I’m not at all surprised to read that one of the nation’s largest cable operators is getting accused of packet shaping. Nor am I surprised that their support folks are being mum on the subject.
This is one reason why I have switched at home to my Covad supplied T1 (and soon a bonded T1-that’s two T1’s bonded together.) Cable Modem’s may be “faster” but this new fangled Speed boosting is really about caching and resending files. When your file is one the going up, it really is more like speeder blocking it seems. The concept of caching and real time communications just won’t work. That’s where the packet sniffer has to say, let this packet pass untouched, or “don’t route the traffic this way, route it that way.”
Yes, I have my suspicions about traffic tampering on the Comcast cable network, where I am a customer for about 4 months now.
I’m in SF East Bay, and VoIP calls on my residential network are consistently hit or miss in terms of session setup and quality. My wife routinely starts calls over VoIP with the question to the called party: Can you hear me ok? Some calls are of high quality, others of low quaility, typically in the form of high latencies (like transcontinental long distance calls in the old days) or packet loss.
So now I look at my VoIP service and wonder whether it will work well for an upcoming call, instead of considering the technology transparent and invisible – as it should be. In fact, I just upped my mobile minutes (the most expensive minutes in the world) as a result of VoIP call quality unpredictability.
I’m using the same VoIP service now that I used in SoCal on the Charter Cable network, and never had a problem there in three years of use. It’s still possible this is a home router issue or some such, but the hardware configuration is the same as in SoCal. The only change is the network access provider.