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?"

Customer Service?

[Kid Zero]

Say, has Vonage reopened their Customer Service department yet? Last I checked, they didn't understand the concept.

I work for a small cable company...

[Anonymous Coward]

And when I compare our VOIP service with Vongage, I use the following facts.

"Vonage requires an internet connection, we do not"
"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"
"Vonage has a national 911 call center, we route 911 locally in your county"
"We are a local call center, where with Vonage, you may get routed to a call center in East India"

While I'm not exactly a fan of Comcast, its all too easy to get a lone CSR (in any company) who really doesnt know what he/she is talking about and will say just about anything to win back customers.

Heh, the confermation/security word I had to type to post this was "exploit".

Verizon FIOS

[stirfry714]

I have Verizon FIOS for Internet and phone right now, and the moment they offer TV, I can be done with Comcast for good... they got their TV franchise here a few months ago, should be a month or two, and then we'll be Comcast free, and everything will be running over the nice fiber pipe.

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

Re:It's not....

[topham]

Shaw Cable does this in Canada. They drop in another cable modem and wire your phonelines up to the cable modem (which has VoIP capabilities); the one significant advantage is they also install a rechargeable battery pack and off some service level guarantees.

VoIP only as good as your connection

[LoverOfJoy]

Do many people really have fully reliable connection? Every place that I've lived had spotty high speed internet connection. It was up MOST of the time but there were definitely periods here and there where it would go out and be a bit before it came back on. Most people are used to much greater reliability with their phone lines. I can't remember a time when the line gave out on me in the middle of a call (unless I accidentally hung it up with my chin while trying to do more than one thing at once). If I need to call 911 I don't want to have to deal with the net being down. Periodically going down for short periods of a time is annoying when it comes to the net but it'd be infuriating if it happened with my phone. It's hard for me to understand how others would want VoIP services like Vonage or a Comcast equivalent unless they had much more reliable internet service.

Re:I'm shocked, shocked...

[simontek2]

Actually, it can, if its not positioned correctly, When I first moved to Savannah 4 years ago, I lived on a private island, the cable service sucked. I think 90% of the people out there used Satelite. The crew who first installed it were lazy and incompetant, to the point if it was cloudy, we would have interference. Finally sick of it, We called to cancel, they sent out someone to fix it, They installed a new dish, put it in the yard, (it was attached to the house, with only 6 trees covering its view) Now it gets great reception. Although I do not live in Savannah anymore. lol.

Really? Net Neutrality already broken?

[twitter]

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.

So, you work for an equipment vendor that's busy setting up "QOS" equipment that will bump off competing VOIP traffic for "downloads" but not Comcasts? Would you say that Comcast is setting up equipment that's currently against the law? That's exactly the sort of anti-competitive behavior everyone worried about net neutrality is talking about.

Lanham Act

[bmo]

In the US, it is _illegal_ to lie about a competitor's product.

IANAL, but _these guys are_

http://www.poznaklaw.com/articles/falsead.htm [poznaklaw.com] (horrid seersucker background, but they're spot on)

If this is true, then Comcast is _hosed_ and I would cheer on Vonage's lawsuit.

--
BMO

Re:I'm shocked, shocked...

[merreborn]

What's funny is that I've driven by Comcast facilities... They use multiple satellite dishes. Looks like they get their signals from Satellite and then send the signals over their own ground-based network...... In that context, they should be pretty careful about criticizing dish-based reception.....

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that a 12", $100 dish doesn't perform the same in the rain as the 100', multi-million dollar dishes Comcast uses.

They were idiots.

[UncleTogie]

Pfft. These doofs were clueless. First, at 70% deaf, I have serious trouble with accents unless they're speaking SLOWLY. This wouldn't be a problem, but when I tried to explain it, the first moron just ignored it. He had no idea what "deaf" or "hearing-impaired" meant when I asked him, and so I asked to be transferred to someone who DID. Same with the second, third, and fourth yahoo. I asked for a manager and FINALLY found someone who not only knew what "deaf" meant, but to also enunciate. Total call time? 50 minutes. Total time for me to ask the question I needed answered and have it answered? 30 seconds. 49 minutes, 30 seconds of hold time to find someone who knows the meaning of "deaf" is -bleep-ing ridiculous.

Re:I'm shocked, shocked...

[BVis]

The network setup that I inherited when I took my current job included 5 (now 7) Vonage lines connected to a Comcast "business class" DOCSIS gateway. When we were experiencing some dropouts and poor voice quality, I researched solutions that others (and Vonage) had found to improve the situation. You're correct in that the only QoS-like packet management happens within Vonage's routers, and after that there's no management. However, this is enough to resolve some problems that Vonage customers experience.

Now, when Comcast breaks for days with no ETA, that's when BVis goes postal. (Guess what I'm going to have to deal with this morning? Cable went out on Saturday according to the boss. Did they tell me Saturday when I might have been able to come in to the office and do some troubleshooting? Hell no. $boss IMd me at 12:15 Sunday morning when he got home from the office, bitching at me about the phones being down. WTF am I supposed to do then? I have no access to the building on the weekends without them there.) A real T1 would cost us another $300 a month over what we're paying now. Clearly if we paid more for a real connection, the ground would split open, dogs and cats would start living together, mass hysteria, etc. etc. Nevermind that phones and internet are mission critical to just about any organization, clearly saving $300 a month is worth days of downtime and lost business.

And yes, I am considering resigning over the fact that they wont do what it takes to allow me to do my job.

See, you're driving a Yugo...

[LocoBurger]

I'm a customer of both Comcast and Vonage. I won't say that Vonage is perfect, but for $25/month, it's pretty fantastic. We've had voicemail outages (voicemail doesn't pick, we can't check voicemail), and that sucks, but it's been very rare (3 times in a little over a year for a couple hours each time). We've had more trouble, in fact, with our Comcast cable modem and Comcast cable TV going down. Generally, the weak link seems to be Comcast, not Vonage.

My wife and I were at a local festival, and Comcast had a booth. I had to figure out why they could have the balls to advertise $40/month for what sounded like the same thing as Vonage. I told the rep that I was a Vonage customer, and I was willing to listen to his schpiel. "See, you're driving a Yugo, and what we've got here is a Lexus!" Uh huh.. So, what makes it a Lexus? He rattles off some features. Vonage includes every one of them. Oh, and Vonage includes calls to Canada and Western Europe. Hmm?

"See, you're driving a Yugo, and what we've got here is a Lexus!"

I thought I gave him a fair shot, and he had no actual arguments or points to make. I'll stay with Vonage, thanks much.

VoIP

[Couchmanx]

I worked as a tech support agent for a US Cable highspeed provider (not comcast), and each and everytime I got a call from a customer on either our VoIP solution or Vonage the call quality was completely garbage unless they were the only one in their area that even knew what the internet was. Out of all the calls I recieved from VoIP customers 2 or 3 of those calls werent dropped and sounded half decent.

Also alot of Vonage customers didnt know if they had digital phone service. Most would assume I was asking if theyre physical phone was digital. This resulted in alot of dropped calls when working through a connection issue (9 out of 10 times it was the vonage "router" that screwed up the connections).

Comcast is chock full of lying goodness

[saltydogdesign]

This isn't news to me. On no fewer than three separate occasions in about four years with Comcast, I have had service outages long enough to cause me to brave their call center. Here's the record on this:

1) Called and was told they were doing work in my area; that service would be restored in "a couple hours." The next day it was still out. While heading out to the car I noticed that the line to the house had become disconnected. I got a ladder, plugged it back in, and it worked fine.

2) Called and was told, again, they were doing work in my area; that service would be restored in "a couple hours." Called again when service was still out the next day. Was told they would send a person out -- this entailed a ten day wait. When the service guy arrived, he told me that the line splitter on the street was not only corroded but had been installed backward. Not sure how that's possible, but there it is.

3) Called and was told, yet again, they were doing work in my area; that service would be restored in "a couple hours." Ten minutes later I reset all my equipment and everything worked fine.

Fact is, "work in my area" is apparently a lie common to call center vermin. And Comcast doesn't care that they do this. Lovely.

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

[rabbit994]

Instead of worrying about 911, here's a simple solution, next time you upgrade cells phones, just keep the old one lying around for 911. Remember, cell phones can always dial 911 if they are connected to a tower. I have a nextel phone with no SIM card that I keep plugged and turned on for that reason. If you have spotty cell phone coverage where you live, this solution might not work for you but for many people, it's a good alternate.

I have Teliax which allows me to use Asterisk at home for my phone service. I use Linksys PAP2-NA for hooking POTS phones in to the Asterisk solution and I just set QOS for Asterisk box on the linksys router to very high and have zero problems.

Comcast vs. Vonage

[Peyna]

I had an interesting experience with Comcast not too long ago. I have had Vonage for quite some time now, and have my Internet service with Comcast. A few months ago, my Internet and Television service randomly stopped working one evening. I called up Comcast and had a recording saying service was out in some places in my area, so I didn't bother waiting on hold. The next time, the service was still out, and so after quite awhile I got through. (All the while, on my cell phone, which has limited minutes, since I got tired of paying so much for it when I have more than enough minutes with Vonage).

Comcast tells me they can get someone out to fix it, but it will be about 4-5 days. Okay fine, I'll get a credit for the time and I guess that's good enough. It turns out they had accidently disconnected my service while connecting a neighbor.

The amusing part of it all, is that while the guy is telling me it is going to this long to get fixed, the guy tried to sell me their VoIP service. (I never told them I had Vonage). I should have responded, "So, you want me to sign up for your phone service, so the next time this happens I won't be able to call and complain?"

Maybe if you have Comcast's VoIP service they put you at the front of the service queue?

Re:Comcast is chock full of lying goodness

[saltydogdesign]

Actually, the disconnected line to the house *was* their problem. Their line, their splitter. The fact that I took it on myself to solve it doesn't mean that it wasn't their responsibility.

In any case, your question is utterly obtuse. I pay these people a lot of money for service, and I don't appreciate being lied to. You frame it like customer service is a huge drag on their business, but as someone who runs a small design shop, I can tell you that customer service *is* your business no matter what line of work you're in. Unless you happen to be a monopoly, apparently.

To clarify the situation for your benefit: I never insisted anything, and I'm willing to give even their scripted solutions the benefit of a doubt. I called, asked what was up, and got this bullshit response. I wouldn't have called except that neighborhood outages are so frequent (in my area there is typically two or three short outages every afternoon -- a neighbor an I have compared notes on these) that it is hard not to make assumptions. But the call jockey never even suggested resetting my equipment (which I'd already tried once in any case -- their outages tend to futz up my router).