I was having some voip issues recently. During the early stages I’d been mucking around with the very low cost pay-as-you-go SIP providers, and there have been some questions recently from the family about jitter or disconnects.

I’m sure you all know as well as I do how a bad experience or two can prejudice people against a technology. Even if connection between the problem and the technology is perceived rather than actual. (Yes, I’m talking about WCF :) ) So I figured I had better try an affordable and solid provider before I was told the system had to come down.
So I spent an afternoon returning to the research and came up with BroadVoice. Plastic in hand, I signed up for an affordable level of service with no long-term commitment. Good thing too because it appears that the “timelessness” of material on the internet may have been a bit misleading. The reputation of that voip provider looks like it went to hell sometime in 2005.

Only loss is the nominal one-time setup cost. Now that it’s in place I might run with it for a month or two but I fully expect to switch to Telasip at some point.

My biggest fear hasn’t realized itself yet though. I haven’t had Comcast bring the packet-shaping hammer down on the voip experiment. Thing is I still have digital voice service with them so that may be buying me some wiggle room. Who can say.

That just kills me though. They packet shape to guarantee the quality of service for their users when some subscribers may be using excessive bandwidth on voip and other things like p2p file sharing, video, etc. But in the next breath they turn right around and use their internet service for the digital voice service they sell. I mean seriously. How can you reconcile that? Clearly they’re more concerned about which voip provider has the business than the impact on other subscriber’s internet.