| but did the study ask WHY? As many here have said, it IS all about the "managed" service but the real question is why... The real reason here is that Comcast controls the end user's network equipment. End-to-end traffic prioritization for SIP is already all over their network but where Vonage and others fail is at the end-users gateway. Comcast will send you one with the phone service of course which is already properly tweaked with QoS and hard-reserved b/w (probably 128k) for the Voice calls. It's their network so they know what settings to put and can probably dynamically update the router's QoS as the network evolves by simply pushing new configs down the line. Vonage on the other hand sends you a little VoIP/Firewall Gateway and prays that you have a clue about networking and/or have never heard of bittorrent. Vonage can't preconfigure much QoS because setting up the bulk of the settings that really matter requires that you know your connection's max up/down. Then there will also be a lot of people who won't use the Vonage router as their gateway, they'll just plug it in to their existing firewall/wireless router which will work fine but leaves them no chance of controlling the gateway.
I have Comcast's higher tier Internet package and Vonage phone service. I'm no fanboy of Vonage's but have been a customer since long before Comcast and others got into the VoIP game. I use an old PC running pfSense [I highly recommend this] as my firewall. pfSense has superb traffic shaping and I have tweaked mine such that I can simultaneously make a Vonage phone call, download 5 or 6 torrents, and game online without the slightest problem. I remember having to use a Linksys router as my gateway for a very brief while a year or two ago and it just didn't work. I had to choose between the above activities and would get a phone call and have to yell upstairs to my wife to stop the torrents or the phone call would drop packets and audio would cutout.
My point here is not how awesome my home firewall/network is but that my Vonage voice quality is excellent (better than some landlines even) and for reliability I'd have to give them 5 nine's because I can never remember a problem with the service quality or reliability that didn't actually stem from my own internet connection or network. Studies like this prove nothing to me except what I already knew...
(End-User + File Sharing + Vonage) = User blames Vonage.
So if you know what you're doing enough to setup pfSense or m0n0wall or any kind of good QoS firewall then don't waste $40+ on Comcast's phone service when you can get Vonage and others for $25 or less (if you dont need unlimited minutes). |
