Residential VoIP in Canada: Not looking so good
Brad's talking about Primus Talkbroadband and how their entire network recently went down, and how this reflects on them:
When your entire VoIP network crashes you prove a number of things:
1) You must have a single point of failure, which means that somebody in your organization doesn't get that whole "up-time and reliability" thing.
2) You should not be charging anything like the price you are charging for the service, given that you have demonstrated a lack of interest in investing in reliability (ie: re-read the first point).
3) You have power washed any good will or early adopter enthusiasm out of the product.
4) This does not yet seem to be a good business proposition for an investor or a prospective customer.
Brad Gibson's Current Thinking: What happens when the Category Killer Dies?
After the network problem and some further thinking, I might be just about ready to stop using Primus for now. I'll tell you why:
- I had been waiting for voicemail-via-email. This is the killer app for me, other than the "second number" capability that lets me have an Ottawa number as well as my Vancouver one. No sign of this feature, and no news on when it is going to be available.
- I just upgraded my cellphone to a P800, so now I have a "spare" cellphone that I can give to Kate
- Quality has been sporadic. I do have the gateway behind my router, but there have also been echoes, it's unusable with our cordless phone, etc.
- Lastly, I'm not saving any money. I don't do enough long distance calling to make the "free" North America-wide long distance worthwhile. I can see where this factor all by itself would convince people to keep it, but I suspect these will be special cases for individual residential users. Lots of business users would fall into this category, but they are also likely highly dependent on quality and reliability.
I'm glad I experimented, and I'll likely keep trying out different options, but I don't think Primus meets my needs as a reliable provider of primary line services. For now, two cellphones is going to be the answer.
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Compare the best Canadian VoIP providers in Canada
I found a site that compares the best Residential VoIP providers in Canada.
Check it out at... http://www.voipchoices.com/voip-canada.html
VoIP - Canada Offerings
Well, I just read about the latest lawsuit in the US over Vonage. And quite frankly, it worries me.
I've been with [them] in the Ottawa (613) area for about 10 months and I've not experienced an outage yet (due to Vonage) I have lost my ISP on 3 occasions. But, when my "Vonage Device" can't talk to the Vonage Network, all calls are magically redirected to my Cell Phone. Magically because they have a great online control panel to set this feature up!
On only a few occasions, I had 'clicking' on the line, but have resolved it with my LinkSys router QoS (dd-wrt) and Vonage bandwidth saver. My calls, quite honestly, are that of a land line quality.
So, now Vonage will have to pay Royalties to Sprint Nextel in the US, I fear this may lead them to dissolve the company. I'm addicted to voice2email feature an my need counseling if I loose it
Good experience after some time
Hi guys,
It's July of 2007 here now and I wanted to voice my opinion. I'm using a VoIP provider out of Ottawa for about the last 14 months. So far, I have been almost thrilled at the service. Here's some of my findings:
- Excellent call quality; The calls are clear, no echo or it's so small it's neglegible.
- Minimal downtime; I think the service has been down a total of 3 or 4 times over the 14 months, and it's been very short each time, except for 1 time when someone with a backhoe cut through their main backbone - and even this was quickly pushed back to working order over just a very short few hours. The VoIP provider gave play-by-play info along the way by email and I was truly impressed. When was the last time a PSTN provider kept you up to date on a problem?
- Far less expensive; I'm shocked on this one. This site talks about an average of 10-20 per month for the service. My service is $2.50/month plus usage, which after 500 minutes, brings it to almost $8.00 for that month. Yes, only $8.00 after 500 minutes. So for my wife and I, this is over $30.00 per month savings.
- Long distance; this has been great too. A typical rate of 2 or 4 cents for anyone we call, even some overseas. 'nuf said there.
- Fully Asterisk compatible; we are now using our own Asterisk PBX and the VoIP provider put us on the IAX protocol, so I only have 1 port on my firewall open and I really don't even need to have that one open. It's great. We have our own "fancy" poor-mans PBX with all the features of a big business and it's stable, clean, and took only 2 hours to set up.
- Echo; Our VoIP provider told us that they do the echo-cancellation and we don't need to worry about it - and we have never needed to. Every once in a while I notice a tiny tiny little little echo but it's for only a second or two, and quite rare indeed. And by tiny, I do mean nearly inaudible and I wouldn't have noticed it unless I knew what to look for.
- Other services; we have since added an 800 line via VoIP and it's fantastic. Anyone in Canada, or the U.S. for that matter, can call us for free and I pay only 4c per minute with it.
Overall experience: My wife and I are thrilled with our VoIP provider. We even bought some cool IP phones to add to our extensions (had been using our normal phones only). Reliability has been as good as the big blue, or the other major PSTN providers.
Closing: We are so happy about our VoIP experience that we have now decided to cancel big blue and move our old PSTN number over to VoIP to keep it simple.
Kind regards,
Mike
Mike's VoIP
Did Mike post anywhere in the forum the VoIP he's using?
VoIP Provider
Who is this VoIP provider that you speak so highly of?
I have been using Primus and I'm more than ready for a change.
Mike, Could you please
Mike,
Could you please provide the name of the company you are referring to?
Thanks.
Which provider
Hi Mike,
I am currently looking for a decent VoIP provider in Ottawa and am very interested in the service you are using.
Could you give me the name of the company or perhaps a website
thanks a lot
Ryan
Can you guys post the name here?
Hi, I'm curious as to which service you are talking about. Could you post the name of it? If you're not allowed to post the name, can you please email me about it?
I'm looking for a VoIP provider and would like to roder it as fast as possible.
Cheers, Hans
Review of Canadian VOIP Providers
We reviewed the 5 leading Canadian VoIP packages late in 2004, and found that Primus and Vonage both had excellent Call Quality. You can see the complete article here :
http://www.broadbandmarket.ca/news1027.html
Due to the entrance of several other players on Canadian soil in 2005, we will likely put together a new review very shortly and include some quantitative methods for reviewing uptime and reliability.
Admin @ Broadbandmarket.ca
Bad taste in my mouth...
I have recently been researching a number of VOIP providers, with less than amazing results.
I have found a few small, independent providers around BC. They all provide unique packages and really cool features. They also have cost effective long distance and some provide local numbers in many areas. Sound good.....
One thing that I have experienced across the board on a few providers is I can't seem to talk to someone that really has a clue about their service and can understand problems and deal with them.
One, when calling long distance one way audio would cut out sometimes. On occasion I couldn't make outgoing calls for maybe hours at a time. When talking to the provider about these and other minor problems, they didn't really seem to care to hear about it and haven't fixed anything in the past three month. (DigitalVoice)
Another, a cable company with a good reputation, Set me up with numbers in two towns, features and 4c/min long distance. It seems mostly fine to make outgoing calls, with brief outages. Incoming calls, however, are abysmal. For the first weeks most every time you called either number you would get wither a reorder tone, a ‘not in service’ recording, or a busy signal. After much talk with them and one call from the actual provider (Galaxy Telecom), which instilled no confidence at all. To this date, although it appears to have improved, from maybe 90% of all calls in a day not going through to about 90 % going through (And this was with very few actual call attempts). I still often get a recording that my number is not in service.
There were other services I have looked into and tried, they also had some things that turned me off from the start.
Yes it appears that these companies are jumping in and slapping a network together. I fully understand that reliability isn’t going to be the same as a PSTN solution. I didn’t though expect that the reliability to be a problem not with the VOIP or Internet technology, but with the actual interfacing to the PSTN, where the technology isn’t new. I would have expected some redundancy in the VOIP network/switch area. So far my experience has been similar to bmann’s post. If there are short term minor glitches, I will survive... When the service doesn’t work coming out of the gate, and all I here are empty promises, tech support that goes, ‘duh...? I wonder what that is..... ‘ and ‘This number is not in service’, I tend to get miffed and say, maybe these guys haven’t figured it out yet. It sounds like the technology can work, the companies selling it, I dunno.
Single point of failure
I was too much in a hurry to post - thanks for the invitation.
My point is you can't compare Primus and Bell, you have to keep in mind it's new and limited. If it's not in your own experience, then you'll be pleased. If it is, then you'll have what you expected. The single point of failure is when people believe the company and don't read their service agreements.
If you have such high expectations after reading their respective service agreements, this is not a service for you. Unfortunately their site and publicity can only be described as deceptive in regards to comparing regular POTS and VoIP.
I believe lots of "uninformed" people are going to be very disappointed with the new players - but this won't stop their progress. Pricing is and has always been a driving factor for telecom services and you'll witness something similar to the hosting business - price wars, consolidation, etc. Watch the aquisitions and you'll start seing a pattern...
Give it time - be fair
Your personal experience and a network failure from a service that's been offered for only a few months hardly makes room for a title like: "Residential VoIP in Canada: Not looking so good".
I'd suggest you change it for "Residential VoIP in Canada: not for me, not now".
Before Primus, there was nothing in res. VoIP. Then along came Vonage, and others are coming in. If nothing else, this pushes competition from both small and big players. It's no surprise all the big companies (Bell, AT&T, etc) have announced VoIP projects (mostly vapor) now they see how fast Primus is getting their customers (at a rate of 250/day, no less). They are paying attention in a big way, and spending big money (like those TV and sign ads where they insist on reliability even in power outages).
Nothing like this would happen without companies like Primus taking big risks and bringing the innovation to end-customers.
Knowing about lack of QOS and firewall issues, as well as poor uplink connections helps understand the current limitations of Primus and similar services. As Jeff Pulver noted recently, demand is pushing to solve those problems at the consumer level.
Seems fair to me
It appears to me that Boris is an enthusiast .
Let's give Primus and similar companies credit where it is due , but please do remember that the potential of lucrative earnings , rather than some social mandate , is these companies' motivator .
I'm nothing if not a supporte
I'm nothing if not a supporter of VoIP in Canada. First movers like Primus face lots of challenges. I stand by "not looking so good" -- a single point of failure is unacceptable for a nation-wide service, and as you point out, other offerings are vapor.
My next step will likely be to try out Vonage, mainly for their voicemail-via-email feature. Also, I won't be using it as my "main" phone number (we'll see if I can "port" my Primus number to Vonage -- should be an interesting experiment). This is very specific to my circumstances. For many others, the Primus VoIP system will save money and offer more features.
(great comments, Anonymous -- consider creating an account or providing a link to where you write online)