robo45h
join:2002-06-28
Phoenixville, PA
| Phonom not so good
Your theory that Phonom has the advantage of a "good first hop" right to the Cavalier servers is a very good one. I had the same thoery. Alas, in practice, it doesn't work out. I've had Phonom (which implies Cavalier's DSL) for a few years, and the quality of the voice has always been poor. Very poor. At first, I thought it was just my DSL speeds -- which another sore point. I live very close to the central office, and was told (pre-sales) that with ADSL2 I should get around 4MBPS at my distance. Post-sale, I find out that my central office doesn't have any spare ADSL2 slots, and I get old-fashioned DSL and ~1Mbps of speed split up/down.
But my thought that the speed was the issue was shot when a friend brought over his Vonage box and we had better voice quality on Vonage than I did on Phonom. What does THAT tell you? Their tech people either have NO idea what they're doing in the VoIP world to get things working, or they choose the wrong VoIP technology and it will never work well; at least not over 1Mbps DSL.
No matter how the techs have tried to adjust parameters of VoIP, change the up/down bandwidth, I've never had great voice quality. Certainly never been able to FAX, as they claimed I could pre-sales (many VoIP vendors specifically say FAXing won't work).
Now, to add insult to injury, last week my DSL speeds have gone to heck. total up/down of under .5 Mbps. Sometimes the up or down will go below dial-up speed!
My initial contact to tech support did not fix the speed; they only resulted in the configuration of my line getting screwed up and loosing my static IP address (effectively shutting down my DSL connection since my router presumed it was using a static IP as it had for the past three years). A call to a competant tech support person fixed the static IP problem.
After the long weekend is over, I'm going to call customer service again and try to get upgraded to ADSL2; they HAVE to have more ports this many years later.
CavTel really seems to be trying to force me to go to Verizon FiOS (which is available to me). If FiOS didn't block ports 25 and 80 (preventing me from running servers), I'd be gone already. |
