Vonage voip

[DELSOLII]

wolfie_cr,

Thank God that business has been good enough where I can afford the upgrade. Without it, I would not be able to make my calls and close deals.

I see that you have suggested lowering the bandwidth, I tried that and it became worse.The volume was very weak and the static was just as bad.

I had no choice.

For those who need to work out of their homes, I can personally say that it is worth the money and keeps me here in CR.

Sol II

 

[wolfie_cr]

"RACSA and ICE, despite being subsidiary/parent, have completely separate uplinks to the outside world."

yes but both such links are the fallback of each other, that is, if ARCOS goes down then ICE falls back to Maya (or the other way around, not really sure), both have different strategies for selling their products and their markets were (until recently) different, that is, when ICE started mass-selling the DSL service to home consumers

In 2007 both companies will be merged, that is, RACSA will be absorbed by one of the divisions of ICE (the one that currently handles DSL) so........................there WILL be only one soon (As a company, as the topology/diversity of upstream links who knows......)

Also Worldcom sells satellite connections .......but be prepared for a big invoice

 

[AdamSelene]

yes but both such links are the fallback of each other, that is, if ARCOS goes down then ICE falls back to Maya (or the other way around, not really sure)

Yes, but it's not so much a matter of connection failure but that RACSA's transit provider (France Telecom) sucks something terrible, whereas ICE's transit provider(s) (MCI/UUNET, among others) are much more reliable.

 

[AdamSelene]

Also Worldcom sells satellite connections .......but be prepared for a big invoice

Someone tried to tell me they had a Worldcom ISDN connection, but I didn't know ICE was even provisioning ISDN lines, nor where they'd be calling to get to Worldcom. In any case I'd hate to see the phone bill.

 

[wolfie_cr]

"RACSA's transit provider (France Telecom) sucks something terrible"

There is much more than that...........but its not something that its exclusive of RACSA

Long long ago I asked RACSA why they sold their colocation service the way they did ($ based on rack space) and not by traffic like everyone else, the answer I got is that they didn't allocate specific bandwidth to the ports that feed each rack but simply let everyone "on the wild", after that I reasoned that it had to do with having to subnet the networks and lose usable ips ($$$$$$$ going down the drain)

This meant that if the rack next door to me was sending spam like crazy, EVERYONE suffered because they didn't throtle anything

Dialup has historically sucked but to anyone that has ever used broadband......ALL dialups will be pretty pathetic

ICE does provide ISDN lines (they call them RDSI, look in your phone bill, they have ads there). Not bad I supose if you can't have dsl and want something faster than a dial up, you can always set it to only use one channel for data transfer

DSL ICE (consumer grade) vary WILDLY in their bandwidth depending on the time of day.........same goes for AMNET, I have no experience with RACSA dedicated lines its probably the same thing..........noone of them have enough contracted bandwidth to cover the needs of everyone during peak hours


Back to the point, my problems with the two (soon to be one.....who knows how they will handle their service when they merge) is basically not the service they offer (of course it could be much better......if only they would use all the features of their really expensive routers /switches................) but with the business practices

I mean, everything takes forever, no clear answers on anything, burocracy level quadruplicated, example

If you ever have a billing problem with your cablemodem service and racsa charges you more than they are suposed to...........you have to go to racsa and ask them to talk to amnet and fix the problem, you simply give a letter, they investigate.....never tell you whats going on........and if that doesn't work then just do it all over again..........

Another one, ICE, you sign up with DSL and they clearly state that if you contract a certain speed you can ask for a public IP (this is for residencial customers obviously symetric business hopefully these two idiotic .......non profit oriented companies will merge and some others will arrive (if they open the market).........I don't mind paying for a service if they actually GIVE ME the service but as it is often the case, you can't get the service because plain and simple they don't feel like providing it :cry4:

 

[wolfie_cr]

"Someone tried to tell me they had a Worldcom ISDN connection"

I supose that now Worldcom may have an ISDN switch and they can terminate connections there and from their switch off to either RACSA/ICE/Satellite link?

that would be pretty weird because ICE offers ISDN and it must be much cheaper than asking Worldcom to give you one?

BTW I am not even sure if its technologically possible to have an ISDN connection from your company to anyone other than the TELCO that provides the line

 

[AdamSelene]

BTW I am not even sure if its technologically possible to have an ISDN connection from your company to anyone other than the TELCO that provides the line

No, ISDN is just a digital phone line. You can "place" phone calls with that line to any other phone number.

For example, you can have an ISDN line at your house and an ISDN line at the office, and setup a direct connection between the two (albiet thru the ISDN telephone switches).

ISDN isn't just for data modems, there are also ISDN telephones for voice calls; and really fancy ISDN telephones with built-in encryption (but try to buy or export one of those, you'd think it were a Stinger missile).

The problem with ISDN is that per-minute (and international) charges still apply.

And the real problem with ISDN is that the local loop can only run over conditioned copper pair (i.e. ICE will generally have to run a new line physically) -- unless they use IDSL (128-bit symmetic DSL over unconditioned copper pair made to look like ISDN), which I doubt.

Offering ISDN internet service is just the same as offering analog dial-up service; you plug a trunk of phone lines into a modem bank. In fact, ISPs state-side do so with the same hardware, given they get their phone lines provisioned on T1 lines separated into 24 64Kbps digital channels (lines) each. Dedicated ISDN just isn't very economical for them to sell because each customer ties up 1 or 2 channels all the time.

I was assuming they were calling Worldcom in Panama or Miami with the ISDN line, setup to dial on-demand to limit charges, but maybe Worldcom has a local number.

 

[wolfie_cr]

Actually Worldcom is right around the block from you, they are in Oficentro

Ok so if I have a ISDN line I can call an ISDN number at worldcom and that gives me bandwidth........uummmm

then it doesn't have any advantage over ICE I supose except that they have a 100% guarranteed bandwidth of actual 128 kbps throughput to wherever you want to connect. (I mean from the computer or whatever to the remote site, obviously you would get 128 in the point to point link assuming you are using both channels)

just after I posted did, I checked worldcom.co.cr which says this

"

IMPORTANTE: Worldcom de Costa Rica, S.A., su casa matriz y/o Subsidiarias, no estan asociadas en forma alguna con WORLDCOM/MCI o sus subsidiarias alrededor del mundo "​

​

which is really puzzling because I specifically remember that like 4 years ago someone that worked in Worldcom USA gave me the name of a contact and that was their site , so who really knows wth is going on​

​

from worldcom.com site the contact info listed here​

​

http://global.mci.com/cr/contact/ is different than the other worldcom.........​

​

oh well........wonder why they haven't sued the "tico" worldcom YET​

 

[AdamSelene]

Hmmm.

Given it takes ICE 9 months to put in an analog line, me thinks it would take them 3 years to provision an ISDN line. Might have to give it a try though, my regular phone line doesn't work when it rains, so even if DSL ever makes it up the mountain I'm screwed.

 

[wolfie_cr]

Its all luck, so your line is probably an analog one (those are the ones required for DSL), perhaps your issues would be solved when they switch your line to a digital one??

anyway......I know I am being naive, but why can't ICE fix your line so that it works like it should?

in my house the static actually started when they put the dsl line! not sure if its the splitter or what but ever since I have ocassional static on the line.........don't really care because I hate phones anyway, typically they just bring bad news such as server crashes.......etc