Comcast and Vonage

Posts: 627 · Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 10:01 pm Post subject:

What you also have to understand about border routers is they have multiple IP handoffs(ISP's). Depending upon how the networks' ASN is being broadcast to your ISP will determine which IP handoff you come into at the border router.

Why does this matter? Well because having a Comcast customer, a Verizon customer, a Optimum Online customer, an AT&T customer all ping the same address, does not mean it will route the same way. And because of this, it will come into the border router using a different internet connection. Depending upon the amount of traffic on that internet connection at that time, the more ICMP that will be dropped.

Therefore your ping to an IP in the NYC co-location may yield much more packet loss then a person on another ISP because they connecting to Vonage via a different handoff. In your case, Vonage has a Comcast handoff in all of the Co-locations. This means your traffic rides Comcast all the way to Vonage. It never has to touch anyone else's network infrastructure like everyone else does. While not every Comcast customer will ride all the way to Vonage due to not every Comcast network is being broadcast to over this ASN, it is near 80% of them.

The fact that in every Comcast issue, it is always the outbound RTP packets that are affected, Comcast is either manipulating egress traffic from the customers and not the ingress traffic to them or there is an issue with the Comcast handoff to Vonage. However, this has been checked from Vonage's side and there has been no issues found. There still could be something within Comcast's network prior to reaching the Vonage border router that is not visible to Vonage such as load that Comcast cannot on a certain group of routers.

Posts: 23 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 24, 2009 Posts: 23

houuser wrote:

Off the subject a tad, but was there not a US government ruling that the internet providers could not downgrade any VOIP service in which was not their own.

Thanks

OH, as long as the Goverment is watching -Then it couldn't possibly happen Lol

Posts: 227 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Dec 10, 2004 Posts: 227

Slyster wrote:

Most network administrators strongly believe they should have ICMP echo capabilities for network debugging purposes, while security administrators tend to limit even this seemingly benign traffic to what is strictly necessary, as even this can be abused by network tunneling applications.
Smile

As one of those Security Specialists I must say you are spot on!

Posts: 810 · Vonage Forum Evangelist Joined: Jun 08, 2007 Posts: 810

bbtrumpetguy wrote:

Slyster wrote:

Most network administrators strongly believe they should have ICMP echo capabilities for network debugging purposes, while security administrators tend to limit even this seemingly benign traffic to what is strictly necessary, as even this can be abused by network tunneling applications.
Smile

As one of those Security Specialists I must say you are spot on!

Yeah, and if you can't troubleshoot a network, you can't fix it and the security problems go away, since the network is broke. The Security expert gets a raise for no intrusions! Lol

Posts: 23 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Feb 24, 2009 Posts: 23

Consumer Advocates Embrace FCC's Latest Comcast Inquiry
Comcast tells us they're still digesting the letter...
05:44PM Tuesday Jan 20 2009 by Karl Bode
tags: business · bandwidth · cable · VoIP · Comcast · Vonage · ViaTalk

Yesterday we reported that the FCC was suddenly concerned about how Comcast's new network management system treats independent VoIP operators. As previously discussed, the new system temporarily de-prioritizes the traffic for customers who meet two criteria: they're on a congested node, and they have been using 70% or more of their assigned upstream or downstream throughput for more than fifteen minutes. However the FCC only just realized that these restrictions will only impact competing VoIP services -- not Comcast's own Digital Voice service.

How about that for a timely solution Smile