan 24, 2009 Posts: 38

i once purchased some partitioning software from Para....and after the badly coded personal version blew out my XP installation I finally found my way to there b.b "of coarse after a reinstall" and very quickly realized this was a common problem with many - I am now the owner of useless software that I would not give to my "well you get the point".

I have since acquired the professional version which does not have that problem.

I sure wished I would of had a look at there b.b before making the purchase.

An ISP can either have a good track record or not and since this is the Voip forum the question was relevant to Voip and QoS. I wonder what the ration is between DSL / Cable (ISP) with respect to dropped calls or broken upstream communication.

Posts: 656 · Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 6:21 pm Post subject:

With DSL you should always have a cleaner line but not as much bandwidth. This is because cable bandwidth is shared a cross a node so each user could affect your connectivity. Whereas DSL is dedicated between you and the CO. If all is good there, the only issues you SHOULD have are that of the ISP's backbone, the IP handoff's across the net to Vonage.