What is the difference between Comcast and any other VoIP phone service? Granted Comcast VoIP is certified in Harris county to carry fire alarm calls, beyond that it really doesn’t matter whether you are using Comcast’s phone service or if you sign up with a third party like Lingo or Vonage.

Out of all of these providers, I’ve found Lingo to provide the best service and best rates, especially for international calls. Keep in mind, your phone service is only going to be as good as your internet service. If you experience latency issues or huge lag times, as many Comcast customers have experienced, then VoIP may not be such a good idea.

Here’s a quick test, if you have a windows machine click Start, Run and type in CMD then press enter. At the prompt, type in “ping www.google.com -n 30″ without the quotes.

Note the column that starts with “time=”. If these times vary too much and are really high like 190ms or higher then VoIP may not be a good idea. If you get any “request timed out”, then again VoIP may not be a good idea.

I switched from Roadrunner (before it became Time Warner and then Comcast) to a Cbeyond BV1 package because of up time issues and response times. The BV1 package comes with a service level agreement so it’s not just a best effort service but a guaranteed service.