Comcast and Vonage to work together on 'protocol agnostic' Internet

Common sense might tell you that Comcast's pledge to stop throttling Internet customers for the protocols they use would immediately help Vonage. But a new agreement may make sure Comcast's alternative doesn't end up hurting it.

In a remarkable agreement announced this afternoon, VoIP service provider Vonage and the US' largest Internet service provider Comcast will work together to improve the "network agnostic" management techniques that Comcast announced last March it would develop. Those techniques may help Comcast to regulate network traffic without implementing throttling techniques that, while benefitting Comcast, would hurt Vonage.

"This [agreement] is primarily directed towards the principles around how Comcast is going to manage traffic on their network, in a way which isn't going to adversely impact Vonage customers' use of the Comcast network for the Internet telephony service that we offer, or for that matter, any other type of service that they might run over their network connection." Vonage Chief Technology Officer Louis Mamakos told BetaNews, in an exclusive interview Wednesday afternoon.

The agreement, Mamakos told us, will directly benefit Vonage's ability to implement its own call management techniques. Like any other voice service provider, Vonage must manage quality of service on a minute-by-minute basis. But unlike most other providers, it can't always implement needed fixes and workarounds, especially when it doesn't have direct management control over the Internet backbone its calls run on.

"One of the things that we've been rolling out here at Vonage is some call quality measurement infrastructure, Mamakos said, "where we take quality measurements on all the calls our customers complete over the network. At least that's the goal -- we're still in the process of rolling that out. As [Comcast] deploys, in stages, their new network management framework -- market-by-market, or however they operationally deploy that -- we'll be able to have some visibility in a sort of 'before and after' comparison, of at least how those techniques resulted in any change in quality for the Vonage service running over the platform."

Vonage won't be giving Comcast access to that management infrastructure -- they are, after all, competitors in the voice services market. But as Comcast rolls out its protocol-agnostic framework, explained Mamakos, Vonage will have more metrics at its disposal for measuring the positive or negative impact of these rollouts. Perhaps more importantly, though, it will have an open channel to Comcast for reporting that impact, which Comcast may then work to remedy.

One effect of this agreement, the Vonage CTO pointed out, is that it helps Vonage to be able to respond to its own customers by determining whether a service problem falls within its purview or Comcast's.

"If a customer is buying broadband capacity from Comcast and is experiencing some kind of a problem, if we think through our diagnostic steps with our Customer Care organization, [and find that] it's probably an issue with their broadband service -- maybe a tree fell on their cable, or who knows what -- we'll have some channels between our customer care organization and theirs to get that customer more effective help more rapidly, as opposed to going into another care organization from the bottom and working the problem from the very beginning.

"Likewise, we're going to be formalizing some communication channels between our network operations group and [Comcast's] as well," Mamakos continued. "So as we have visibility into the traffic that we send to our customers on Comcast, [when] we think there's an issue, we'll have a more formalized channel which we can communicate back and forth, to resolve any kind of operational issues." Of course, this agreement pertains, he added, just to customers that Comcast and Vonage have in common.

When issues do arise, what are the actions that Vonage may be able to take in response? If a peering point appears congested, Mamakos said, his team could rapidly purchase additional bandwidth elsewhere, enabling call traffic to bypass that congestion. And in long-term planning, if the fiber infrastructure somewhere in the country contributes to delay times, the operational data could give Vonage's team a way to chart more efficient courses for its calls.

"What this relationship with Comcast does for me," the Vonage CTO told BetaNews, "is give us a more effective way to action things as [we] identify them, on the operation front as well as with my customers' operational issues...By having this relationship with one of the broadband ISPs, when I give them a call and say, 'Hi, this is Vonage, we think we're seeing something weird,' I'm not just some crank calling them on the phone. We have this working relationship.

"As a larger issue, I think this is a statement that two competitors, at least in the telephony space, have publicly said, 'We can coexist, we can each go to market with our own suites of products that might appeal to different sets of customers, and we can do this on a network that is going to treat all these applications in a similar way, and not penalize any specific application.' That gets at the root of this protocol-agnostic network management technique."