Comcast and VOIP

So we've been on Vonage for just about 5 years. Aside from some hiccups in the early months -- way back in spring of 2004 -- we've had no major complaints. (Though the simultaneous ringing feature takes some time for both you and your callers to get used to.)

Then just this year we started having serious voice quality problem. People would say I was breaking up on nearly every call. Calls would drop right in the middle of phone calls. People would say they called us but rolled right over to voicemail. Multiply all these small aggravations by my working from home more and routinely doing 6-9 hours a day on conference calls, and I knew we had to do something.

Vonage said it was Comcast's fault; Comcast said it was "congestion in my neighborhood" or my Linksys router's fault. Reading the press about Comcast's bandwidth caps and bandwidth shaping, I suspected Comcast was merrily dropping Vonage's VOIP packets.

So we made the switch to Comcast Digital Voice today. As much as I dislike potentially rewarding the guilty party, I need a reliable phone service -- and a single throat to choke when I can't get that. The finger pointing was driving me crazy, and my phone just wasn't working. (In case you are wondering, the AT&T coverage near my house is not that great, and other VOIP services including both Skype and MagicJack weren't much better, quality-wise.)

So we'll see how the grand experiment goes. As is typical, I lost a bunch of hours today managing the 6 Comcast people (two on-site techs, 3 phone support folks, and 1 voice-chat person)
that it took to switch me over from Vonage. But after two new modems, two physical network doodad replacements, 8 cable modem and router resets, I think I'm back to normal now.

Call me if you want to hear that Comcast VOIP sounds like. :-)

The upside: this new package features super-fast Internet access. Check these two bandwidth speed test results from earlier today. Yup, that's 17 Mbps downstream and 8-9 Mbps upstream. Woot!