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Comcast and Vonage agree to play nice with over-the-top VoIP

Players collaborate to manage VoIP service

      

While the industry waits for standards to maintain QoS for “over-the-top” VoIP traffic that rides over a partner’s network, Comcast and Vonage have announced a “collaborative agreement” to support the “reasonable” network management of IP services.


In what should be a model for or at least an indication of more bilateral agreements to come, the two providers will work together to create and enforce a number of networks management “techniques” that can adequately minimize network congestion while ensuring customers high quality VoIP.

No word yet on just what techniques will be used, or how customer service satisfaction will be measured (my best is Mean Opinion Score consumer testing). However, both vendors have indicated that Vonage traffic will not receive and specific priority treatment, or gain preference over non-VoIP flows. The agreement instead focuses on establishing a framework for communication between the two companies over management and back-end issues. Though no financial aspects have been worked out, this agreement is designed to give both providers a way to address any network issues or quickly escalate operational or customer concerns to the appropriate channel at the partner’s HQ.

“Although we’re competitors with Comcast, this understanding helps our two companies work together to balance the needs of network management with consumers’ ability to freely access the services, applications and content of their choice,” said Louis Mamakos, Vonage CTO.

Emphasizing consumer choice across a variety of applications and content is a key strategic direction for Comcast too — and maybe a bit of a sore point, after recent criticism from the FCC and Network Neutrality spokespeople for throttling P2P application bandwidth, especially BitTorrent.

The largest American MSO (in homes served) hopes to leave the issue behind by pledging to move to a protocol-agnostic network management scheme by the end of 2008; testing is currently in progress in at least three markets.

Comcast also hopes its collaborations with BitTorrent and Pando Networks, along with its participation in the P4P Working Group under the Distributed Computing Industry Association, and the IETF Workshop on P2P Infrastructure, will not go head off any ongoing FCC concerns that could result in regulation. Currently, the FCC is investigating Comcast’s network management policies.

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