RE: bad Vonage connection, was Vonage complains about VoIP-blocking

["John R Levine" <johnl () iecc com>]

> Odd regarding the Vonage connection. Their sitting on UU from where I
> can see and I have excellent transit to them from Comcast.

I'm on Sprint, and the service was fine for a year and a half.  In recent
months it deteriorated to the point where more often than not I couldn't
understand the other party at all, even though they always said they could
hear me fine.  Since my connection is symmetrical (t1, not dsl or cable)
and my stats always say I have spare inbound capacity, I'm sure it's not
at my end.

> I've tested Vonage, only because I had it, with the Semena NE2000 Network
> Test Device and introduced multiple error, path, and latency issues and it
> stood up very well. At one point, I jacked up the latency to 4000ms and I
> was still able to place, communicate, and drop calls effectively. I was
> very surprised at how it handled that large introduced latency.

It wasn't latency, it was jitter and mostly dropouts.  I think they have
vast amounts of buffering so latency is tolerable if you can stand the
talking to the moon effect.

> I don't know about Vonage support. Never tried it.

That's the problem.  It no longer exists.  E-mail is auto-acked and
ignored, phone calls go through the usual voice jail tree until you get to
the point when it would queue me for a person, where I always got a busy
signal.

Calling the number to cancel was no problem getting through, but by then
it was too late, I'd already ported the number to Lingo who is slightly
cheaper and has a much larger local calling area, roughly Honolulu to
Helsinki.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl () iecc com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.