Re: What vexes VoIP users? - Bufferbloat
Jim Gettys j...@freedesktop.org writes: Now that I have mitigated the bufferbloat disaster in my home cable service via bandwidth shaping, Skype works sooo much better for me. This is what devices such as Ooma are doing. Unfortunately, it means you have to defeat features such as Comcast's PowerBoost. Actually not... if your queueing scheme is smart enough to stay one step ahead of PowerBoost it works fine. https://calomel.org/pf_hfsc.html I run flashrd/OpenBSD 4.8 on an ALIX 2D3. Love it. -r
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
This has nothing to do with Vonage and likes that market to consumer - their devices are locked so the consumer is locked into the services that Vonage/MagicJack/etc provides. They are not the companies that are going to eat lunch of cable companies and old school telcos as their business model is to sell the same servie at a minimum discount to the rates of dominant carriers. What the cable companies are afraid of is that when a consumers have SIP speaking devices used to terminate calls the consumers will find VOIP providers that charge $1.00 a month for a phone number and another $0.01457 per voice minute with 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 or 1 second billing. After deploying about nearly a thousand SIP-speaking phones for different folk over last few months I can tell you that the self-provisioning for the customer's side is becoming so easy a caveman can do it. There goes their $20 or more per month worth of profit per phone number. First its indisputable that voice is inexpensive and will become less expensive, from all providers that stay in the business, over time. Having said that, perhaps you might want to look at both Skype MagicJack since their pricing ranges between free to extremely inexpensive. MagicJack does require an adapter designed for them, but that seems to mainly be because they are targeting the very low technical skill market specifically. Skype (and clones) of course run on multiple devices ranging from SOHO 3rd party adapters to PCs to smart phones. MagicJack charges $19.99 per year for unlimited US and Canadian calling(and it appears to really be unlimited http://blogs.computerworld.com/voip_quiz_how_many_minutes_in_an_unlimited_plan). While Skype and MagicJack have attracted users (so has Google Voice which is also free) they haven't eroded the VOIP take rates for the cable operators in significant numbers. I would suggest that this has nothing to do with the fact these services/devices don't inter-operate with PacketCable networks and more to do with customers liking bundles and generally believing that the cable offering is a good deal even if its not the cheapest offering. Does it mean that they are preventing other SIP devices to work on their IP network? No, it does not. But what they are doing is preventing SIP devices from working with their voice network because they do not want it to be a user-controlled SIP device. Alex Exactly how are they preventing anything? This is like someone yelling that they have designed a car that is 14 feet wide and the government is preventing them from being able to drive on the existing roads which by standard are only 12 feet wide (some older roads are much narrower). -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
There's no particularly good reason that a VoIP-over-cable system shouldn't be able to hand off calls to an arbitrary SIP device. No, there's no particulary good technological reason why VOIP-over-cable system shouldn't be able to hand off calls to an arbitrary SIP device. The reason is purely business - it will destroy their own voice service user base. Alex
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 3/3/2011 3:47 PM, Alexander O. Yuriev wrote: There's no particularly good reason that a VoIP-over-cable system shouldn't be able to hand off calls to an arbitrary SIP device. No, there's no particulary good technological reason why VOIP-over-cable system shouldn't be able to hand off calls to an arbitrary SIP device. The reason is purely business - it will destroy their own voice service user base. Alex PacketCable pre-dates network neutrality discussions in the US, think 1999 for version 1.0 http://www.cablelabs.com/specifications/PKT-SP-TGCP-C01-071129.pdf So we have a working technology that pre-dated significant direct to consumer SIP services. Vonage went direct to consumer in 2002, before that their model was selling to the cable operators.) Now its true there is no technical reason that 3rd party SIP devices couldn't be included in the mix, especially since PacketCable 2.0 moves from MGCP to SIP. However, there is a ton of work to build an interoperable protocol for signaling call setup, AAA, number ports, etc, etc. Integrating 3rd party SIP into the existing PacketCable standards is certainly possible, but who is going to pay for it? I know of no 3rd party VOIP vendors that even want to go down this path. Vonage's technical folks seem quite happy to have a ~60% success rate in my experience troubleshooting networks and Skype seems even more disinterested. I also think you greatly over estimate the amount of concern generated by MagicJack, Skype, Vonage, et al. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Depends on the network, but we use private IPs on the eMTA side of the CM. Frank -Original Message- From: Alexander O. Yuriev [mailto:alex-lists-na...@yuriev.com] Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2011 2:48 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? There's no particularly good reason that a VoIP-over-cable system shouldn't be able to hand off calls to an arbitrary SIP device. No, there's no particulary good technological reason why VOIP-over-cable system shouldn't be able to hand off calls to an arbitrary SIP device. The reason is purely business - it will destroy their own voice service user base. Alex
Re: What vexes VoIP users? - Bufferbloat
On 03/01/2011 04:32 AM, William Pitcock wrote: That is the same market Vonage is now targeting in the US, basically. National calling in the US is basically bundled with most calling plans now. I'm not convinced that many people use Vonage in the US - my experience with it was that it was not as reliable as the VOIP products offered through the various broadband providers I have had. Due to bufferbloat in the broadband edge, the broadband carriers have a fundamental advantage in providing VOIP, since they do not do so over the data service the user has but does not have access to for any classification; it is provisioned entirely separately on different channels. As you can see in the ICSI Netalyzr data you can find in my blog at http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/ whenever a home connection is saturated for any reason, customers can easily experience *seconds* of latency. (Telephony standards for max latency + jitter are in the 150MS range). Even web browsing induces transient jitter of order hundred(s) of milliseconds, from some experiments I've done, which is a problem for VOIP, much less the bulk data transfers which kill you for long periods. Now that I have mitigated the bufferbloat disaster in my home cable service via bandwidth shaping, Skype works sooo much better for me. This is what devices such as Ooma are doing. Unfortunately, it means you have to defeat features such as Comcast's PowerBoost. Note I do not believe bufferbloat was intended by any broadband carrier to give them such an advantage. Right now, they take it in the ear on service calls. And as far as I've been able to tell, just about everyone has been making the same generic mistake. I'm sure the conspiracy theorists will love to make such claims, however. If you don't know what bufferbloat is, you can try the talk I gave recently in Bell Labs, available at: http://mirrors.bufferbloat.net/Talks/BellLabs01192011/ or wade through my blog at: http://gettys.wordpress.com/ or come to the transport area meeting at the Prague IETF where I will be giving a somewhat abbreviated version of the talk. Best regards, Jim Gettys Bell Labs
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Michael Thomas m...@mtcc.com Yes, really. The only difference was which L2 channels the RTP packets were flowed onto, which was determined by the MGCP/SIP signalling and interaction with the telephony gateway. There is a **very** complicated state machine that deals with this using some bastardized IETF protocols (COPS IIRC). Ok, see, now I (like, I suspect, Frank Bulk) am confused again: when you say which L2 channels the RTP packets were flowed onto, that sounds to me a *whole* lot like which VLAN on the end-user drop carried the RTP packets from the terminal adapter in their cable box to our concentrator... which is pretty much the point I was originally trying to make, if perhaps in slightly different terms. Am I still misunderstanding you? Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
As I said, this second channel doesn't exist in almost all cases (its not cost effective nor needed in almost all cases). Having said that over the top VOIP providers do suffer in comparison because they don't get the benefit of prioritization in the local cable plant. Cost-effective? Could you expand on how the provisioning of a second virtual pipe down the hill to a cable box has any incremental costs at all? Cheers, -- jra Because it takes either another 6 MHz on the downstream side that could be used for a TV channel as well as 3.2 MHz (or 6.4 MHz for =D2) on the upstream side. It also takes the CMTS interfaces, which are not cheap even with the advent of high capacity cards QAMs for D3. On top of all this it also takes more time on the design and management side because you have to make sure all of your nodes are getting both sets of channels and you have to make sure your provisioning or CMTS config keeps the EMTA's on the right channels. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Frank, No, not all. There seems to be some confusion here between the concept of PacketCable flows which everyone _should_ (but aren't) be using to prioritize their voice traffic and separate downstream and upstream channels which a few operators use for voice traffic only. On 3/2/2011 12:55 AM, Frank Bulk wrote: Scott: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? Frank -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:55:16 CST, Frank Bulk said: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? So the cable company carves out a protected flow for its own triple-play telephone, while third-party VoIP vendors have to contend on the Internet flow? Why aren't the net-neutrality people busy having a cow over this? pgpgHw2hZpuxE.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
What everyone is actually *selling* commercially, except for cable providers, is *not* VoIP; it's a subset of that: VoN; Voice Over Internet; where the IP transport *goes over the public internet*, and through whatever exchange points may be necessary to get from you to the provider. Hmm, I don't know if this is a useful distinction. I do know that is not the common usage for VoN. VoN is more commonly understood to be Voice over Network which is a superset of VOIP rather than a subset. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voip http://bit.ly/f9u08K Cable companies are selling you *one hop* (maybe 2 or 3; certainly not 12-18), over a link with bandwidth protected from whatever may be going on on the Internet IP link they're also selling you; and which is therefore guaranteed to have better quality than whatever VoIP service it might be competing with. That also depends. While the most common method for cable operators is Packet Cable using dedicated links to and from the softswitch/session border controller that is by no means universal. Here are two companies I know of that specialize in selling pure SIP solutions, which are often back hauled across the public Internet. http://xcastlabs.com/ https://www.momentumtelecom.com/ I wasn't suggesting QOS. I was suggesting *there's a completely separate pipe*, on non-Internet connected IP transport, carrying only the voice traffic, directly to a termination point, which is dedicated from the triple-play box and nailed up. Are you suggesting that's *not* how it's being done in production? In some cases, there is a dedicated connection to the underlying MGCP/SIP network and in others there is not. In some cases there is an MPLS connection with QoS over the public Internet and in others there is prioritization at all. (I don't recommend the latter, but its usually an economic issue.) Cheers, -- jra -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 3/2/2011 10:40 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:55:16 CST, Frank Bulk said: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? So the cable company carves out a protected flow for its own triple-play telephone, while third-party VoIP vendors have to contend on the Internet flow? Why aren't the net-neutrality people busy having a cow over this? You mean besides the fact that most of the net neutrality wonks don't know nor want to know how stuff works? -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Thanks for clarifying. I can't imagine an MSO using separate DS and US QAMs for their eMTAs. Regardless, the customer's Internet would flow over those same QAMs (unless it was a D3 channel-bonding eMTA, and even then I'm not sure if the CMTS could be provisioned to use one QAM for voice and the remaining QAMs for data). Frank -Original Message- From: Scott Helms [mailto:khe...@ispalliance.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 9:27 AM To: frnk...@iname.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? Frank, No, not all. There seems to be some confusion here between the concept of PacketCable flows which everyone _should_ (but aren't) be using to prioritize their voice traffic and separate downstream and upstream channels which a few operators use for voice traffic only. On 3/2/2011 12:55 AM, Frank Bulk wrote: Scott: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? Frank -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 03/02/2011 06:23 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Michael Thomasm...@mtcc.com Yes, really. The only difference was which L2 channels the RTP packets were flowed onto, which was determined by the MGCP/SIP signalling and interaction with the telephony gateway. There is a **very** complicated state machine that deals with this using some bastardized IETF protocols (COPS IIRC). Ok, see, now I (like, I suspect, Frank Bulk) am confused again: when you say which L2 channels the RTP packets were flowed onto, that sounds to me a *whole* lot like which VLAN on the end-user drop carried the RTP packets from the terminal adapter in their cable box to our concentrator... which is pretty much the point I was originally trying to make, if perhaps in slightly different terms. Am I still misunderstanding you? They're kind of like VLAN's, but not exactly. It's been a long time since I worked on this... The RTP is flowed over what is called unsolicited grants (UGS) which give slots on the upstream for transmission. There are several other types of qos treatment between the CM and CMTS... I think that packetcable flows the MGCP and SIP over nrt-PS, but I might be misremembering. The signalling between the CM (MTA) and CMS (eg MGCP) is what fields the requests for better qos treatment for the RTP stream, and the CMS talks to the CMTS via COPS to set up the UGS flows to the cable modem/voice box (ie, an embedded MTA). In any case, this is 100% IP end to end, with all kinds of goodies for LEA and privacy to boot, which make the entire problem of faithfully reproducing the PSTN over IP a giant headache. Mike, I should know about the LEA aspect since I was the first one at Cisco to find and then dutifully step on that mine
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Yes, that's how PacketCable works. Here's some CLI output -- nothing like a quick example to make that clear. Here's a customer with 8M/512K Internet service: CMTS:7A#sh cable modem 0008.0ed2.0928 svc-flow-id Service flow id Interface Flow Direction Flow Max Rate 1 cable 0/0 Upstream 512000 2 cable 0/0 Downstream 800 CMTS:7A# Here's a customer with 128K/128K Internet service and two additional service flows for voice signaling: CMTS:7A#sh cable modem 0013.1192.f867 svc-flow-id Service flow id Interface Flow Direction Flow Max Rate 3593 cable 0/1 Upstream 128000 3594 cable 0/1 Upstream 12000 3595 cable 0/1 Downstream 128000 3596 cable 0/1 Downstream3 CMTS:7A# And here's a customer with 2M/2M Internet service with a call in progress. Note the additional service flows, with sufficient bandwidth and overhead for a G.711 call. CMTS:7A#show cable modem 0015.a275.efd3 svc-flow-id Service flow id Interface Flow Direction Flow Max Rate 4425 cable 1/1 Upstream2048000 4426 cable 1/1 Upstream 12000 4427 cable 1/1 Downstream 2048000 4428 cable 1/1 Downstream3 8745 cable 1/1 Upstream 92800 29314 cable 1/1 Downstream87200 CMTS:7A# Remember, PacketCable is not Internet VoIP and I don't think any MSO has claimed it is such. It doesn't run over the Internet connection and is not given priority within the Internet flow. That's why there should be no net neutrality concerns. Frank -Original Message- From: valdis.kletni...@vt.edu [mailto:valdis.kletni...@vt.edu] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 9:40 AM To: frnk...@iname.com Cc: 'Scott Helms'; nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:55:16 CST, Frank Bulk said: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? So the cable company carves out a protected flow for its own triple-play telephone, while third-party VoIP vendors have to contend on the Internet flow? Why aren't the net-neutrality people busy having a cow over this?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Frank, It gets better (which is sad) in the case of Charter if a customer ordered voice and data they were given a normal Moto SB for Internet data and a separate Arris eMTA (with no CPEs allowed other than the TA and the Ethernet port disabled) for voice. The channels they were using for voice even terminated on a different CMTS altogether. On 3/2/2011 11:26 AM, Frank Bulk wrote: Thanks for clarifying. I can't imagine an MSO using separate DS and US QAMs for their eMTAs. Regardless, the customer's Internet would flow over those same QAMs (unless it was a D3 channel-bonding eMTA, and even then I'm not sure if the CMTS could be provisioned to use one QAM for voice and the remaining QAMs for data). Frank -Original Message- From: Scott Helms [mailto:khe...@ispalliance.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 9:27 AM To: frnk...@iname.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? Frank, No, not all. There seems to be some confusion here between the concept of PacketCable flows which everyone _should_ (but aren't) be using to prioritize their voice traffic and separate downstream and upstream channels which a few operators use for voice traffic only. On 3/2/2011 12:55 AM, Frank Bulk wrote: Scott: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? Frank -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 03/01/2011 11:50 PM, Owen DeLong wrote: It's worked out great for me in a number of places. OTOH, it was kind of dicey even without the torrents from other places. I found that bandwidth and jitter were the bigger issues than other applications I was sharing the link with. I even managed to get passable call quality (though far from ideal) calling the US on a US third party provider from my soft-phone on my laptop from Kigali, Rwanda. I think that's close to a worst case scenario, frankly. These days, voice is a very low-bandwidth service. On any decent link, it seems to get through just fine. Right, if it wasn't skype would be useless which it manifestly isn't. Which is why all the heavy machinery to dynamically provision qos for the rtp flows was, per typical, overwhelmed by moore's law. I floated that heresy about 10 years ago, but by then there was too much invested in seeing it through. Mike, skype shows you can do all manner of horrible things and still work... real time media over tcp!
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
The service class for the bearer stream, at least on modern configurations with Moto, is DefVoiceDown and DefUGS. The signaling is DefRRDown and DefRRUp. MSOs may create different service classes with unique names, so our (plain vanilla configuration which uses the default names) may not be representative of other implementations. Frank -Original Message- From: Michael Thomas [mailto:m...@mtcc.com] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 10:36 AM To: Jay Ashworth Cc: NANOG Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? On 03/02/2011 06:23 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Michael Thomasm...@mtcc.com Yes, really. The only difference was which L2 channels the RTP packets were flowed onto, which was determined by the MGCP/SIP signalling and interaction with the telephony gateway. There is a **very** complicated state machine that deals with this using some bastardized IETF protocols (COPS IIRC). Ok, see, now I (like, I suspect, Frank Bulk) am confused again: when you say which L2 channels the RTP packets were flowed onto, that sounds to me a *whole* lot like which VLAN on the end-user drop carried the RTP packets from the terminal adapter in their cable box to our concentrator... which is pretty much the point I was originally trying to make, if perhaps in slightly different terms. Am I still misunderstanding you? They're kind of like VLAN's, but not exactly. It's been a long time since I worked on this... The RTP is flowed over what is called unsolicited grants (UGS) which give slots on the upstream for transmission. There are several other types of qos treatment between the CM and CMTS... I think that packetcable flows the MGCP and SIP over nrt-PS, but I might be misremembering. The signalling between the CM (MTA) and CMS (eg MGCP) is what fields the requests for better qos treatment for the RTP stream, and the CMS talks to the CMTS via COPS to set up the UGS flows to the cable modem/voice box (ie, an embedded MTA). In any case, this is 100% IP end to end, with all kinds of goodies for LEA and privacy to boot, which make the entire problem of faithfully reproducing the PSTN over IP a giant headache. Mike, I should know about the LEA aspect since I was the first one at Cisco to find and then dutifully step on that mine
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Wow, I was not aware of that, what a management and maintenance nightmare. Do they still do this? Frank -Original Message- From: Scott Helms [mailto:khe...@ispalliance.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 10:49 AM To: frnk...@iname.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? Frank, It gets better (which is sad) in the case of Charter if a customer ordered voice and data they were given a normal Moto SB for Internet data and a separate Arris eMTA (with no CPEs allowed other than the TA and the Ethernet port disabled) for voice. The channels they were using for voice even terminated on a different CMTS altogether. On 3/2/2011 11:26 AM, Frank Bulk wrote: Thanks for clarifying. I can't imagine an MSO using separate DS and US QAMs for their eMTAs. Regardless, the customer's Internet would flow over those same QAMs (unless it was a D3 channel-bonding eMTA, and even then I'm not sure if the CMTS could be provisioned to use one QAM for voice and the remaining QAMs for data). Frank -Original Message- From: Scott Helms [mailto:khe...@ispalliance.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 9:27 AM To: frnk...@iname.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? Frank, No, not all. There seems to be some confusion here between the concept of PacketCable flows which everyone _should_ (but aren't) be using to prioritize their voice traffic and separate downstream and upstream channels which a few operators use for voice traffic only. On 3/2/2011 12:55 AM, Frank Bulk wrote: Scott: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? Frank -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Frank, I hope not, but the sales guy I knew (he was the one who sold all of the VOIP only CMTSs) is in a different field now. Their architecture was crummy and their reasoning for doing obtuse, but my friend was happy to sell them the gear. On 3/2/2011 11:52 AM, Frank Bulk wrote: Wow, I was not aware of that, what a management and maintenance nightmare. Do they still do this? Frank -Original Message- From: Scott Helms [mailto:khe...@ispalliance.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 10:49 AM To: frnk...@iname.com Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? Frank, It gets better (which is sad) in the case of Charter if a customer ordered voice and data they were given a normal Moto SB for Internet data and a separate Arris eMTA (with no CPEs allowed other than the TA and the Ethernet port disabled) for voice. The channels they were using for voice even terminated on a different CMTS altogether. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Valdis Kletnieks valdis.kletni...@vt.edu On Tue, 01 Mar 2011 23:55:16 CST, Frank Bulk said: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? So the cable company carves out a protected flow for its own triple-play telephone, while third-party VoIP vendors have to contend on the Internet flow? Why aren't the net-neutrality people busy having a cow over this? Ok, see, Valdis; this was where I started this conversation, and -- I think because I was merely using terms they didn't like for the objects involved -- everyone told me no, that wasn't what was really going on. But it sure *sounds* like what I thought was going on, really is (ie: the condition about which you inquire, above). And it wouldn't be Net Neutrality: it would be common-carrier equal access. I think. Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
I do not live over there, I have never seen a Vonage or Magic jack or any other VoIP service ad on TV in the UK, ever. Vonage *are* advertising on UK TV. Hardly the carpet-bombing the OP suggests is the case in the US, but they are doing something. It is quite a different market here. I can get POTS services over the same copper from, I'd say, about 5 different companies. Maybe more, I have not counted. I guess the competition already available on the copper would largely preclude anything but the cheapest VoIP service. For UK national calls, which pretty much all the POTS providers are offering for free (read bundled), I tend to agree - especially given that the POTS providers who *aren't* BT (Residential) are largely having to lease at least the last mile copper from BT (OpenReach). The Vonage TV ads that I've seen in the UK are pitched at offering cheap / free / bundled international calls, and the target market for that I believe is both different and smaller. Regards, Tim.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Hi, On Tue, 1 Mar 2011 09:25:23 + (GMT) Tim Franklin t...@pelican.org wrote: I do not live over there, I have never seen a Vonage or Magic jack or any other VoIP service ad on TV in the UK, ever. Vonage *are* advertising on UK TV. Hardly the carpet-bombing the OP suggests is the case in the US, but they are doing something. It is quite a different market here. I can get POTS services over the same copper from, I'd say, about 5 different companies. Maybe more, I have not counted. I guess the competition already available on the copper would largely preclude anything but the cheapest VoIP service. For UK national calls, which pretty much all the POTS providers are offering for free (read bundled), I tend to agree - especially given that the POTS providers who *aren't* BT (Residential) are largely having to lease at least the last mile copper from BT (OpenReach). The Vonage TV ads that I've seen in the UK are pitched at offering cheap / free / bundled international calls, and the target market for that I believe is both different and smaller. That is the same market Vonage is now targeting in the US, basically. National calling in the US is basically bundled with most calling plans now. I'm not convinced that many people use Vonage in the US - my experience with it was that it was not as reliable as the VOIP products offered through the various broadband providers I have had. William
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: William Pitcock neno...@systeminplace.net That is the same market Vonage is now targeting in the US, basically. National calling in the US is basically bundled with most calling plans now. I'm not convinced that many people use Vonage in the US - my experience with it was that it was not as reliable as the VOIP products offered through the various broadband providers I have had. Let us be clear: if you're getting digital telephone service from a cable television provider, it is *not* VoIP, in the usage in which most speakers mean that term -- Voice Over Internet is what they should be saying, and cable-phone isn't that; the voice traffic rides over a separate DOCSiS channel, protected from both the Internet and CATV traffic on the link. So of course Vonage and other VoN products will be less rugged. As I recall, this questionably fair competitive advantage has been looked into by ... someone. (Cablecos won't permit competing VoIP services to utilize this protected channel, somewhere between generally and ever.) Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
offered through the various broadband providers I have had. Let us be clear: if you're getting digital telephone service from a cable television provider, it is *not* VoIP, in the usage in which most speakers mean that term -- Voice Over Internet is what they should be saying, and cable-phone isn't that; the voice traffic rides over a separate DOCSiS channel, protected from both the Internet and CATV traffic on the link. No, this incorrect. Packet Cable most certainly _is_ VOIP (a MGCP variant to be precise until 2.0 after which it is SIP). While a few providers, usually for non-technical reasons, did deploy an entirely separate set of downstream and upstream interfaces that is far from the norm. AFAIK the only top 20 MSO to do so in scale was Charter and I don't know if they continue that today. Comcast, the largest cable telephone provider certainly does not nor do providers need to since any Packetcable CMTS and EMTA combo offers reliable prioritization in the same channel(s) as the normal data path. So of course Vonage and other VoN products will be less rugged. As I recall, this questionably fair competitive advantage has been looked into by ... someone. (Cablecos won't permit competing VoIP services to utilize this protected channel, somewhere between generally and ever.) As I said, this second channel doesn't exist in almost all cases (its not cost effective nor needed in almost all cases). Having said that over the top VOIP providers do suffer in comparison because they don't get the benefit of prioritization in the local cable plant. Cheers, -- jra -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
There may be no compelling reason to do so, at least. However, digital gear offers benefits, and some people want them. Others, like me, live in bad RF environments where POTS picks up too much noise unless you very carefully select your gear and shield your cables. Further, the digital phones support other features, such as the ability to manage multiple calls seamlessly, present Caller-ID reliably (even while you are on another call), etc. If you have issues with your wiring as bad as you describe then your problem is with your in home wiring and possibly the wiring in your area. Twisted pair inherently resists the kinds ingress your describing if its properly installed and maintained. Of course this has nothing to do with digital communications since any communication over your wiring will be problematic. I hate to tell *you*, but the LEC's and cable companies like to hand off POTS to small businesses too. Of course they do, but the discussion was specifically about residential users. In the case of enterprise users there are lots of choices ranging from virtual PBXs to local PBXs with proprietary digital phones. Your argument: This works fine for most people therefore it will work for everyone. Is that really what you're saying? No, I asked what will make consumers choose digital connections today for residential service rather than re-using their existing hand sets. What's broken for a residential user? That depends. I've got many years of experience with POTS. That's nice, but your experience doesn't track with what the market has done. You describe specific wiring related problems as if they are endemic to in home wiring and that's simply not true nor does a digital hand set magically fix them if they are there. If anything when a user has that many issues with in home wiring the lowest cost solution is usually to install a wireless set, not because its better but because its cheaper than fixing the in home wiring in many/most cases for operators. That's a matter of the consumer and their needs and wants. The market has very definitively answered this question so far which is what confuses me about your argument. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 03/01/2011 05:51 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: William Pitcockneno...@systeminplace.net That is the same market Vonage is now targeting in the US, basically. National calling in the US is basically bundled with most calling plans now. I'm not convinced that many people use Vonage in the US - my experience with it was that it was not as reliable as the VOIP products offered through the various broadband providers I have had. Let us be clear: if you're getting digital telephone service from a cable television provider, it is *not* VoIP, in the usage in which most speakers mean that term -- Voice Over Internet is what they should be saying, and cable-phone isn't that; the voice traffic rides over a separate DOCSiS channel, protected from both the Internet and CATV traffic on the link. Er, I'm not sure what the difference you're trying to make. Is IP running over an L2 with a SLA any less IP than one without a SLA? That's all the DOCSIS qos is: dynamically creating/tearing down enhanced L2 qos channels for rtp to run over. It's been quite a while since I've been involved, but what we were working on with CableLabs certainly was VoIP in every respect I can think of. | As I recall, this questionably fair competitive advantage has been looked into by ... someone. (Cablecos won't permit competing VoIP services to utilize this protected channel, somewhere between generally and ever.) There's is a great deal of overhead involved with the booking of resources for enhanced qos -- one big problem is that it adds quite a bit of latency to call set up. I'm sceptical at this point that it makes much difference for voice quality since voice traffic is such a tiny proportion of traffic in general -- a lot has changed in the last 15 years. Now video... I'm willing to believe that that enhanced qos still makes a difference there, but with youtube, netflix, etc, etc the genie isn't getting back in that bottle any time soon. So Moore's law is likely to have the final word there too making all of the docsis qos stuff ultimately irrelevant. Mike
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
There may be no compelling reason to do so, at least. However, digital gear offers benefits, and some people want them. Others, like me, live in bad RF environments where POTS picks up too much noise unless you very carefully select your gear and shield your cables. Further, the digital phones support other features, such as the ability to manage multiple calls seamlessly, present Caller-ID reliably (even while you are on another call), etc. If you have issues with your wiring as bad as you describe then your problem is with your in home wiring and possibly the wiring in your area. Yes. The problem couldn't possibly be related to the AM/FM broadcasting mega-station with several towers just a short distance away, and it couldn't be related to poorly shielded electronics devices that are made as cheaply as possible... Twisted pair inherently resists the kinds ingress your describing if its properly installed and maintained. Of course this has nothing to do with digital communications since any communication over your wiring will be problematic. Twisted pair mildly deters RF interference. Give it enough and the whole thing's still an antenna... which is why shielding cables is part of the solution. I hate to tell *you*, but the LEC's and cable companies like to hand off POTS to small businesses too. Of course they do, but the discussion was specifically about residential users. In the case of enterprise users there are lots of choices ranging from virtual PBXs to local PBXs with proprietary digital phones. If you actually work with small businesses, you'll find that in many cases, products like TDS's XData or whatever Time Warner Cable's bundled business offering is called have been sold to small businesses and they like to hand off POTS. As in, in most cases, no other option exists. The problem here is that all of this discourages the advantages inherent in digital technology. POTS functions as a chokepoint in the realm of possibilities. Once you've converted the signal from digital to POTS and then reconverted it to digital, there's less flexibility. There's no particularly good reason that a VoIP-over-cable system shouldn't be able to hand off calls to an arbitrary SIP device. Your argument: This works fine for most people therefore it will work for everyone. Is that really what you're saying? No, I asked what will make consumers choose digital connections today for residential service rather than re-using their existing hand sets. In many cases, they don't care. I already answered things that *will* make some people choose digital connections. What's broken for a residential user? That depends. I've got many years of experience with POTS. That's nice, but your experience doesn't track with what the market has done. You describe specific wiring related problems as if they are endemic to in home wiring and that's simply not true nor does a digital hand set magically fix them if they are there. If anything when a user has that many issues with in home wiring the lowest cost solution is usually to install a wireless set, not because its better but because its cheaper than fixing the in home wiring in many/most cases for operators. Actually, a digital phone does. Dumping POTS for ISDN BRI eliminated numerous problems; most notably, the call quality went from wildly erratic with random radio interference, to crystal clear. ISDN BRI was essentially *just* substituting a digital path from the same CO to the same CPE over the same copper; att still had problems getting their systems to do things like presenting multiple calls to the same DN on the BRI (who knows why). So the switch from BRI to VoIP added other useful capabilities, such as multiple call appearances working properly. For your average residential user, the idea that someone can pick up a phone and not accidentally cut in on someone else's call is nearly stunning; to be able to accept multiple incoming calls or place more than one simultaneous outbound call is quite nice in some households. That's a matter of the consumer and their needs and wants. The market has very definitively answered this question so far which is what confuses me about your argument. No, the market hasn't. What *has* happened is that the LEC's and cable carriers have deemed it a support nightmare to try to support random VoIP gear, and they'd rather sell $29/month VoIP-to-a-POTS-jack service because it's more profitable. That's an artificial constraint on the market, that's not actually the market. This is probably off-topic for NANOG at this point; I'm not sure where to redirect it to though. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Michael Thomas m...@mtcc.com On 03/01/2011 05:51 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote: Let us be clear: if you're getting digital telephone service from a cable television provider, it is *not* VoIP, in the usage in which most speakers mean that term -- Voice Over Internet is what they should be saying, and cable-phone isn't that; the voice traffic rides over a separate DOCSiS channel, protected from both the Internet and CATV traffic on the link. Er, I'm not sure what the difference you're trying to make. Er, I'm not sure why... Is IP running over an L2 with a SLA any less IP than one without a SLA? That's all the DOCSIS qos is: dynamically creating/tearing down enhanced L2 qos channels for rtp to run over. It's been quite a while since I've been involved, but what we were working on with CableLabs certainly was VoIP in every respect I can think of. Wow. I thought I was pretty clear in what I said above; I'm sorry you didn't get it. What everyone is actually *selling* commercially, except for cable providers, is *not* VoIP; it's a subset of that: VoN; Voice Over Internet; where the IP transport *goes over the public internet*, and through whatever exchange points may be necessary to get from you to the provider. Cable companies are selling you *one hop* (maybe 2 or 3; certainly not 12-18), over a link with bandwidth protected from whatever may be going on on the Internet IP link they're also selling you; and which is therefore guaranteed to have better quality than whatever VoIP service it might be competing with. Better? | As I recall, this questionably fair competitive advantage has been looked into by ... someone. (Cablecos won't permit competing VoIP services to utilize this protected channel, somewhere between generally and ever.) There's is a great deal of overhead involved with the booking of resources for enhanced qos -- one big problem is that it adds quite a bit of latency to call set up. I'm sceptical at this point that it makes much difference for voice quality since voice traffic is such a tiny proportion of traffic in general -- a lot has changed in the last 15 years. Now video... I'm willing to believe that that enhanced qos still makes a difference there, but with youtube, netflix, etc, etc the genie isn't getting back in that bottle any time soon. So Moore's law is likely to have the final word there too making all of the docsis qos stuff ultimately irrelevant. I wasn't suggesting QOS. I was suggesting *there's a completely separate pipe*, on non-Internet connected IP transport, carrying only the voice traffic, directly to a termination point, which is dedicated from the triple-play box and nailed up. Are you suggesting that's *not* how it's being done in production? Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Sent from my iPhone On Mar 1, 2011, at 8:35 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Michael Thomas m...@mtcc.com On 03/01/2011 05:51 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote: Let us be clear: if you're getting digital telephone service from a cable television provider, it is *not* VoIP, in the usage in which most speakers mean that term -- Voice Over Internet is what they should be saying, and cable-phone isn't that; the voice traffic rides over a separate DOCSiS channel, protected from both the Internet and CATV traffic on the link. Er, I'm not sure what the difference you're trying to make. Er, I'm not sure why... Is IP running over an L2 with a SLA any less IP than one without a SLA? That's all the DOCSIS qos is: dynamically creating/tearing down enhanced L2 qos channels for rtp to run over. It's been quite a while since I've been involved, but what we were working on with CableLabs certainly was VoIP in every respect I can think of. Wow. I thought I was pretty clear in what I said above; I'm sorry you didn't get it. What everyone is actually *selling* commercially, except for cable providers, is *not* VoIP; it's a subset of that: VoN; Voice Over Internet; where the IP transport *goes over the public internet*, and through whatever exchange points may be necessary to get from you to the provider. Cable companies are selling you *one hop* (maybe 2 or 3; certainly not 12-18), over a link with bandwidth protected from whatever may be going on on the Internet IP link they're also selling you; and which is therefore guaranteed to have better quality than whatever VoIP service it might be competing with. Better? Many VoIP companies like jive, peer with providers to give customers *one hop* (maybe 2 or 3; certainly not 12-18), over a link with bandwidth protected from whatever may be going on on the Internet IP link they're also selling you; VoN? Didn't know there was a difference. Same protocols, same RTP,RTCP, Codecs, DSCP values. Am I missing something? | As I recall, this questionably fair competitive advantage has been looked into by ... someone. (Cablecos won't permit competing VoIP services to utilize this protected channel, somewhere between generally and ever.) There's is a great deal of overhead involved with the booking of resources for enhanced qos -- one big problem is that it adds quite a bit of latency to call set up. I'm sceptical at this point that it makes much difference for voice quality since voice traffic is such a tiny proportion of traffic in general -- a lot has changed in the last 15 years. Now video... I'm willing to believe that that enhanced qos still makes a difference there, but with youtube, netflix, etc, etc the genie isn't getting back in that bottle any time soon. So Moore's law is likely to have the final word there too making all of the docsis qos stuff ultimately irrelevant. I wasn't suggesting QOS. I was suggesting *there's a completely separate pipe*, on non-Internet connected IP transport, carrying only the voice traffic, directly to a termination point, which is dedicated from the triple-play box and nailed up. Are you suggesting that's *not* how it's being done in production? Cheers, -- jra
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
What everyone is actually *selling* commercially, except for cable providers, is *not* VoIP; it's a subset of that: VoN; Voice Over Internet; where the IP transport *goes over the public internet*, and through whatever exchange points may be necessary to get from you to the provider. This is utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand (What vexes VoIP users/providers). Further, it's ridiculous to say that something is a subset of something else, and yet not that something else. A1 cannot be a subtype of A without being A. A1 cannot be a subset of steak sauce without being steak sauce. Yes, it's a specific type of steak sauce, and is basically made of corn sugar, which may negate some of the issues with tomato-paste based steak sauces, but it is STILL a steak sauce, and is still relevant when talking about how many people put sauce on their steak as opposed to utilizing old fashioned steak rub. Cable companies are selling you *one hop* (maybe 2 or 3; certainly not 12-18), over a link with bandwidth protected from whatever may be going on on the Internet IP link they're also selling you; and which is therefore guaranteed to have better quality than whatever VoIP service it might be competing with. Better? Not really, because you're still arguing a point that doesn't matter. Is it Voice? Is it IP? Then it's VoIP. A lot of the issues are still relevant, and certainly the number of users can be said to count. The number of hops doesn't matter one iota. Is it not email if you're only 1 hop away from your SMTP server? Nathan
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Scott Helms khe...@ispalliance.net Let us be clear: if you're getting digital telephone service from a cable television provider, it is *not* VoIP, in the usage in which most speakers mean that term -- Voice Over Internet is what they should be saying, and cable-phone isn't that; the voice traffic rides over a separate DOCSiS channel, protected from both the Internet and CATV traffic on the link. No, this incorrect. Packet Cable most certainly _is_ VOIP (a MGCP variant to be precise until 2.0 after which it is SIP). While a few providers, usually for non-technical reasons, did deploy an entirely separate set of downstream and upstream interfaces that is far from the norm. AFAIK the only top 20 MSO to do so in scale was Charter and I don't know if they continue that today. Comcast, the largest cable telephone provider certainly does not nor do providers need to since any Packetcable CMTS and EMTA combo offers reliable prioritization in the same channel(s) as the normal data path. Indeed. Then either Bright House is lying, their deployment was pretty early, or I'm nuts, cause I'm pretty certain that their early triple- play advertising said this -- though not in so many technical words. So of course Vonage and other VoN products will be less rugged. As I recall, this questionably fair competitive advantage has been looked into by ... someone. (Cablecos won't permit competing VoIP services to utilize this protected channel, somewhere between generally and ever.) As I said, this second channel doesn't exist in almost all cases (its not cost effective nor needed in almost all cases). Having said that over the top VOIP providers do suffer in comparison because they don't get the benefit of prioritization in the local cable plant. Cost-effective? Could you expand on how the provisioning of a second virtual pipe down the hill to a cable box has any incremental costs at all? Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 03/01/2011 08:01 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Bret Palssonb...@getjive.com VoN? Didn't know there was a difference. Same protocols, same RTP,RTCP, Codecs, DSCP values. Am I missing something? Well, you try to hold a conversation with someone while there's Torrent traffic going on on the same link, using a third-party SIP provider, and you tell *me* how that works out... That's completely under the control of the user's CPE: just get a router that prioritizes one over the other, or use a cable modem that does that for you. It doesn't require any Docsis magic. Mike
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 03/01/2011 07:51 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: As I said, this second channel doesn't exist in almost all cases (its not cost effective nor needed in almost all cases). Having said that over the top VOIP providers do suffer in comparison because they don't get the benefit of prioritization in the local cable plant. Cost-effective? Could you expand on how the provisioning of a second virtual pipe down the hill to a cable box has any incremental costs at all? The original analog cable plant was separated into bands, so carving out IP of any kind meant sacrificing channels. They initially put the IP uplink into a band that was used originally used for very low bandwidth uplink signalling... the kind the big refrigerators and other noise producers torqued badly. So from the MSO's perspective, giving QoS treatment to the upstream had a big potential business case. Of course, analog cable is now gone and I doubt that any of the original assumptions have much bearing today. Mike, where's John Chapman when you need him?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Works just fine. Yes that is one of the many tests we do. It's call partnerships with carriers and prioritization. DSCP works wonders, so do EF queues and policies, yes this is on the carrier side. Sounds like you need a VoIP company that cares. Sent from my iPhone On Mar 1, 2011, at 9:03 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Bret Palsson b...@getjive.com VoN? Didn't know there was a difference. Same protocols, same RTP,RTCP, Codecs, DSCP values. Am I missing something? Well, you try to hold a conversation with someone while there's Torrent traffic going on on the same link, using a third-party SIP provider, and you tell *me* how that works out... Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Michael Thomas m...@mtcc.com I wasn't suggesting QOS. I was suggesting *there's a completely separate pipe*, on non-Internet connected IP transport, carrying only the voice traffic, directly to a termination point, which is dedicated from the triple-play box and nailed up. Are you suggesting that's *not* how it's being done in production? There were some MSO's who were thinking about doing that, but as I recall they went the way of the AAL2 dodo bird. Maybe a few deployed it, but from a packetcable/cablelabs perspective they weren't on the table. MGCP was the answer to getting rid of class 5 switches altogether, which the MSO's didn't have any particular affinity to. It was always rtp over ip over DOCSIS with DSCP in the core and arguments about RSVP. Over *the same* IP transport which carried packets from the user's router or PC to the broadband provider's edge router? Really? Then Bright House was either special, or pretty carefully misleading in the advertising they did here. Mike, member of the packetcable security spec team whose work spawned SRTP and KINK amongst other things Well, you'd certainly have been in a position to hear about it. I've Been Mislead. My apologies, all. Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
I'm sensing you have been burned badly by VoIP... which is too bad. I'm going to step out of the conversation since no one but you is likely to win. Which isn't a bad thing, but trying to help someone understand a bit more about how some VoIP providers actually work now a days, who have already made up their mind... it's just not worth the effort. Certainly it's not helping others on this list. -Bret Bret Palsson Sr. Network Systems Administrator Jive Communications, Inc. www.getjive.com Sent from my iPad On Mar 1, 2011, at 9:15 PM, Jay Ashworth j...@baylink.com wrote: - Original Message - From: Nathan Eisenberg nat...@atlasnetworks.us What everyone is actually *selling* commercially, except for cable providers, is *not* VoIP; it's a subset of that: VoN; Voice Over Internet; where the IP transport *goes over the public internet*, and through whatever exchange points may be necessary to get from you to the provider. This is utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand (What vexes VoIP users/providers). Further, it's ridiculous to say that something is a subset of something else, and yet not that something else. A1 cannot be a subtype of A without being A. A1 cannot be a subset of steak sauce without being steak sauce. Yes, it's a specific type of steak sauce, and is basically made of corn sugar, which may negate some of the issues with tomato-paste based steak sauces, but it is STILL a steak sauce, and is still relevant when talking about how many people put sauce on their steak as opposed to utilizing old fashioned steak rub. I believe you have a polarity reversal in your reading of my post. VoN is a subset of VoIP; it is what providers who *advertise* VoIP are generally actually selling; it is much more prone to problems on the local IP loop and the backbone than the subset of VoIP which the cable company who's selling you the broadband is offering. Cable companies are selling you *one hop* (maybe 2 or 3; certainly not 12-18), over a link with bandwidth protected from whatever may be going on on the Internet IP link they're also selling you; and which is therefore guaranteed to have better quality than whatever VoIP service it might be competing with. Better? Not really, because you're still arguing a point that doesn't matter. Is it Voice? Is it IP? Then it's VoIP. A lot of the issues are still relevant, and certainly the number of users can be said to count. The number of hops doesn't matter one iota. Is it not email if you're only 1 hop away from your SMTP server? Aw, c'mon with the strawmen, Nathan. SMTP isn't latency, jitter, and dropped-packet sensitive and SIP/RTP is, and that's pretty obvious. Yes, the number of hops and exchange points matters to VoIP in ways that it doesn't matter to SMTP and POP. I will attempt, one more time, to clarify my original underlying point. Then, if you absolutely insist, I shall give up: Lots of people sell PSTN gateway access via the TCP/IP public Internet. Nearly all of them call this VoIP. It is, but that term is insufficiently specific to allow the comparison of this service with VoIP service offered as a triple-play by broadband/cable companies, because their service is protected in one fashion or another from many impairments which the service sold by those third-parties is prone to, by the nature of the differences in their transport. Additionally, characterizing that third-party service solely as VoIP tends to give that term a bad reputation in other contexts, such as protected internal VoIP PBX service, in which it's perfectly suitable, even though Vonage is generally no better than mediocre. Did that more clearly explain why I'm unhappy with the fast and loose usage of the term VoIP in many contexts? Cheers, -- jra
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Scott: Are you saying that the large MSOs don't use CM configuration files that create separate downstream and upstream service flows for Internet, voice signaling, and voice bearer traffic? Frank -Original Message- From: Scott Helms [mailto:khe...@ispalliance.net] Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2011 8:35 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? offered through the various broadband providers I have had. Let us be clear: if you're getting digital telephone service from a cable television provider, it is *not* VoIP, in the usage in which most speakers mean that term -- Voice Over Internet is what they should be saying, and cable-phone isn't that; the voice traffic rides over a separate DOCSiS channel, protected from both the Internet and CATV traffic on the link. No, this incorrect. Packet Cable most certainly _is_ VOIP (a MGCP variant to be precise until 2.0 after which it is SIP). While a few providers, usually for non-technical reasons, did deploy an entirely separate set of downstream and upstream interfaces that is far from the norm. AFAIK the only top 20 MSO to do so in scale was Charter and I don't know if they continue that today. Comcast, the largest cable telephone provider certainly does not nor do providers need to since any Packetcable CMTS and EMTA combo offers reliable prioritization in the same channel(s) as the normal data path. So of course Vonage and other VoN products will be less rugged. As I recall, this questionably fair competitive advantage has been looked into by ... someone. (Cablecos won't permit competing VoIP services to utilize this protected channel, somewhere between generally and ever.) As I said, this second channel doesn't exist in almost all cases (its not cost effective nor needed in almost all cases). Having said that over the top VOIP providers do suffer in comparison because they don't get the benefit of prioritization in the local cable plant. Cheers, -- jra -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Mar 1, 2011, at 8:01 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Bret Palsson b...@getjive.com VoN? Didn't know there was a difference. Same protocols, same RTP,RTCP, Codecs, DSCP values. Am I missing something? Well, you try to hold a conversation with someone while there's Torrent traffic going on on the same link, using a third-party SIP provider, and you tell *me* how that works out... Cheers, -- jra It's worked out great for me in a number of places. OTOH, it was kind of dicey even without the torrents from other places. I found that bandwidth and jitter were the bigger issues than other applications I was sharing the link with. I even managed to get passable call quality (though far from ideal) calling the US on a US third party provider from my soft-phone on my laptop from Kigali, Rwanda. I think that's close to a worst case scenario, frankly. These days, voice is a very low-bandwidth service. On any decent link, it seems to get through just fine. Owen
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Some provider woes: FAX over VOIP is a PITA. I've not yet seen an ATA or softswitch that handled it reliably. E911 for mobile devices sucks. Regulations, and the E911 system, do not seem to have the flexibility for handling this in a seamless way. Call routing (on a more global scale) sucks. Keeping calls pure IP is sexy, but the routing protocol for it is nonexistent (and please don't say ENUM).
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Power supply! Old POTS is remote-power-suplied, so the phone will work for hours, days or even weeks from remote battery power. In my area, one mobile network was off after 4h, the other after 10h, but my good-old analogue telefone did work all the time during an 40h power outage (it was 11 years ago). Juergen. -Original Message- From: Nathan Eisenberg [mailto:nat...@atlasnetworks.us] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 6:33 PM To: NANOG list Subject: RE: What vexes VoIP users? Some provider woes: FAX over VOIP is a PITA. I've not yet seen an ATA or softswitch that handled it reliably. E911 for mobile devices sucks. Regulations, and the E911 system, do not seem to have the flexibility for handling this in a seamless way. Call routing (on a more global scale) sucks. Keeping calls pure IP is sexy, but the routing protocol for it is nonexistent (and please don't say ENUM).
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Simplicity. POTS lets me plug almost anything in from the past who-knows-how-many-years and it just works. When it breaks, I can go next door and borrow a telephone. When I can pick up an automagically configured VoIP device from a huge selection down at the local electronics shop and when it just works at my house and my kids houses then it will be interesting. VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. -- Leigh On 28 Feb 2011, at 17:55, na...@ilk.net wrote: Power supply! Old POTS is remote-power-suplied, so the phone will work for hours, days or even weeks from remote battery power. In my area, one mobile network was off after 4h, the other after 10h, but my good-old analogue telefone did work all the time during an 40h power outage (it was 11 years ago). Juergen. -Original Message- From: Nathan Eisenberg [mailto:nat...@atlasnetworks.us] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 6:33 PM To: NANOG list Subject: RE: What vexes VoIP users? Some provider woes: FAX over VOIP is a PITA. I've not yet seen an ATA or softswitch that handled it reliably. E911 for mobile devices sucks. Regulations, and the E911 system, do not seem to have the flexibility for handling this in a seamless way. Call routing (on a more global scale) sucks. Keeping calls pure IP is sexy, but the routing protocol for it is nonexistent (and please don't say ENUM).
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. -- Leigh Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year!
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV these days - if VoIP is too niche, how are those two making any money? pgpCRfSUaSLpa.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 2/28/2011 1:29 PM, Bret Clark wrote: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. -- Leigh Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! Very true, remember that VOIP includes Packet Cable (as opposed to SIP from Vonage etc all) from cable providers which is largely a POTs replacement service from the end users stand point. Comcast is now a top 5 phone provider in the US. This is anecdotal, but most of the Magic Jack (which is SIP AFAIK) purchases I see are non-technical people. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 28 Feb 2011, at 18:29, Bret Clark wrote: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. -- Leigh Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! And how many grandmothers do you think are responsible for this downturn? Not many I'll bet. The downturn will be down to cell phones and the odd person who gets cable and finds they can do with skype or something. People are not, en-masse, going away from POTS and towards plugging a VoIP device into the back of their router. -- Leigh Porter
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 28 Feb 2011, at 18:37, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV these days - if VoIP is too niche, how are those two making any money? I do not live over there, I have never seen a Vonage or Magic jack or any other VoIP service ad on TV in the UK, ever. It is quite a different market here. I can get POTS services over the same copper from, I'd say, about 5 different companies. Maybe more, I have not counted. I guess the competition already available on the copper would largely preclude anything but the cheapest VoIP service. -- Leigh
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
They are in the US. Comcast tallies 8.6 million household telephone service accounts, making it the United States' third-largest telephone provider. As of February 16, 2011 Comcast has 8.610 million voice customers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#Home_telephone People are not, en-masse, going away from POTS and towards plugging a VoIP device into the back of their router. -- Leigh Porter -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Mon, 28 Feb 2011, Leigh Porter wrote: On 28 Feb 2011, at 18:37, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV these days - if VoIP is too niche, how are those two making any money? It's more cellphones than VoIP or cable provider services, but the latter two are still eating POTS' lunch in the US - even if you don't count something like FiOS where Verizon tears out your copper POTS and moves your line to their ONC. It is quite a different market here. I can get POTS services over the same copper from, I'd say, about 5 different companies. Maybe more, I have not counted. I guess the competition already available on the copper would largely preclude anything but the cheapest VoIP service. Sounds very different indeed. In the US, it's basically your local Ma Bell derivative, or something not-POTs. Anecodtally, as of this morning we just dropped one of our POTS lines for the cable company's alternative. Cost dropped from $69/mo to $29/mo right there. With say, Verizon POTS you're looking at nearly $30/mo just for dialtone, with everything else (outbound calls, LD, caller ID...) extra. Now there is some added value in real POTS, but it's awfully hard to justify the cost difference. -- Jameel Akari
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic. Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page: vex |veks| verb [ trans. ] make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.] Alright, now that that's out of the way... I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are all our customers, we do not do residential) - Seemingly complex. - Worried about the What if the internet goes down scenario. - Call quality. - Price - Location - Outages Responses: - Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you want it. - What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same downtime as the internet. However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages. For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works. - Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx. - Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better service. Who would have thought? - Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX. - Last mile: In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a whole other topic. -PBX: Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an enterprise backend. -Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. The customer plugs in phone lines into the router and if the internet goes down, they can make emergency calls or calls to the world limited by the number of lines the router can accept and are plugged in of course. Now in all our experience going on 7 years now, 90% of the time WAN outages happen, guess what also dies, the POTS! Who would have thought that when cables get cut, that the phone lines were also part of the cables? There you go, some common worries, with some answers to hopefully sooth the vexed VoIP user. Bret Palsson Sr. Network Systems Administrator www.getjive.com On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:37 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV these days - if VoIP is too niche, how are those two making any money?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 28 Feb 2011, at 19:03, Jameel Akari wrote: Sounds very different indeed. In the US, it's basically your local Ma Bell derivative, or something not-POTs. Anecodtally, as of this morning we just dropped one of our POTS lines for the cable company's alternative. Cost dropped from $69/mo to $29/mo right there. With say, Verizon POTS you're looking at nearly $30/mo just for dialtone, with everything else (outbound calls, LD, caller ID...) extra. Now there is some added value in real POTS, but it's awfully hard to justify the cost difference. -- Jameel Akari Yeah I am thankful for the competition we have over here now! I think that if I were 'over there' then I would be using VoIP as well. -- Leigh Porter
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Another vexation for VOIP in the SMB environment is that it rarely works particularly well (if at all) in light of a multiple-external-address NAT pool. You simply have to map all of your VOIP phones in such a way that they consistently get the same external IP every time or shit breaks badly. Owen On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Bret Palsson wrote: Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic. Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page: vex |veks| verb [ trans. ] make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.] Alright, now that that's out of the way... I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are all our customers, we do not do residential) - Seemingly complex. - Worried about the What if the internet goes down scenario. - Call quality. - Price - Location - Outages Responses: - Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you want it. - What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same downtime as the internet. However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages. For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works. - Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx. - Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better service. Who would have thought? - Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX. - Last mile: In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a whole other topic. -PBX: Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an enterprise backend. -Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. The customer plugs in phone lines into the router and if the internet goes down, they can make emergency calls or calls to the world limited by the number of lines the router can accept and are plugged in of course. Now in all our experience going on 7 years now, 90% of the time WAN outages happen, guess what also dies, the POTS! Who would have thought that when cables get cut, that the phone lines were also part of the cables? There you go, some common worries, with some answers to hopefully sooth the vexed VoIP user. Bret Palsson Sr. Network Systems Administrator www.getjive.com On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:37 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV these days - if VoIP is too niche, how are those two making any money?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
We haven't run into that issue and have very large clients. I'm interested to find out where you may have run into that issue? -Bret On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:25 PM, Owen DeLong wrote: Another vexation for VOIP in the SMB environment is that it rarely works particularly well (if at all) in light of a multiple-external-address NAT pool. You simply have to map all of your VOIP phones in such a way that they consistently get the same external IP every time or shit breaks badly. Owen On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Bret Palsson wrote: Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic. Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page: vex |veks| verb [ trans. ] make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.] Alright, now that that's out of the way... I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are all our customers, we do not do residential) - Seemingly complex. - Worried about the What if the internet goes down scenario. - Call quality. - Price - Location - Outages Responses: - Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you want it. - What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same downtime as the internet. However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages. For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works. - Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx. - Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better service. Who would have thought? - Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX. - Last mile: In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a whole other topic. -PBX: Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an enterprise backend. -Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. The customer plugs in phone lines into the router and if the internet goes down, they can make emergency calls or calls to the world limited by the number of lines the router can accept and are plugged in of course. Now in all our experience going on 7 years now, 90% of the time WAN outages happen, guess what also dies, the POTS! Who would have thought that when cables get cut, that the phone lines were also part of the cables? There you go, some common worries, with some answers to hopefully sooth the vexed VoIP user. Bret Palsson Sr. Network Systems Administrator www.getjive.com On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:37 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV these days - if VoIP is too niche, how are those two making any money?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Sorry I didn't include this in the last email... We have large clients who have phones registered on multiples of public IPs from the same location. Works no problem. We do some trickery on our side to make that happen, but I thought all VoIP companies would do that. -Bret On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:25 PM, Owen DeLong wrote: Another vexation for VOIP in the SMB environment is that it rarely works particularly well (if at all) in light of a multiple-external-address NAT pool. You simply have to map all of your VOIP phones in such a way that they consistently get the same external IP every time or shit breaks badly. Owen On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Bret Palsson wrote: Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic. Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page: vex |veks| verb [ trans. ] make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.] Alright, now that that's out of the way... I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are all our customers, we do not do residential) - Seemingly complex. - Worried about the What if the internet goes down scenario. - Call quality. - Price - Location - Outages Responses: - Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you want it. - What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same downtime as the internet. However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages. For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works. - Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx. - Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better service. Who would have thought? - Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX. - Last mile: In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a whole other topic. -PBX: Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an enterprise backend. -Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. The customer plugs in phone lines into the router and if the internet goes down, they can make emergency calls or calls to the world limited by the number of lines the router can accept and are plugged in of course. Now in all our experience going on 7 years now, 90% of the time WAN outages happen, guess what also dies, the POTS! Who would have thought that when cables get cut, that the phone lines were also part of the cables? There you go, some common worries, with some answers to hopefully sooth the vexed VoIP user. Bret Palsson Sr. Network Systems Administrator www.getjive.com On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:37 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV
RE: What vexes VoIP users?
Odd - do the phones just randomly egress from different IPs in the pool if you don't? Is this perhaps a too-long registration interval issue? Short registration timers seem to deal with keeping the state table appeased on most firewalls. Any chance the NAT device has some god-forsaken ALG agent installed that's trying to proxy the SIP traffic? (Yes, I hate ALGs. They are evil.) Nathan -Original Message- From: Owen DeLong [mailto:o...@delong.com] Sent: Monday, February 28, 2011 11:26 AM To: Bret Palsson Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: What vexes VoIP users? Another vexation for VOIP in the SMB environment is that it rarely works particularly well (if at all) in light of a multiple-external-address NAT pool. You simply have to map all of your VOIP phones in such a way that they consistently get the same external IP every time or shit breaks badly. Owen On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Bret Palsson wrote: Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic. Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page: vex |veks| verb [ trans. ] make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.] Alright, now that that's out of the way... I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are all our customers, we do not do residential) - Seemingly complex. - Worried about the What if the internet goes down scenario. - Call quality. - Price - Location - Outages Responses: - Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you want it. - What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same downtime as the internet. However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages. For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works. - Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx. - Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better service. Who would have thought? - Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX. - Last mile: In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a whole other topic. -PBX: Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an enterprise backend. -Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. The customer plugs in phone lines into the router and if the internet goes down, they can make emergency calls or calls to the world limited by the number of lines the router can accept and are plugged in of course. Now in all our experience going on 7 years now, 90% of the time WAN outages happen, guess what also dies, the POTS! Who would have thought that when cables get cut, that the phone lines were also part of the cables? There you go, some common worries, with some answers to hopefully sooth the vexed VoIP user. Bret Palsson Sr. Network Systems Administrator www.getjive.com On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:37 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Ahhh yes... ALG... Turn it off. -Bret On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:41 PM, Nathan Eisenberg wrote: Any chance the NAT device has some god-forsaken ALG agent installed that's trying to proxy the SIP traffic?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
Any idea how to workaround the uverse broken alg? I've had to do some fun hacks to work around it. Sometimes I can reboot or crash them with the cisco notify for config check. Jared Mauch On Feb 28, 2011, at 2:45 PM, Bret Palsson b...@getjive.com wrote: Ahhh yes... ALG... Turn it off. -Bret On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:41 PM, Nathan Eisenberg wrote: Any chance the NAT device has some god-forsaken ALG agent installed that's trying to proxy the SIP traffic?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Feb 28, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Bret Clark wrote: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. -- Leigh Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I would suggest that the exponential decrease in POTS is driven by cell phones, not VOIP - I just get my cell phone from the store, any store, and use it, almost anywhere. It's just like my land line but without the wire tether. I get wireless without VOIP complications. Of course, we could discuss Long Distance rates for land lines vs cell or Skype (VOIP for almost free). But that is really another discussion. James R. Cutler james.cut...@consultant.com
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
They are in the US. Comcast tallies 8.6 million household telephone service accounts, making it the United States' third-largest telephone provider. As of February 16, 2011 Comcast has 8.610 million voice customers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#Home_telephone People are not, en-masse, going away from POTS and towards plugging a VoIP device into the back of their router. Twenty bucks says the first poster is correct; I'm willing to bet that most of the Comcast VoIP customers are handed off as RJ11 into legacy POTS lines in the target residence. In fact, I've had trouble finding any way to get our cable company to hand off their telephony service digitally, making the claims of digital phone service a little laughable as they still hand it off analog. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
It's only an issue if you have a single gateway which is serving up multiple public addresses. SIP is not the only traversal that breaks in this environment, but, it does choose to break in some of the most interesting (especially to troubleshoot when you don't know that's what is causing the problem) ways. This was not the result of smart nat or ALG issues. I will say that I have not seen a lot of environments that have a single gateway that maps clients to a variety of external addresses and that may account for the number of colleagues that haven't seen this issue before. It is real. It does exist. It is all kinds of fun (not!) to troubleshoot the first time you encounter it. (The SIP gets through the traversal just fine, but, usually one half (and not consistently the same half) of the RTP streams don't.) Owen On Feb 28, 2011, at 1:00 PM, Jared Mauch wrote: I've found that sip alg on devices is badly broken and must be disabled. This is true of ios and various consumer electronics devices. Nat traversal for multiple devices is not an issue in any case I have seen. Turning off smart nat usually solves it. Jared Mauch On Feb 28, 2011, at 2:34 PM, Bret Palsson b...@getjive.com wrote: Sorry I didn't include this in the last email... We have large clients who have phones registered on multiples of public IPs from the same location. Works no problem. We do some trickery on our side to make that happen, but I thought all VoIP companies would do that. -Bret On Feb 28, 2011, at 12:25 PM, Owen DeLong wrote: Another vexation for VOIP in the SMB environment is that it rarely works particularly well (if at all) in light of a multiple-external-address NAT pool. You simply have to map all of your VOIP phones in such a way that they consistently get the same external IP every time or shit breaks badly. Owen On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:11 AM, Bret Palsson wrote: Since our company is a VoIP company, I will chime in to this topic. Let's start off with the definitions so everyone is on the same page: vex |veks| verb [ trans. ] make (someone) feel annoyed, frustrated, or worried, esp. with trivial matters : the memory of the conversation still vexed him | [as adj. ] ( vexing)the most vexing questions for policymakers.] Alright, now that that's out of the way... I am only referring to small medium business and some enterprise (Those are all our customers, we do not do residential) - Seemingly complex. - Worried about the What if the internet goes down scenario. - Call quality. - Price - Location - Outages Responses: - Seemingly complex... Very true. Most VoIP companies, both hosted and on premises are difficult/time consuming to setup and make work they way you want it. - What if the internet goes down. This one is a challenge. POTS actually have issues too, but when analog phone service goes down, there is no light on the phone indicating that the phones are not working so many customers perceive there is a problem. With the FCC mandating all POTS move to a VoIP backend (which for long hauls, is mostly already true) POTS will experience the same downtime as the internet. However as we all know, the internet is built to tolerate outages. For most people they don't understand how the internet actually works. - Call quality... If a VoIP company pays for good bandwidth and maintains good relationships with peers, the only concern is the last-mile(From the CO to location). Now there is much more that plays in quality, ie. codec selection, voice buffer, locality to the pbx. - Price... Believe it or not people are worried about paying less for better service. Who would have thought? - Location... Location is super important both in the last mile and PBX. - Last mile: In older locations the copper in the ground is aged, if you can't get fiber and your stuck using T1, lines, then hopefully you are in a location that keeps the copper in the ground properly maintained. If you are in older locations, which one of our offices are, there are remedies, you can contact your bandwidth provider and have them do a head to head test using a BERD (bit error rate detector) and they can find the problem. But that's a whole other topic. -PBX: Some people believe that on premise is the best location for a PBX, this may or may not be true. I happen to believe that keeping it off premise is the way to go. You get up-time, redundancy, locality, and mobility. You just plug in your phone and your phone is up and running. Move offices.. got bandwidth? Your good to go. No equipment to worry about, say a power outage happens, your voicemail still works people call in and are in call queues and have no clue you are down. Feels more like POTS with an enterprise backend. -Outages: If the internet does fail, most providers offer WAN survivability. The customer plugs in phone lines
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 2/28/2011 5:19 PM, Joe Greco wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#Home_telephone People are not, en-masse, going away from POTS and towards plugging a VoIP device into the back of their router. Twenty bucks says the first poster is correct; I'm willing to bet that most of the Comcast VoIP customers are handed off as RJ11 into legacy POTS lines in the target residence. Of course they are, since users oddly enough like using their existing phones, extensions, and wiring. In fact, I've had trouble finding any way to get our cable company to hand off their telephony service digitally, making the claims of digital phone service a little laughable as they still hand it off analog. This is a bit disingenuous, are CD's not digital because the speakers you play the music from analog devices? You can plug any ATA into the existing home wiring, including the ones that Vonage deploys: http://support.vonage.com/doc/en_us/649.xml -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Feb 28, 2011, at 1:33 PM, Cutler James R wrote: On Feb 28, 2011, at 1:29 PM, Bret Clark wrote: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. -- Leigh Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! I would suggest that the exponential decrease in POTS is driven by cell phones, not VOIP - I just get my cell phone from the store, any store, and use it, almost anywhere. It's just like my land line but without the wire tether. I get wireless without VOIP complications. Of course, we could discuss Long Distance rates for land lines vs cell or Skype (VOIP for almost free). But that is really another discussion. James R. Cutler james.cut...@consultant.com Pretty soon, cell phones will, essentially, be VOIP devices. In fact, some already are. In fact, one could argue that LTE cell phones are in essence what VOIP will be when it grows up. It is clear that eventually voice will simply be an application on a packet switched data network. I believe that the frontier after that will be to replace HDMI with high-speed ethernet and media will go from being a source-selector/sound-display solution to a packet-switched source-network-destination solution where the destination will be either a time/place shifting device (recorder) or an output (audio/video). This frontier can't be crossed until multi-gigabit household networking becomes commonplace, so, it will be a few years, but, I believe it will eventually occur. I also believe that the RIAA/MPAA/etc. will do everything the can to prevent it which will likely delay it for several more years. Owen
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
From: Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net I have no idea why anyone would be paying Ma Bell $69/month for a phone line, unless you like giving them your money or something. In my neck of the woods (Washington DC), the POTS line is the one that works during a bad power outage, and has qualitatively different failure modes than my cable service. Whether that's something one wants to purchase is a different question. David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 2/28/2011 5:19 PM, Joe Greco wrote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#Home_telephone People are not, en-masse, going away from POTS and towards plugging a VoIP device into the back of their router. Twenty bucks says the first poster is correct; I'm willing to bet that most of the Comcast VoIP customers are handed off as RJ11 into legacy POTS lines in the target residence. Of course they are, since users oddly enough like using their existing phones, extensions, and wiring. So then let's argue that ILEC-delivered POTS is digital too, because it went on fiber to the local SLC hut... In fact, I've had trouble finding any way to get our cable company to hand off their telephony service digitally, making the claims of digital phone service a little laughable as they still hand it off analog. This is a bit disingenuous, are CD's not digital because the speakers you play the music from analog devices? So's your handset. So let's look for a rational comparison instead. Take your CD player's analog audio output and run it fifty feet, making sure to route it along some nice fluorescent lights. Even with a good shielded cable, analog signal is notorious for picking up noise. Now take your CD player's TOSLINK output and run it that same fifty feet. I'm aware of the spec limits, but most modern gear with good cables will do this without a problem - we're discussing the difference between analog and digital here in any case. Anyways, listen to both and then let's talk about the difference that carrying a signal in an analog format needlessly can make. You can plug any ATA into the existing home wiring, including the ones that Vonage deploys: http://support.vonage.com/doc/en_us/649.xml So here's the *point*: if you have digital phones, maybe VoIP but could also certainly be any of the proprietary digital systems, why should you have to run through the ambiguity of a digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion? With end-to-end digital, you can have reliable call supervision and status, OOB Caller-ID delivery, crystal clear call quality, probably the ability to handle multiple calls intelligently, no hook race conditions, etc. When you throw that one stupid and pointless analog hop in there, you are suddenly limited and broken in so many ways. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
From: Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net=0AI have no idea why anyone would be = paying Ma Bell $69/month for a phone=0Aline, unless you like giving them y= our money or something.=0A=0AIn my neck of the woods (Washington DC), the P= OTS line is the one that works =0Aduring a=A0bad=A0power outage, and has qu= alitatively different failure modes than my =0Acable service.=A0 Whether th= at's something one wants to purchase is a different =0Aquestion.=0A=0ADavid= Barak=0ANeed Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: =0Ahttp://www.listentothefranch= ise.com =0A=0A=0A In my neck of the woods, you can get a basic POTS line for $15/month if it's important to you, local calls billed by the number of calls and the normal LD charges. Add a basic DSL service to that ($20) AND add a basic unlimited VoIP service to that ($20) and suddenly you have the benefits of POTS for emergencies *plus* Internet connectivity *plus* unlimited worldwide calling for ~$60/month, which seems to me to be a better deal than what Ma Bell is likely to be giving you even if you're managing to pay them $69/month. Toss in a UPS and a computer and you can even use the Internet during power outages. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
So then let's argue that ILEC-delivered POTS is digital too, because it went on fiber to the local SLC hut... It is, at least in some cases, and its even VOIP in a few (Occam BLC's for example). Having said that its almost never derived voice of any type into the home because of life line requirements. So's your handset. That was kind of the point :) So let's look for a rational comparison instead. Take your CD player's analog audio output and run it fifty feet, making sure to route it along some nice fluorescent lights. Even with a good shielded cable, analog signal is notorious for picking up noise. Now take your CD player's TOSLINK output and run it that same fifty feet. I'm aware of the spec limits, but most modern gear with good cables will do this without a problem - we're discussing the difference between analog and digital here in any case. Anyways, listen to both and then let's talk about the difference that carrying a signal in an analog format needlessly can make. You're working under the incorrect assumption that a user can't simply plug into the back of their EMTA and I assure that isn't the case. An operator can choose to not use the in home wiring, and in some installs this is the right method, but in the case of decent wiring and existing analog sets the user is happy with there's no reason to do so. You can plug any ATA into the existing home wiring, including the ones that Vonage deploys: http://support.vonage.com/doc/en_us/649.xml So here's the *point*: if you have digital phones, maybe VoIP but could also certainly be any of the proprietary digital systems, why should you have to run through the ambiguity of a digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion? I hate to tell you, but residential users don't to buy a new phone. They don't see any problem with their existing analog set and usually they're right. We've been dealing with analog to digital conversions, at least one and sometimes two, in the local LEC system for decades without impacting MOS. (It wasn't until GR-303 and TR-08 interfaces became common on switches that remote terminals got the signal digitally.) With end-to-end digital, you can have reliable call supervision and status, OOB Caller-ID delivery, crystal clear call quality, probably the ability to handle multiple calls intelligently, no hook race conditions, etc. When you throw that one stupid and pointless analog hop in there, you are suddenly limited and broken in so many ways. ... JG What's broken for a residential user? For that matter I'd rather get rid of every digital phone in our business, they're a waste of money, and run pure soft phones but until people start caring about voice (they don't, check cell MOS scores) and adopt wideband voice in numbers there is 0 reason for a home user to change. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ISP Alliance, Inc. DBA ZCorum (678) 507-5000 http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net With end-to-end digital, you can have reliable call supervision and status, OOB Caller-ID delivery, crystal clear call quality, probably the ability to handle multiple calls intelligently, no hook race conditions, etc. When you throw that one stupid and pointless analog hop in there, you are suddenly limited and broken in so many ways. Sure. But I don't think it's the analog hop that people are really concerned about *per se*... it's the fact that the traditional analog last-mile *connects you to a real CO*, with a real battery room, that's engineered -- in most cases, to cold-war standards, *through a loop with very low complexity*. If you have DC continuity and good balance to ground on a copper pair, you are *done*; no intermediate gear, no batteries, no config files, nothing. All I need at the residence is a 500 set, and the complexity of *those* is super low, too. The real, underlying problem is that people take insufficient notice of all the complexity pinch points that they're engineering into loops in exchange for the extra controllability they get because everything's digital end to end. When I'm bringing 31 T-spans into my call center, that extra complexity is easily justifiable. For grandma's phone? Not so much. And it doesn't *matter* whether it's riding on a cable internet link the complexity of which is already amortized: you're now *adopting* that complexity onto the voice service... the semantics of which (used to be) very well understood and not at all complex at all. From the user perception standpoint, I think, it's a tipping point thing... just like Madison WI. Cheers, -- jr 'that was *not* an invitation' a
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Owen DeLong o...@delong.com Pretty soon, cell phones will, essentially, be VOIP devices. In fact, some already are. In fact, one could argue that LTE cell phones are in essence what VOIP will be when it grows up. TTBOMK, that isn't *quite* true, yet, Owen. The only US carrier with LTE deployed is VZW, and their only *handset* with LTE is the not-yet-quite-shipped HTC Thunderbolt... and it is my understanding that their first generation release of handsets will *not* be doing PSTN voice as VoIP over the LTE data connection; they'll be dual-mode handsets, using traditional (IS-95? IS-136?) CDMA voice on a separate RF deck. The two reasons I've heard have to do with battery life and the immaturity of the protocol stack or its implementations. LTE-data-only with VoIP for the carrier PSTN service is indeed their goal, but I don't think you can say Already are quite yet. Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
So let's look for a rational comparison instead. Take your CD player's analog audio output and run it fifty feet, making sure to route it along some nice fluorescent lights. Even with a good shielded cable, analog signal is notorious for picking up noise. Now take your CD player's TOSLINK output and run it that same fifty feet. I'm aware of the spec limits, but most modern gear with good cables will do this without a problem - we're discussing the difference between analog and digital here in any case. Anyways, listen to both and then let's talk about the difference that carrying a signal in an analog format needlessly can make. You're working under the incorrect assumption that a user can't simply plug into the back of their EMTA and I assure that isn't the case. No, I'm not, we were talking about a CD player, and I assure you it *is* the case that I *can* do that. An operator can choose to not use the in home wiring, and in some installs this is the right method, but in the case of decent wiring and existing analog sets the user is happy with there's no reason to do so. There may be no compelling reason to do so, at least. However, digital gear offers benefits, and some people want them. Others, like me, live in bad RF environments where POTS picks up too much noise unless you very carefully select your gear and shield your cables. Further, the digital phones support other features, such as the ability to manage multiple calls seamlessly, present Caller-ID reliably (even while you are on another call), etc. You can plug any ATA into the existing home wiring, including the ones that Vonage deploys: http://support.vonage.com/doc/en_us/649.xml So here's the *point*: if you have digital phones, maybe VoIP but could also certainly be any of the proprietary digital systems, why should you have to run through the ambiguity of a digital-to-analog-to-digital conversion? I hate to tell you, but residential users don't to buy a new phone. I hate to tell *you*, but the LEC's and cable companies like to hand off POTS to small businesses too. They don't see any problem with their existing analog set and usually they're right. Your argument: This works fine for most people therefore it will work for everyone. Is that really what you're saying? What's broken for a residential user? That depends. I've got many years of experience with POTS. How about a POTS phone that won't automatically hang up when the call is complete? Really annoying when it's a speakerphone and you have to get up and walk across the room to press one stupid button. (Our Cisco 79xx gear is *stellar* both in speakerphone quality and in handling such things). How about listening to the local radio station's broadcast on your POTS line while making calls, because the cheap Taiwanese phone isn't sufficiently shielded? I don't really want or need to go on; POTS *stinks* compared to digital. I have no objection to you wanting your lines handed off as POTS, but I'd like mine delivered digitally. For that matter I'd rather get rid of every digital phone in our business, they're a waste of money, and run pure soft phones but until people start caring about voice (they don't, check cell MOS scores) and adopt wideband voice in numbers there is 0 reason for a home user to change. That's a matter of the consumer and their needs and wants. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 28 Feb 2011, at 23:15, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net With end-to-end digital, you can have reliable call supervision and status, OOB Caller-ID delivery, crystal clear call quality, probably the ability to handle multiple calls intelligently, no hook race conditions, etc. When you throw that one stupid and pointless analog hop in there, you are suddenly limited and broken in so many ways. Sure. But I don't think it's the analog hop that people are really concerned about *per se*... it's the fact that the traditional analog last-mile *connects you to a real CO*, with a real battery room, that's engineered -- in most cases, to cold-war standards, *through a loop with very low complexity*. If you have DC continuity and good balance to ground on a copper pair, you are *done*; no intermediate gear, no batteries, no config files, nothing. All I need at the residence is a 500 set, and the complexity of *those* is super low, too. The real, underlying problem is that people take insufficient notice of all the complexity pinch points that they're engineering into loops in exchange for the extra controllability they get because everything's digital end to end. When I'm bringing 31 T-spans into my call center, that extra complexity is easily justifiable. For grandma's phone? Not so much. Exactly the point I made earlier. POTS is simple, it does what it does and it is pretty good at it. Now, in the background, you have a whole lot of engineering. But I would trust a DMS100 far more than any of the stuff that routes IP. POTS is cheap, easy, scalable and resistant to many disasters that would soon wipe any VoIP network out. -- Leigh Porter
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 2/28/2011 15:35, Joe Greco wrote: There may be no compelling reason to do so, at least. However, digital gear offers benefits, and some people want them. Others, like me, live in bad RF environments where POTS picks up too much noise unless you very carefully select your gear and shield your cables. Further, the digital phones support other features, such as the ability to manage multiple calls seamlessly, present Caller-ID reliably (even while you are on another call), etc. ISDN would have fit the bill nicely as a digital home phone line. However, it never became popular in the US. I once read on Wikipedia that it was popular in Germany. ~Seth
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net With end-to-end digital, you can have reliable call supervision and status, OOB Caller-ID delivery, crystal clear call quality, probably the ability to handle multiple calls intelligently, no hook race conditions, etc. When you throw that one stupid and pointless analog hop in there, you are suddenly limited and broken in so many ways. Sure. But I don't think it's the analog hop that people are really concerned about *per se*... it's the fact that the traditional analog last-mile *connects you to a real CO*, with a real battery room, that's engineered -- in most cases, to cold-war standards, *through a loop with very low complexity*. Yeah, um, well, hate to ruin that glorious illusion of the legacy physical plant, but Ma Bell mostly doesn't run copper all the way back to a real CO with a real battery room these days when they're deploying new copper. So if you have a house built more than maybe 20 years ago, yeah, you're more likely to have a pair back to the CO, but if you've ordered a second line, or you're in a new subdivision and you're far from the CO, the chances you're actually on copper back to the CO drops fairly quickly. If you have DC continuity and good balance to ground on a copper pair, you are *done*; no intermediate gear, no batteries, no config files, nothing. All I need at the residence is a 500 set, and the complexity of *those* is super low, too. Yes, it's elegant in a traditional way. I certainly agree. It has some benefits. It also has some downsides in terms of usability, things we wouldn't have noticed in 1970 but today we do. In an age when cell phones can handle multiple calls and deliver Caller-ID for a waiting call, it's nice to see feature parity on your landline. The real, underlying problem is that people take insufficient notice of all the complexity pinch points that they're engineering into loops in exchange for the extra controllability they get because everything's digital end to end. Looked at a different way, the cold-war reliability of the POTS network maybe isn't quite as important as it once was. If you have a cell phone and a VoIP line, maybe you're actually better off. If a plane crashes into your local CO, perhaps you lose POTS and even your cell because the tower was at the local CO. But if you've got a cell and a VoIP line that runs over cable, maybe you actually have more diversity. When I'm bringing 31 T-spans into my call center, that extra complexity is easily justifiable. For grandma's phone? Not so much. And it doesn't *matter* whether it's riding on a cable internet link the complexity of which is already amortized: you're now *adopting* that complexity onto the voice service... the semantics of which (used to be) very well understood and not at all complex at all. Yes, but you *gain* capabilities as well as losing some of the benefits of the old system. We're gaining the ability to do things like texting and transmitting pictures to 911 via the cellular network, for example. Things change. Maybe some people do not need a cold-war relic of a phone anymore. From the user perception standpoint, I think, it's a tipping point thing... just like Madison WI. Cheers, -- jr 'that was *not* an invitation' a What, you want me to invite you for pizza in Madison? I hear there's some good places near the Capitol... ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again. - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Owen DeLong o...@delong.com This no intermediate gear term, it does not mean what you think it means... Loading coils, Bridge-Taps, WDFs, Protection Blocks, etc. all could be classified as intermediate gear. Many of these things have been the bane of DSL installations, so, you cannot claim that they have no effect on the circuit. Sure. But they're not really gear in the meaning in which we use that term, and they do not add complexity to it in the meaning in which *I* was using that term. There are no batteries, CPUs, configuration files, etc, on any of those items. I will grant that thing like TR-303 RSUs do introduce those complexities, but they're generally treated as part of the CPU, IME, and engineered and maintained that way, and they're not really all *that* configurable either, as I understand them. When I'm bringing 31 T-spans into my call center, that extra complexity is easily justifiable. For grandma's phone? Not so much. For grandma, probably not. For myself, I like having a phone on my laptop that works just about any where in the world and allows me to make local calls in the US. As do I. And we do. Was this subthread not about whether VoIP was *generically* ready to replace the PSTN's present last-mile provisioning? Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net Yeah, um, well, hate to ruin that glorious illusion of the legacy physical plant, but Ma Bell mostly doesn't run copper all the way back to a real CO with a real battery room these days when they're deploying new copper. So if you have a house built more than maybe 20 years ago, yeah, you're more likely to have a pair back to the CO, but if you've ordered a second line, or you're in a new subdivision and you're far from the CO, the chances you're actually on copper back to the CO drops fairly quickly. Ok, sure. But probably to an RSU, which -- as I noted to Owen just now -- is engineered and monitored to quite a bit higher standards than I'm betting Comcast or FiOS is. If you have DC continuity and good balance to ground on a copper pair, you are *done*; no intermediate gear, no batteries, no config files, nothing. All I need at the residence is a 500 set, and the complexity of *those* is super low, too. Yes, it's elegant in a traditional way. I certainly agree. It has some benefits. It also has some downsides in terms of usability, things we wouldn't have noticed in 1970 but today we do. In an age when cell phones can handle multiple calls and deliver Caller-ID for a waiting call, it's nice to see feature parity on your landline. Oh, I'm not arguing that. The question, for me, has always been are we taking full account of the *features* we get from traditionally engineered copper POTS in doing our cost benefit analysis to newer technologies... and my answer was always don' look like it to me. The real, underlying problem is that people take insufficient notice of all the complexity pinch points that they're engineering into loops in exchange for the extra controllability they get because everything's digital end to end. Looked at a different way, the cold-war reliability of the POTS network maybe isn't quite as important as it once was. If you have a cell phone and a VoIP line, maybe you're actually better off. If a plane crashes into your local CO, perhaps you lose POTS and even your cell because the tower was at the local CO. But if you've got a cell and a VoIP line that runs over cable, maybe you actually have more diversity. That's possible; there are *lots* of end-site use cases. But that's end-user engineering; you could *always* improve your diversity if you were willing to put the time, though (and money) into it. And it doesn't *matter* whether it's riding on a cable internet link the complexity of which is already amortized: you're now *adopting* that complexity onto the voice service... the semantics of which (used to be) very well understood and not at all complex at all. Yes, but you *gain* capabilities as well as losing some of the benefits of the old system. We're gaining the ability to do things like texting and transmitting pictures to 911 via the cellular network, for example. Things change. Maybe some people do not need a cold-war relic of a phone anymore. some people is, for me, the important phrase in that sentence. Cell phones have killed off pay phones and utility-grade watches; I'm not sure we're the better for it in either case. And SMS to 911 is still a *teeny* little capability; I think there's *one* whole PSAP in the US equipped for it so far. From the user perception standpoint, I think, it's a tipping point thing... just like Madison WI. Cheers, -- jr 'that was *not* an invitation' a What, you want me to invite you for pizza in Madison? I hear there's some good places near the Capitol... ...to political arguments on NANOG. Sorry not to show my work. :-) Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
- Original Message - From: Owen DeLong o...@delong.com TTBOMK, that isn't *quite* true, yet, Owen. The only US carrier with LTE deployed is VZW, and their only *handset* with LTE is the not-yet-quite-shipped HTC Thunderbolt... That's the US market. We are, as usual, traditionally well behind the rest of the world. and it is my understanding that their first generation release of handsets will *not* be doing PSTN voice as VoIP over the LTE data connection; they'll be dual-mode handsets, using traditional (IS-95? IS-136?) CDMA voice on a separate RF deck. The two reasons I've heard have to do with battery life and the immaturity of the protocol stack or its implementations. Sad. There are definitely LTE-data-only VOIP handsets in other deployments. Of course. Silly me. :-) Cheers, -- jra
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Feb 28, 2011, at 7:24 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net Yeah, um, well, hate to ruin that glorious illusion of the legacy physical plant, but Ma Bell mostly doesn't run copper all the way back to a real CO with a real battery room these days when they're deploying new copper. So if you have a house built more than maybe 20 years ago, yeah, you're more likely to have a pair back to the CO, but if you've ordered a second line, or you're in a new subdivision and you're far from the CO, the chances you're actually on copper back to the CO drops fairly quickly. Ok, sure. But probably to an RSU, which -- as I noted to Owen just now -- is engineered and monitored to quite a bit higher standards than I'm betting Comcast or FiOS is. Well, I have to go back to the hurricanes of 04 for a personal view of this higher standards. Cable went down because of cable cuts (expected) and because of no power backup longer than a short time with batteries. CO's faired a scoch better but when their battery banks went dry it was over because the gensets never autostarted and there was no one here on the coast in central Florida to intervene. All cell phones were toast except old Bell South. Local worked through both Cat 3's and then LD came back later. Don't know whether it was towers with only short term batts or power to fiber was disrupted. 36+ hours after both Cat 3's all BellSouth wireless was back up but with load issues as you can imagine. Other carriers took days. My home internet is wireless to my colo and then via 4 carriers out. All but one carrier died after 24+ hours of outage. Colo was fine an humming. Feedback later was that the problems were due to poor maintenance of generators and failover equipment and understanding of disasters. Bottom line is my VOIP worked because I had luck or at least I was proactive and my cell worked because I was lucky. Today, given the margins and the amount of reinvestment and maintenance I doubt that either cable or POTS would hack a disruption like this which is not out of the question. I doubt that they would do as good. Tom PS as for the comment that your mother wouldn't use VOIP, my mother in her 80's uses VOIP and loves it.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Mon, 28 Feb 2011, Jay Ashworth wrote: - Original Message - From: Owen DeLong o...@delong.com Sad. There are definitely LTE-data-only VOIP handsets in other deployments. Of course. Silly me. :-) Couldn't fine Owens original post, so I'll ask here. Which are these handsets? Could you provide some names, please? Since I work for an LTE operator and haven't heard about them I'd really like to know. Considering the USB dongles get hot enough to fry eggs off of, I was under the impression it wasn't really possible to make a handset with a big enough battery to give any decent standby-time at this point in the tech evolution? -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: swm...@swm.pp.se
Re: [v6z] Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 3:00 PM, Joe Greco jgr...@ns.sol.net wrote: In my neck of the woods, you can get a basic POTS line for $15/month if it's important to you, local calls billed by the number of calls and the normal LD charges. Add a basic DSL service to that ($20) AND add a basic unlimited VoIP service to that ($20) and suddenly you have the benefits of POTS for emergencies *plus* Internet connectivity *plus* unlimited worldwide calling for ~$60/month Or just move to California, order residential dry-loop DSL from ATT (not sure about via resellers) and they are required by law to give you dial-tone and access to 911. $20/month for the DSL, $0/month for the VOIP (via Google Voice and Asterisk) and you've got the best of all worlds. Scott.
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On 2/28/11 10:37 AM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:29:08 EST, Bret Clark said: On 02/28/2011 01:17 PM, Leigh Porter wrote: VoIP at the last mile is just too niche at the moment. It's for people on this list, not my mother. My mother has comcast voice... they decided on that themselves after moving out of dsl range. Baloney...if that was the case, then all these ILEC's wouldn't be whining about POT's lines decreasing exponentially year over year! The temporary decade and half longe bump of dial modems, fax machines and second pots lines to keep the teen off the main one is over. I do believe that the ILEC's are mostly losing POTS lines to cell phones, not to VoIP. the only reason anyone under 30 would end up with a pots line anymore imhoas a new service activation has to do with the pricing for unbundled dsl. I myself have a cell phone but no POTS service at my home address. On the other hand, I *am* seeing a metric ton of Vonage and Magic Jack ads on TV these days - if VoIP is too niche, how are those two making any money?
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Leigh Porter leigh.por...@ukbroadband.com wrote: Exactly the point I made earlier. POTS is simple, it does what it does and it is pretty good at it. Now, in the background, you have a whole lot of engineering. But I would trust a DMS100 far more than any of the stuff that routes IP. POTS is cheap, easy, scalable and resistant to many disasters that would soon wipe any VoIP network out. I wouldn't call DMS100 a cheap platform. The switch gear is expensive, features are expensive, floor space is expensive, training is expensive, and provisioning, for the most part, is stuck in the dark ages. Sure, it works, but to make the generalization that it's cheaper than modern VoIP switching is just incorrect. Besides that, if you have done much DMS100 ops, you are well aware that there are many (infrequent) tasks that require multi-hour outages of major DMS100 components, e.g. one of the two CMs (control plane, for unfamiliar readers.) In addition, the official maintenance procedures often don't tell you how to perform these tasks without taking the whole switch out of service. A growing number of end-users are perfectly happy with no land-line and no VoIP, relying only on cellular phone service. I'm sure that cellular is generally orders of magnitude less reliable than POTS. I'm sure most VoIP offerings are somewhere in-between. End-users are going to choose the product they want, and for many, the choice will be to save hundreds of dollars per year while sacrificing a little bit of reliability which they are unlikely to notice or miss. -- Jeff S Wheeler j...@inconcepts.biz Sr Network Operator / Innovative Network Concepts
Re: What vexes VoIP users?
On Feb 28, 2011, at 11:22 PM, Jeff Wheeler wrote: On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Leigh Porter leigh.por...@ukbroadband.com wrote: Exactly the point I made earlier. POTS is simple, it does what it does and it is pretty good at it. Now, in the background, you have a whole lot of engineering. But I would trust a DMS100 far more than any of the stuff that routes IP. POTS is cheap, easy, scalable and resistant to many disasters that would soon wipe any VoIP network out. I wouldn't call DMS100 a cheap platform. The switch gear is expensive, features are expensive, floor space is expensive, training is expensive, and provisioning, for the most part, is stuck in the dark ages. Per subscriber, amortized over the likely 20-30 year lifetime of a DMS-100, compared to VOIP gear, rapid product life cycling, and low subscriber density, uh, yeah, the DMS-100 is, actually cheap in many cases. Sure, it works, but to make the generalization that it's cheaper than modern VoIP switching is just incorrect. Besides that, if you have done much DMS100 ops, you are well aware that there are many (infrequent) tasks that require multi-hour outages of major DMS100 components, e.g. one of the two CMs (control plane, for unfamiliar readers.) In addition, the official maintenance procedures often don't tell you how to perform these tasks without taking the whole switch out of service. VOIP is just starting to get cheaper than POTS, but, barely. As to the reliability issue, you're technically correct, but, there is actually a very strong emotional connection for many end users of I want my phone to work to call 911 when the lights are out. Cellular, in spite of its reliability issues is perceived to provide that. POTS is perceived to provide that and it's pretty rock solid. VOIP is perceived to have that as a severe limitation. Owen
