Comcast say they have reached a collaborative agreement with Vonage which appears to suggest that while Comcast have their own VoIP offering, they wont be blocking or degrading Vonage’s rival product.

Quite where that leaves other SIP and proprietary VoIP users on Comcast’s network is anybody’s guess.

Comcast also say they haven’t been blocking any rivals VoIP in the past either but accusations have been levelled at them.

Connection quality is critical for Voice over IP applications as you need as much of the data as possible to arrive in a timely manner. ‘Packet loss’ in a VoIP conversation can manifest itself as a degradation of quality in the call followed by the call actually breaking up and finally being dropped altogether when too few packets arrive. Delaying of data at the ISP level can cause issues where the latency of the call makes normal conversation difficult.

Slashdot has a current discussion about which domestic router is best for Quality of Service (QOS) provision for Voice over IP.

The original question posed is by someone using a Linksys WRT54G wireless broadband router with Bittorrent and other high-bandwidth applications to consider. Unfortunately, the WRT54G isn’t quite cutting it when used alongside Vonage.

Inevitably for Slashdot, there is some gravitation toward open-source products. Open firmware for the WRT54G is suggested by some while another comment mentions that m0n0wall, an open-source firewall VPN distribution, can be deployed on relatively low-end commodity hardware and provides the type of QoS required.

According to VoIP News, Snom has introduced a new handset dubbed ‘klarVOICE‘ which can be adapted to work with any of their VoIP telephones.

Compared with standard phones, the handset allows the capture of more than twice the spectrum of voice frequencies, providing enhanced voice quality.

The handset is said to offer quality akin to ’speaking to somebody in the same room’

The Register reports that Vonage and Nortel have made a cashless settlement of their patent disputes by agreeing to exchange patent licenses. Reportedly, no money is to change hands.

US based Voice over IP provider Vonage has been ordered by a federal judge to pay $69.5m damages to Sprint Nextel in their patent infringement suit.

Vonage were held to have voilated six Sprint patents in their products. This judgement is seperate to the case brought against Vonage by Verizon in March.

Industry experts have suggested that Vonage may not be able to weather this latest judgement against them.