I appreciate that the ISP is only one factor in the end-to-end Voip
'chain' however I presume it is a fairly important link in the chain
so my question is, from a voip pov, are there any ISPs to totally
avoid for SIP?

Do LLUs have any advantages/disadvantages?

Also are 'tunable' factors important such as contention ratios,
interleaving, traffic shaping options etc....

What isp's would you recommend/avoid?

Thanks,
Stefan

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

In article <1186658487.699140.187030@l70g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,
<relaxandchillout@gmail.com> wrote:
>I appreciate that the ISP is only one factor in the end-to-end Voip
>'chain' however I presume it is a fairly important link in the chain
>so my question is, from a voip pov, are there any ISPs to totally
>avoid for SIP?
>
>Do LLUs have any advantages/disadvantages?
>
>Also are 'tunable' factors important such as contention ratios,
>interleaving, traffic shaping options etc....

I think (but someone correct me if I'm wrong!) that contention is more
or less a thing of the past with ADSL-MAX these days with BT setting a
minimum service level and the ISPs themselves having a bit of more control
over it (by balanging their subscribers with the fat-pipes the buy from BT)

In-general you should get the benefit of (the equivalent of) a lower content
ion
with business class products (where the upstream is "up to " 833Kbps) than t
he
domestic 443Kbps connections.

Interneave shouldn't make any noticable different to VoIP. Gamers whinge
about it. With interleave on, you might see a ping time of 10-15ms more
than in "fast" mode. I've used VoIP connections over both and it's never
made any difference as far as I could tell.

>What isp's would you recommend/avoid?

It's a big grey area and hard to know what to suggest. (Other than
what you have personal experience of!)

Personally, I reckon you get what you pay for when it comes to provision
of an Internet service. The biggy corps have lower prices, but the service
might not be as "personal" and with offshore call centres, as the smaller
ones (who may charge more as they don't have the economy of scale)

I have had good service and quality with Zen and Entanet (via a reseller)

One thing you can do is go over to http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ and
spend some time reading their forums, etc. You'll quickly see which ISPs
generate the most complaints... You'll find that in-general when things
work, they work well, so no-one complains, (and rarely praises!) but one
tiny little bit of an issue and you'll see complaints, so you need to be
a bit selective and filter out what might be issues not relating to the
ISPs themselves, but maybe elsewhere... (And occasionally you'll get a
very small number if individuals who'll complain no-matter who they are
connected to, so you might need to filter those out too)

Gordon

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Gordon Henderson wrote:
> Interneave shouldn't make any noticable different to VoIP. Gamers whinge
> about it. With interleave on, you might see a ping time of 10-15ms more
> than in "fast" mode. I've used VoIP connections over both and it's never
> made any difference as far as I could tell.


It doesn't make any difference at all, because the latency introduced by
interleaving is always constant.

Tim

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Gordon Henderson wrote:
> In article <1186658487.699140.187030@l70g2000hse.googlegroups.com>,

>
> Personally, I reckon you get what you pay for when it comes to provision
> of an Internet service. The biggy corps have lower prices, but the service
> might not be as "personal" and with offshore call centres, as the smaller
> ones (who may charge more as they don't have the economy of scale)
>
> I have had good service and quality with Zen and Entanet (via a reseller)
>

Do Zen have good quality support? Their service is good so I've no idea
what their support is like.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

In article <5i5abkF3n2v86U1@mid.individual.net>, Nick  <Spam@Spam.com> wrote:
>Gordon Henderson wrote: 
> 
>
>Do Zen have good quality support? Their service is good so I've no idea
>what their support is like.

I'd suggest that they do... But they're slow with email, so if you
need support, phone them.

I did get a bit irritated with them recently though - their support is
only office hours and it seemed to take a little while to get through to
them (in email) regarding an intermittent line problem I had (potentially
still have as it's not been resolved, just "gone away")

They also sell VoIP, but don't provide a VoIP number/SIP address to call
them on! You need to use an 0845 number, so you end up paying for it
(and they get 1p a minute for calls to it). I don't think I should pay
then for support when the fault isn't of my doing.

I hope this isn't an indication of badness to come though - in the past
when I had an issue they actually called me to get it resolved! This time,
even though I detailled in my emails that I'd already done all the "usual"
diagnostics I could do (different modems, working back to the test socket,
etc.) they still wanted me to go through their 20-point plan to test my
internal cabling, etc. so they effectively ignored my emails.

Hmmm... I've now not painted too good a picture, I guess. But it's
working, download speeds are exactly what they say on the tin and I've
rarely (if ever?) noticed any degradation which might be caused by
contention/overloaded centrals, and VoIP through their network seems to
work very well indeed.

Gordon

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Nick wrote:

> Do Zen have good quality support? Their service is good so I've no idea
> what their support is like.

Yes. Their support is generally very good (I've had one bad experience,
several good ones). They alos escalate to BT effectively.

One of our Zen ADSL lines had a fault. Zen went to a lot of trouble to
lean on BT till it was fixed.

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Iain wrote:
>
> Yes. Their support is generally very good (I've had one bad experience,
> several good ones). They alos escalate to BT effectively.

We installed a Zen line about 6 months ago.  BT completely messed up the
install - they connected us to some LLU operator.

Zen did a really good job of chasing BT into fixing the problem.

Tim

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Tim wrote:
> BT completely messed up the
> install - they connected us to some LLU operator.

Really?

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Paul Cupis wrote:
> Tim wrote: 
>
> Really?

Yes.  Giveaway was that we ordered a home (or whatever) it is called
line that should only have been syncing at 400ish K

Our line was syncing at 800ish K.   Also bt_test@startup_domain  (or
whatever it is) wasn't working at all, implying another operator.

The BT engineer who came pretty much confirmed the story.

TIm

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Gordon Henderson wrote:
> I think (but someone correct me if I'm wrong!) that contention is more
> or less a thing of the past with ADSL-MAX these days with BT setting a
> minimum service level and the ISPs themselves having a bit of more control
> over it (by balanging their subscribers with the fat-pipes the buy from BT)[/vbcol
]

Contention is not a thing of past with ADSL - with the current consumer
pricing it is the only possible model which works.

What we no longer have is BT publishing "worst case" contention ratios
for their specific part of the network/service.
[vbcol=seagreen]
> In-general you should get the benefit of (the equivalent of) a lower conte
ntion
> with business class products (where the upstream is "up to " 833Kbps) than
 the
> domestic 443Kbps connections.

You don't get lower contention with these products - what you should get
is priority over non-premium products at the exchange level if the
exchange is congested. Not a common event in any case.

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