HORROR STORY: CON-Cast Cable Internet, Skype, and Internet Neutrality.

benburch

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Wed Apr-26-06 06:04 PM
Original message

HORROR STORY: CON-Cast Cable Internet, Skype, and Internet Neutrality.

As CIO of Head On Radio Network ( http://www.headonradionetwork.com ), it is my job to manage voice connections for remote broadcasts.

We have found that Skype provides a free means of doing this that is consistent with the goals of our network at this stage in its development. Naturally, we plan to purchase POTS line codecs and ISDN solutions as we can afford them, but Skype has proven to be a good medium.

Until this week.

This week we have a host who cannot be at the studio due to a family medical emergency. No problem. We had him sign up for Comcast Cable Internet at his parent's home, and with a 768 kbps upstream we should have been right as rain for Skype.

We dutifully did test calls, and everything sounded good.

Until we tried to run a show.

Almost immediately, the audio quality started breaking down. Artifacts appeared, and finally the call was terminated. He reconnected, and the same thing happened. We simply could not make a call work!

So we brought up a re-run show, and called it a night. (On *my* network we refuse to call it a "Best Of" show unless it really is an edited collection of best parts. Otherwise you are lying to your audience.) Later we did more test calls and everything worked. We updated software, removed the router that was between the laptop and the cablemodem, and did more tests. Everything was perfect! But the next evening the same shit happened.

We ran a speed test from http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and, though we were only getting half of what Comcast had promised, 330 kbps upstream SHOULD have worked. Skype reported to us that we had zero intermediate routers, and the setup in the studio has worked great with hosts Skypeing in from around the planet, so we knew it was not in our studio.

It was as though we were getting large and bursty delays in the transmission, though, that resulted in late packets. And it seemed that this was happening only during the hours from 6 ET though 10 ET, when our show was being produced.

So I did some searching on the skype user forum and on Google to see if we had a known problem. And, lo-and-behold, we did!

Seems that ComCast, who I shall always call CON-Cast in the future, introduced their own, non-free VOIP service in early March, and almost immediately, Skype users began having problems, especially during prime time! The suspicion is that CON-Cast is deliberately interfering with Skype and other VOIP providers to drive users into their for-pay VOIP service.

Here are some links about that;

http://oren.blogs.com/praxis/2006/03/comcast_poisoni.html

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=942

http://skypefamily.blogspot.com/2006/03/we-are-still-skyping.html#links

http://www.isen.com/blog/2006/03/is-comcast-impairing-vonage.html

And there are many more if you search!

*This* is what all the fuss is about with the bill removing the presumption of ISP Neutrality!

But it appears that CON-Cast was not prepared to wait for a bill, but has gone ahead and done it anyway.

And I think that those of you who are reading this and using CON-Cast should change providers AT ONCE, even if you are NOT using a VOIP solution.

I recommend Speakeasy, but there are many more providers who can give you quality, neutral, honest DSL solutions.

Ditch CON-Cast, and tell your friend to do so!

Unless you want to wake up and find that you can no longer get to DU because FR has paid for preferential access in the political blog category!