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Carrier Services
Comcast and Vonage agree to play nice with over-the-top VoIP
Players collaborate to manage VoIP service
by Doug Allen
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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