Telkom putting lower priority on VoIP ports

[MaD]

Hey all.. I've had a few mails from people on ADSL who have said their Skype (and similar apps) quality has decreased rapidly the past month or two and the choppiness has increased dramatically. The one chap called Telkom and they said yes, they purposely allocated lower priority port to VoIP.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? It is obstruction of communication and now that VoIP is legal, preventing VoIP communications would be as illegal as preventing a normal phone call.

[wab512]

Hi MaD,

I have had one or two days (about a week ago) that Skype was REALLY bad, but it seems to be better now. It may have been a problem on the network or even on my side.... I will keep a close watch and post if I get any difference again.

[Gooku]

Hi MaD

Collect some hard evidence (quietly !) eg,Technician's remarks on the re-prioritization of ports on tape......

you might never have to worry about money anymore ,ever !

[hArTh]

WTF is ICASA going to do about that? They are technically inept and politically hamstrung.

[Clipse]

I***A? I just flushed an I***A down the toilet aswell

[Karnaugh]

They canot force Telkom to do anything, its a pivate business and they can do what they like with their network!

Government and the rest of you need to realise, the solution is not in hating Telkom or legaly forcing them to do this and that, the solution is to liberate the market so that we dont have to use Telkom's network.

[MaD]

Who said anything about forcing Telkom to do anything? And it's not THEIR network, it's the bloody taxpayers' network. They just inherited that somehow for free.

[Chris]

Unfortunately I can't say anything bad has happened on my side. I can hear Skype conversations perfectly.

[WickedWeasel]

Telkom in fact have put monitoring on h.323 and sip standard ports and have slowed them down as well as adding latency

[ic]

This is exactly the reason why one has to have SLAs with any ISP, especially Telkomonopoly, the old story of not being able to guarantee anything at all in a network which is 100% Telkomonopoly controlled reeks of ripe manure. I really think we need to spend more time [re]investigating getting SLAs in place - if an ISP can force an AUP on customers then the customers must be allowed to reciprocate with SLAs, it's only fair & we need to construct this based on existing constitutional rights.

[antowan]

I agree IC...

[daffy]

Telkom have suddenly turned on Interleave mode on ADSL...
This adds latency on the ADSL line, at least an extra 25ms.
(It also corrects some errors on the bad lines where the customer is far away from the exchange.)
But they haven't just done it for the ports of those few bad lines.. they're doing it on every DSLAM in the country.

Well done telkom... you've now made VoIP almost unusable..
The one thing that we didn't have to use Telkom for anymore...

[TheRoDent]

Bling... VPN. Sip, h323. Choose your port, choose your unshaped traffic.

[lewstherin]

theRodent...elaborate?

[FireFLi]

I was on last night, definite degradation of quality on skype. Was fine Saturday but can't say I am surprised, was only a matter of time