[Eug-lug] Local dial tone providers - Qwest alternatives?

[Russ Johnson]

larry price wrote:

>what is the quality level like for Vonage?
>  
>
While I can't say it's perfect, I can say that I've been really pleased. 
I set up a QoS rule to give my adapter absolute priority through the 
firewall. I haven't had any dropped calls. Every once in a while I get 
echo for a second or two, but then it clears up. I figure it's a packet 
or two getting lost.


>
>I know that Vonage and other VOIP companies have built/leased High
>Speed Backbone networks and some of the Cisco stuff I've been reading
>goes into excruciating detail about bad things that can happen if you
>don't properly allocate bandwidth for latency sensitive services (like
>VOIP).
>  
>
While it's sensitive to bandwidth, it's requirements aren't that great. 
Something like 96kbps. The adapter itself will do QoS if you put it 
between your firewall and your dsl/cable adapter. It takes what it needs 
and gives you the rest. I chose to have it plugged into my hub and do 
the QoS in my firewall.

When no calls are active, it maintains a UDP connection to the Vonage 
servers. That takes little to no bandwidth. When a call comes in/goes 
out, another connection opens for the call itself.

>It strikes me that VOIP is like many other services we've seen, where
>the intial wave of popularity runs into the limitations of the
>infrastructure and puts providers into a race to build out their
>networks to handle the anticipated demand, while trying to keep costs
>down, and prices competitive.
>  
>
Well, as long as the pipe from the 'net to the Vonage servers is large 
enough, the rest is up to the end users and making a good choice for an 
ISP.

Russ