Right now our company uses a standard Cable provider for our VoIP traffic to a hosted PBX. When we first started, the cable provider that we used was awful at handling the traffic. We saw significant packet loss on many streams. So, we switched providers and things got a lot better. However, it's still a concern of mine that things are still being treated Best Effort, even if the network is able to handle that BE traffic better.
The current cable provider handles the VoIP traffic really well which leads me to think that they have some sort of recognition and prioritization going on within their network. After all, they also offer VoIP services of their own and even during peak times the streams look to be flowing well from what I can see in the Wireshark capture from the network tap, but there's no way for me to tell that they're treating the traffic that way for sure.
In the end, it would be nice to know that the traffic is being treated well, at least to the backbone. I've looked into MPLS circuits to the hosted PBX but we would have to pay for an endpoint on both ends because the provider doesn't offer any such services. They were willing to have one installed, on our dime, but I feel that if we were able to secure some trusted Class of Service hand-offs between our network and the ISP to the backbone, that would be about as close to MPLS quality as we could get without the price tag.
Anyone facing similar issues? What is the best way to contact the cable ISP to inquire about this, because the customer service reps have no idea?