Yesterday at around 17:00 the phones in our home stopped working. No more dial tone… We use Vonage for our home phone service, and we use Shaw Cable as our ISP. Nothing changed in our network at home, so I was stumped. I power cycled our cable modem and router issued by Vonage but that did not seem to work. I made sure we still had internet connectivity and we did. So I did what any geek would do… I started Googling and here is what I found.
Shaw introduces QofS:
“With Internet telephony, voice data is treated like regular data. Under peak loads voice frames will be dropped equally with data frames. Regular data, however, is not time sensitive and dropped packets can be corrected through the process of retransmission. Dropped voice packets, which are time sensitive, cannot be corrected in this manner.” - Shaw
To me it sounds like they’re referring to the difference between a connectionless protocol (UDP) and a connection-oriented protocol (TCP).
Vonage vs. Shaw:
The dispute between telephone internet provider Vonage Canada and cable company Shaw Communications heated up Wednesday, with Shaw calling Vonage’s complaints about subscriber fees “wrong and misleading.”
Customer testimonials on a Vonage Forum:
“VoIP is just another form of data traffic. However all of the VoIP providers do send a special form of data through the high speed internet that does allow the ISPs to detect whether or not you have VoIP. I truly believe that Shaw is a very bad company for playing this childish game.” - Kevin270
Whatever it is… it sounds like a lot of red tape. I certainly hope that Shaw and Vonage work out this dispute. If Shaw is indeed bandwidth shaping Vonage VOIP traffic I sure hope the CRTC puts and end to this. Either way it would be nice to get some sort of regulatory body to provide some answers as to what is actually going on.
Up until yesterday we haven’t had any outages with our Vonage service and we’ve been quite happy with it. We do experience lag and static in the background at different times, but for the cost and amount of use for us it’s worth it. We end up paying Vonage approximately $21.00/month CAD for phone service versus Shaw’s digital phone at $55.00/month CAD.
With Vonage we also get our voicemail emailed to us. We can view records of the number of minutes spent on each call, and lots and lots of reporting.
This morning I gave Vonage customer service a phone call (from my cell phone of course) because our service still wasn’t back up. I spoke with a gentleman by the name of Mir, who was absolutely fantastic. In a matter of a few minutes we had phone service back up again. I don’t think the cause of our outage had anything to do with Shaw, but after reading a few customer testimonials and some articles I am a little more critical of Shaw then I once was.
In order to get service back up, I…
- logged into the management interface for our VOIP router.
- Backed up existing settings to a file.
- Grabbed a paper clip and stuck it into the reset hole on the bottom of the router for 25 seconds.
- I logged back into the router management interface using the default username and password. (In my case, username “admin”, password “admin”)
- I restored the settings file.
- I restarted the router.
And the dial tone returned!