If you have Comcast, read this

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Sep 10, 2003 Posts: 2

Folks,
I really feel for Vonage at the moment. I bet an awful lot of their Comcast based customers are having real problems with their service, and are blaming Vonage. The real issue lies with Comcast's network, and their technical inability to solve some major routing issues in their headend CISCO routers caused by the current worm plagues (basically all the packets generated by the worm are causing an ARP storm, which in turn flattens any vaguely busy nodes in the system).
I'm coming to the conclusion that Comcast dont care, because they see that customers who have Vonage are basically screwed, and hope to get them back on their Digital Phone service. My other advice would be "don't rely on Vonage if you have Comcast, and live in a well populated area".

Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 9:13 pm Post subject:

I have a total of three Vonage lines and use Comcast cable modem in the Los Angeles area and have had great success. Compared to my earthlink dsl, which was abysmal. I can have all three lines running at the same time with no problems.

Guest

I live in Atlanta and have Comcast and I have had excellent service and no problems with Vonage even during heavy bandwidth usage. You may want to look at this article. Comcast is looking at increasing bandwidth from 1.5 megabits (per second) downstream to 3 megabits (per second) downstream by the end of the year to their entire cusomter base.

http://news.com.com/2100-1034-5072641.html

Posted: Fri Sep 12, 2003 11:56 am Post subject:

I live in DFW area, Lewisville, and haven't had any problems so far.

Posts: 27 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: 1058492018 Posts: 27

I have had problems here. Since the Blaster worm, I have had my service go down twice (both for 24hrs). Not a big problem since I mainly use my cell, but irritating none the less. I have asked for credits and Comcast was happy to give them to me.

Guest

I'm in Massachusetts. I'm having the the
same issue as the person that started this thread.

My Vonage home service has become unusable.
When I make a call, at some point after the
connection is established the conversation
becomes one way with me being able to hear
the other person and they not being able
to hear me.

I worked with Vonage and we were able to verify
the behavior.

Their theory is that somewhere in the comcast
network there is some firewall that is interpreting
the sudden flood of packets as an attack.

It doesn't sound like it's going to be an easy
thing to investigate. Before I start trying to
look at sniffer traces etc, I was wondering
if anyone else that uses Vonage is having
this problem.

I've told Vonage that if we can't resolve this
I'm going to have to cancel the service which
is a real shame.

Another option would be to switching to
RCN cable. Has anyone had any luck with them?

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Sep 10, 2003 Posts: 2

Media1 - they were much better weren't they!
Thats exactly what I'm doing - switching to RCN. A neighbour has it, and their MegaModem (3Meg/800K) rocks. Fiber, not Coax, to the house. And still better than comcast post their supposed upgrade to 3M down.
If you have all 3 (cable/phone/internet) - they have a good deal that gives you a phone line, basic cable, plus "MegaModem" service for 77 bucks month for a year (rising back up to 92 after a year - but still good value)
Also, if you go through the disconnect process with Comcast (tell them you're switching to RCN) they will offer BIG discounts (they offered me free internet service for 6 months, and 50% discount on everything else for 3 months). I still told them to shove it on principal tho.
My advice - get your own portable email address to so you can play the two off and switcheroo when you feel like it.

Posts: 5 · Posted: Mon Jan 10, 2005 9:46 pm Post subject:

I live in Connecticut and I've had Vonage and Comcast for a while now. The service has been great for a long time, but over the last few weeks my phone has been so messed up it's almost embarassing to even call someone on it. I'm moving in a couple weeks, can't wait to tell them how ashamed I am of them.

Code:

19 packets transmitted, 13 packets received, 31% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 49.078/228.729/545.936/171.719 ms

Posts: 35 · Posted: Tue Jan 11, 2005 12:35 am Post subject:

comcast just north of boston.

no problems... however, i have noticed a considerable drop in download rate when on a phone call. my connection is 3000/256 and if I set the QoS to 180, I get the expected upload, but the download drops 1000bps, which in my opinion is quite absurd and unacceptable!

other than losing 1/3 of my download bandwidth during the call, i've had no problems.

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

On Comcast in New Hampshire. No problems.