Who is your internet provider?

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I had Comcast at my house, and was paying $57/mo for just internet for their 10 meg service.

AT&T U-verse rolled out, switched to their 18 meg service for $65 and love it!

I called Comcast and tried to downgrade to their 1 meg service and get my bill down to $19.99 or $29.99 just as a backup if U-verse went down, but they refused to sell me a lower package than what I had with them already. I ended up keeping Comcast for another 2 months on standby, till finally I just got fedup and cancelled.

The thing that pisses me off with Comcast is that they screw with the voice packets when using any other VOIP providers other than their own. I got 3 VOIP phones that work with our phone system at the office, and when you connect it to Comcast we are always getting break ups in the sound quality when making calls and that was on a 10 MEG Comcast connection.

There is no issues with U-verse, and I have other employees who use a 1.5 MEG DSL connection which runs better than Comcast for VOIP.
 
Arvig Comm (ACS) 10meg is what I'm paying for.

Funny thing is when I use their check speed it always shows above 10. Any other speed check shows around 7.
 
Mine is Verizon Online DSL. Not bad.

Me too.
Have a constant problem with service disconnects. Sometime it is just not there! Then it comes back and is adequate until it leaves again. Recycling the power sometimes works. Incoming calls dump the service.

The real pisser is that if you call to report the outage the VZ Interactive Voice Response switchboard eventually gets you to a setting where it asks you to call back when it is convenient to be at the keyboard, connected to their DSL with a phone.

measured speed at 1.74 down & .15 up with a ping of 162...is that ok?

The ship is sinking and, no, I can't come up on deck...I am busy bailing the water out of the engine room.

Joe
 
The thing that pisses me off with Comcast is that they screw with the voice packets when using any other VOIP providers other than their own. I got 3 VOIP phones that work with our phone system at the office, and when you connect it to Comcast we are always getting break ups in the sound quality when making calls and that was on a 10 MEG Comcast connection.

There is no issues with U-verse, and I have other employees who use a 1.5 MEG DSL connection which runs better than Comcast for VOIP.

Whats crucial for VOIP and causes the symptoms you're experiencing is quality of service. You can be getting 15M download speed, but if you get 30M for 30 seconds and 0M for 30 seconds, thats still 15M. Trick is getting at least a fully consistent ~200-250Kb/s both ways for smooth voip.

I've seen huge inconsistencies and long 'pauses' in comcast service. No doubt they work that out when they're installing their own digital voice service.

I had several VOIP providers at my old house with comcast 6 and 8M service and they worked spottily at best. Vonage and the original AT&T voip services worked okay, but sunrocket and several others were terrible.

In my new house with comcasts 12 and 16 services, I use Ooma with no problems.

Try running one of the many available 'voiptest' services to see how good the quality of service, jitter and packet loss stats are. At least that gives you a little ammo to work with on the ISP, although the ISP nowhere assures quality of service, just an average data rate over a period of time and they dont even really assure that either.
 
Me too.
Have a constant problem with service disconnects. Sometime it is just not there! Then it comes back and is adequate until it leaves again. Recycling the power sometimes works. Incoming calls dump the service.

I'd bet money you've got a piece of bad phone cable somewhere in your house, a badly wired outlet, a bad dsl filter or something wrong in the network access box on the side of your house. Try taking a long piece of known good phone wire out to the network box, unplug your houses wiring and plug in that long wire and take it in to where your modem is, put a splitter on it and plug in a phone w/dsl filter and the dsl modem.

See if your speed isnt better and see if your problems dont go away. Then look for the POC phone wiring component inside your house.

Other thing I've seen that caused a similar problem was a guy who lived near the ocean and when the phone company side of the box was opened up (its usually locked) it was full of bugs and the wiring was covered with green corrosion and badly degraded. New wire, bug clean out, and his speed doubled and problems went away.
 
I'd bet money you've got a piece of bad phone cable somewhere in your house, a badly wired outlet, a bad dsl filter or something wrong in the network access box on the side of your house. Try taking a long piece of known good phone wire out to the network box, unplug your houses wiring and plug in that long wire and take it in to where your modem is, put a splitter on it and plug in a phone w/dsl filter and the dsl modem.

See if your speed isnt better and see if your problems dont go away. Then look for the POC phone wiring component inside your house.

Other thing I've seen that caused a similar problem was a guy who lived near the ocean and when the phone company side of the box was opened up (its usually locked) it was full of bugs and the wiring was covered with green corrosion and badly degraded. New wire, bug clean out, and his speed doubled and problems went away.

Thanks,

I'm gonna start at the NID and bypass all the circa 1950 telco stuff.

MY experience with VZ is they are better than what I am getting....I'll report back.

Joe
 
Time Warner Cable for both internet and phone. Pay for 15 mbps, and consistently get over 30 mbps
 
Whats crucial for VOIP and causes the symptoms you're experiencing is quality of service. You can be getting 15M download speed, but if you get 30M for 30 seconds and 0M for 30 seconds, thats still 15M. Trick is getting at least a fully consistent ~200-250Kb/s both ways for smooth voip.

I've seen huge inconsistencies and long 'pauses' in comcast service. No doubt they work that out when they're installing their own digital voice service.

I had several VOIP providers at my old house with comcast 6 and 8M service and they worked spottily at best. Vonage and the original AT&T voip services worked okay, but sunrocket and several others were terrible.

In my new house with comcasts 12 and 16 services, I use Ooma with no problems.

Try running one of the many available 'voiptest' services to see how good the quality of service, jitter and packet loss stats are. At least that gives you a little ammo to work with on the ISP, although the ISP nowhere assures quality of service, just an average data rate over a period of time and they dont even really assure that either.


I'm using ooma with very little problems. I found my VOIP problems were uplink bandwidth too crowded; my ISP provides me 970kbps at best but my network has outgrown that BW. I had the ooma hub behind the router using a lot of Qos settings and finally yanked it out altogether and moved the ooma hub to modem and connected my smart switch to the ooma hub. Problem seems to be solved w/o slowing the Internet connection. ooma suggests turning off the downlink Qos by setting to 0. So my Qos is as simple as setting the uplink speed.

I had read somewhere that the omma hub has asterisk integrated into the ooma tunnel while the telo model has integrated freeswitch. Seems to be nice equipment for VOIP but my first ooma hub had some defects that took ooma a while to own-up to.
 
UPDATE:

I am going to change 'net providers. AT&T will be gone. Comcast 12MB and Unlimited Phone for $45+tax (approx. $50/month) for a year. Yeah, it jacks up substantially in year two (no contract/commitment), but I will save $300 the first year over AT&T's 1.5MB DSL/Phone and get 8x faster 'net. I'll negotiate for year 2 or drop the phone altogether.
 
UPDATE:

I am going to change 'net providers. AT&T will be gone. Comcast 12MB and Unlimited Phone for $45+tax (approx. $50/month) for a year. Yeah, it jacks up substantially in year two (no contract/commitment), but I will save $300 the first year over AT&T's 1.5MB DSL/Phone and get 8x faster 'net. I'll negotiate for year 2 or drop the phone altogether.

Your not in a ATT U-Verse area are you ?

I am moving from Verizon 3.0 m (running about 1m of late) to the Dark Side, the local Cable company for 8 mg for $ 44 p/m after the discounts. (6 months for $ 24 p/m).
This should happen on Friday, I can't wait as the Verizon has gotten worse and worse and really bad this week......
 
Your not in a ATT U-Verse area are you ?

I am moving from Verizon 3.0 m (running about 1m of late) to the Dark Side, the local Cable company for 8 mg for $ 44 p/m after the discounts. (6 months for $ 24 p/m).
This should happen on Friday, I can't wait as the Verizon has gotten worse and worse and really bad this week......
Jimbo, I am in a AT&T U-Verse neighborhood. I have been aruging with AT&T over a simple $10/month for a year discount they gave me back in March (they offered it, I didn't ask). I've had to call every month to remind them to apply it. I finally gave up yesterday when they said they wouldn't honor it. Honestly, $10 isn't much on the surface, but over the course of a year, $120/year is. A company should honor what they say.
 
Jimbo, I am in a AT&T U-Verse neighborhood. I have been aruging with AT&T over a simple $10/month for a year discount they gave me back in March (they offered it, I didn't ask). I've had to call every month to remind them to apply it. I finally gave up yesterday when they said they wouldn't honor it. Honestly, $10 isn't much on the surface, but over the course of a year, $120/year is. A company should honor what they say.

My thoughts were that you could get up to 20 MG thru the VRAD box thru ATT
 
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