Comcast Lying About Vonage

jehnx writes, "Apparently, Comcast is trying some new tricks to get people to sign up for its version of VoIP, 'Comcast Digital Voice,' according to Wang (of WangScript fame). From the blog post: 'Today my wife received a phone call from a Comcast representative who had called to promote their new "Comcast Digital Voice" service... Ordinarily, we don't mind Comcast calling us from time to time with new offers... [but this time] they proceeded to tell LIE after LIE in an attempt to convince us that Vonage was not as good as Comcast Digital Voice. Imagine how many people would be scared into using Comcast Digital Voice because Comcast makes them believe that Vonage is insecure and only works when your PC is turned on.' Is Comcast going a bit far in their techniques to lure in new customers?"

Re:Its too bad

[Rude Turnip]

IANAL, but it sounds more like a case for a libel suit, rather than false advertising, if the claims are true.

Hate to say it by Comcast is partially correct

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case Comcast is partially correct.

They are selling a full DQOS phone service. This means that that there is full QOS when on their network. You are guaranteed that you will have the bandwidth for the telephone call. This cannot be said when you are using Vonage. Vonage over a DOCSIS connection is strictly best effort, meaning that you voice packets have no more priority on the line than you neighbors downloads. This will (if it does not already) mean that you will have inferior quality on a Vonage phone vs. the Comcast solution. Also with DQOS from Comcast you get priority for any 911 call. You cannot get this from Vonage.

Disclosure - I do work in the cable industry but for a equipment vendor not Comcast.

Never atribute to malice...

[Telvin_3d]

When I hear things like this, I always wonder how much of it is the company and how much or it is the phone operator. I mean, I ahve heard sales people say some amazingly stupid things in the past. Often not because of any intentional malice but simply because they have no clue. Now, think about the person on the other end of the telephone. They are likely fairly young and are being paid ~$8-$9 an hour to sit in a chair and read a script to people on the phone. They have gotten all of an hours training on any given service if they are lucky. Maybe all they got was an e-mail or memo saying what the new spiel was. That, plus some comments overheard in the break room, are all they have to go on and they are being judged on how many people sign up. So, sure some of the time it is intentional corporate lies, but my guess is that it is an issue with the operator more times than not.

Re:Customer Service?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they do. They goofed on their long distance prefix overseas code list and gave me a credit for a 30 minute phone call to Italy that was suppose to be free. They have two sets of prefixes for Italy, one of which is 40 cents/minute. My prefix was not listed so I called the number assuming it would be covered under my plan.

Anyway, I called at 1 am, got through quickly to an agent, explained the issue and asked for the credit back to my account. And done. That's it. No squabbling.

Re:Vonage isn't secure

[Ucklak]

So VOIP is no more secure than POTS.

Re:I'm shocked, shocked...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still shocked Comcast tells that lie since their service quits every time it rains but my friends with satellite don't have problems except a very few times of the year. Comcast is too cheap to use water-tight connectors so their cables always short-out when wet. They also are too cheap to use NEMA rated enclosures so the amps also short when it's windy and raining. All it takes it a little shower to knock-out cable for many hours for every one I know that has Comcast.

Re:Its too bad

[dolphino]

libel is in print - slander is by voice

Re:Verizon FIOS

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

So glad there's finally some real competition for Comcast. I guess it takes one monopoly to take down another monopoly.

It's called an oligopoly and in the long run, it is not much different from a monopoly market.

Re:Hate to say it by Comcast is partially correct

[chill]

Really? Then how come my Comcast VoIP phone goes all to hell when I start uploading big files at the same time?

Re:Really? Net Neutrality already broken?

[The Vulture]

PacketCable, which is what is used for these Cable/VoIP lines doesn't (intentionally) work like that.

DOCSIS has excellent QoS support. It supports what are called "Service Flows" when the modem is provisioned in DOCSIS 1.1 mode. Essentially, a service flow creates a secondary pipe to the CMTS that is completely independant of the other ones. Thus, there would be a second service flow, provisioned for 64 or 128Kbps, used only for VoIP, which has a higher priority than the data flow.

When using cable modem service, traffic from Vonage unfortunately falls into the "data" pipe, and therefore gets jumbled with the rest.

I don't feel that Comcast is being anti-competitive at all, they're using a feature of the DOCSIS specification that cable operators devised and use. Perhaps you need to take your case to CableLabs (and get laughed out by them).

-- Joe

Re:Vonage isn't secure

[laing]

Actually it's slightly more secure only because SS7 is a simple protocol compared to SIP (tunneled of course). It's also more secure in that a non-authorized person (like a private investigator) could not tap a VoIP connection without gaining entry to the premises. A POTS connection can be tapped by anybody who can access your line (anywhere). Comcast's VoIP likely uses similar technology to Vonage and so is probably just as secure.

Re:Hate to say it by Comcast is partially correct

[MichaelKaiserProScri]

Aha! So Comcast does NOT put the internet and VoIP into two different frequency ranges. This does not happen on Brighthouse because they do put internet and VoIP into two different ranges. In essence two different cablemodems that are totally invisible to each other.

Re:I work for a small cable company...

[radish]

And when I compare our VOIP service with Vongage, I use the following facts.
You have a different definition of "fact" from me.

"Vonage requires an internet connection, we do not"
Fine, Vonage requires an internet hookup. If you don't have one, Vonage isn't for you. Next!

"Vonage routes their calls over the public internet, which may result in poorer quality or dropped calls, we route calls over our private cable network"
Never had a dropped call on Vonage. Never had bad line quality. I've been using it for 2 years now, it's been more reliable than my old POTS line.

"Vonage has a national 911 call center, we route 911 locally in your county"
False. In almost all cases 911 calls are routed automatically to your local emergency center [vonage.com], the Vonage center is used only in exceptional cases where this is impossible. What do YOU do when you can't route to the county? Do you even HAVE a call centre to handle that? Stop spreading FUD.

"We are a local call center, where with Vonage, you may get routed to a call center in East India"
I've called Vonage once, and the person I spoke to didn't sound Indian. But then I'm not a racist ass who thinks only Americans are capable of telling me to restart my router.

Security issues true...

[pavera]

Ok, not entirely, but Vonage is a completely unencrypted service. It is the same as sending a standard email. If you are ordering things over a Vonage phone line and saying or dialing your credit card number, it is just like emailing it. Grabbing these packets off the internet and replaying them is exceedingly simple. As your voice travels across the internet, any router along that path could be used to dump those packets and a malicious tech or hacker who has gained access to that router can very easily steal your information.

Comcast probably suffers from the exact same problem, although the traffic is probably not traversing multiple provider's networks the way Vonage is and therefore the danger should in theory be less.

Re:Cable is secure

[Afrosheen]

Actually the cable company provides battery backup boxes for their phone service to satisfy telco laws. They must have 9 9's uptime on the phone service due to 911 requirements. Even the cable techs (who despise the phone boxes) are extremely careful when adding or removing services on homes with digital phone lines. They must never, ever disconnect the line at the pedestal/pole during service calls due to the phone boxes. All of the filters and other things they need to access are all in the digital phone box, so really there's no reason to climb a pole or open a catbox anyway. But due to the poor design, wrestling around inside of the boxes is less than simple and easy and usually takes both hands with a tool in each.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not just Vonage.

[rantingkitten]

I am the technical director for a VoIP provider I won't name (it's not Vonage), and I can tell you that Comcast has been a thorn in my side for a long time because of this nonsense.

Whenever a customer calls complaining about voice quality, it's almost always latency or some other issue with their connection; VoIP is, as you can guess, very sensitive to connection quality.

Comcast has been one of the worst for us, though other cable providers aren't much better (Time Warner, I'm looking in your direction). I cannot prove it, but I'm certain Comcast is doing some sort of traffic shaping for VoIP packets not their own, and it wreaks havoc with my company and many others, because we can't do anything for the customer except tell them "take it up with your ISP".

I think we all know what the ISP's invariable reaction is. Some tier-one flunky goes "Yup, signal looks good! No problems here!" and the customer comes back to us and there's nothing we can do about it. It doesn't matter how many pingtests, traceroutes, or other measures you offer them -- the cable companies have been notoriously unhelpful in getting their act together. Worse still they'll offer outlandish suggestions to the user, like "getting a static IP might help" or "upgrade your connection to six megs", neither of which will do a damn thing (well, the latter might, but it's not likely that bandwidth is the problem).

Now I admit that part of this is that VoIP over public residential/business connections is purely "best effort", especially the RTP stream is delivered via UDP which most ISPs and backbone providers consider less important than TCP. Contrawise, Comcast and other integrated providers can QoS their own VoIP packets any way they like. But for an ISP to leverage this fact to spread misinformation or misrepresent what is actually going on is totally ridiculous.

Part of the problem is that most people really don't know anything about computers or the internet. They'll tell you "but I have a fast connection! It's three megs!" because they don't understand the difference between latency and bandwidth, or they'll point out that their email and websites load really quickly. From this end-user's point of view there's nothing wrong with their connection that should cause their VoIP phone to suck, because "everything else works", and I partially agree with them -- they shouldn't have to constantly harrass their ISP to stop screwing around. (My disagreement is my cynicism of caveat emptor, and it wouldn't kill people to know a little something about how the service works, at the very least so they know to whom to complain when something goes wrong. In essence they're bringing a car to the mechanic complaining that the ride is bumpy, when the problem is the road outside their house is full of potholes.)

But even my cynicism has limits -- as a matter of fact I had to go through this same crap with my home cable provider, Charter, and it took nearly two weeks for me to get them to deal with the problem. Keep in mind that's someone like me, who knows what he's talking about, who is in IT, who can provide useful information about where the problem lies, and knows to whom to speak and how to phrase the problem to get results. What is your average user supposed to do, when they don't know anything about this stuff?

When it gets to that point, and the ISP is telling them things like "reboot the computer!", the user sees only a few choices -- get a new ISP, or get a new VoIP provider. And here comes Mr Comcast Droid with his promises of high quality, one bill, blah blah blah, and the user thinks that sounds pretty good, so they make the switch.

Also, for those of you griping about security of VoIP, I get that question a lot too. It's not particularly secure, but I find it amusing that nobody asks that question when they're getting a copper line from the local Bell, which isn't secure either. At least to eavesdrop on VoIP you'd have to have access to one of the routers along the path, whereas any ten-year-old can plug a handset into the phone interface on the outside of your house (my friends and I did it all the time to bug my sister).