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Should Voice-over-IP Be Regulated?
dj_due asks: "Here in the Philippines where technology is still catching up, the NTC (equivalent of FCC) will regulate the use of voive over IP, and currently it is not allowed. They proposed that ISP's who engage in internet telephony will be required to pay the telco's access charges. Should the telco's care if we make our phone calls over the Internet?" I can see reasons why telephone companies might want to control VoIP technologies but only as long as telephone lines remain the current way people connect to the internet. With broadband technologies coming of age, people will find other ways to connect to the internet, bypassing the telephone companies entirely. Do you think allowing telco's control of how VoIP is shaped may be setting a dangerous precident for later?
~~~
I agree. Furthermore, there should be a road tax on aircraft.
If I am lending u my roads(telephone lines) for some price then I expect u guys to use it in the way I want, not in the way u want. Fair-unfair, doesn't really matter for me, as long as I am the boss.
By that arguement, modems are not to be permitted except over privatly owned communications equipment. AT&T NEVER liked modems.
There is also a matter of semantics. Suppose I get a phone line. It is provided to me so that I can place and recieve voice phone calls to other people of my choosing. I am free to say whatever I like, and can even play them an mp3 file if I like. How would a VoIP company be violating that expected use? They pay for the lines, they accept and place calls. They just happen to play back and make digital recordings in real time, in accordance with the wishes of the calling and recieving parties.
You left out the punchline! The ILECs lobbied heavily for the interconnection fees listed in item 1 believing that with a larger customer base, it would heavily favor them during the critical start-up time for the CLECs. That's what caused 2 to happen.
That's the danger of designer legislation :-)
One of the problems with VOIP is that it needs to be higher priority traffic than normal traffic- it pretty much needs guaranteed bandwidth. The problem is that we probably can't have ALL the bandwidth on the internet being high priority.
Paying more for voice grade QOS does make sense (it costs more to provision), but that should go to the network provider, not the phone company, and then, only for packets tagged for the higher QOS (no matter what they are actually carrying). Voice packets that are not tagged should cost no more than any other UDP packet.
You need to look at why all these regulation were enacted in the first place. It basically comes down to the fact that laying cable is expensive. Ineffort to get company to lay cable to rural farms and such, you needed to grant them a monompoly over the whole system so that the cheaper city cables will balance out the expensive rural ones. The same thing was done with electric power. Then all sorts of regulations were added to regulate the monsters (monopolies) thet they created.
Wireless and Data-over-power-lines. Aren't quite up to snuff - probably wont ever be for broadband.
Wait a second.. I already pay my local telco $80/month for my 1.2/1 DSL line. I pay my ISP $20/month so that my DSL line can be connected to the rest of the net. Most ISP lease their lines from telcos anyhow so they are ALREADY paying telcos for the lines. So on top of what I and my ISP is paying.. now they are going to have to PAY extra if that bandwith is used for VoIP?
Some thing sounds very wrong here.
... and then the Internet collapses, because UDP doesn't have any sort of congestion control facility. TCP congestion control is one of the only things that keeps the whole mess from deadlocking in one big mass of overwhelmed routers.
This reminds me of the time someone here was screaming when they found out about TCP congestion control in the Linux kernel. They insisted that it was stupid that anything should be preventing their packets from getting full priority, and it should be ripped out. A lot of people seemed to agree.
Man, can someone say "tragedy of the commons?"
DNA just wants to be free...
Phones were regulated because:
Infrastructure was expensive, hard to build and required rights of way.
Investment horizons were in the 25-100 year range
It was the creation of a new public utility.
The flip side of guaranteed rates of return is regulation needed to insure that.
Do we need a guaranteed rates of return for netphones? Do we need to eliminate competition just because MegaTelco can't move out of its own way? Do we need to erect MORE barriers around the local CO? Do we want to ceed rights of way, or spectrum to more private companies? Regulation is a mixture of good and bad. Here's a brief list:
Almost universal phone coverage paid for by taxes so that anyone who really needs a phone can get at least some service.
Expensive residential service that subsidizes business service discounts.
Extremely slow pace of technology or service change.
Non existant customer service.
On the whole a very reliable system.
A complex Byzantine billing and tariff structure designed to make competition harder not easier.
Is this what you want for VoIP?
for the past two years or so my friends (computer dorks or not) have been relying on AIM instead of phone calls to make plans and get gossip around. No sense in picking up the damn phone, you can talk to 15 people at once on AIM. All the people moved off campus and needed to get DSL to make sure that they could stay connected to AIM.
:)
Even though VoIP may not be for the non-techno savvy AIM is and it is useful.
Likewise, auto-makers should be levied an additional tax which would subsidize the horse-breeding and equestrian 'industry' for the loss in revenue that the new technology (automotives) have torn from the hands of the horse-trade, by using the same streets with an alternate vehical as a method of transportation of individuals from one location to another.
It is only fair that new technologies and services be responsible for continuing the financial well-being of the services and past technologies they are making obsolete.
---
seumas.com
Tried the same thing in some Caribean Countries. If I remember correctly it is still illegal in Jamicia.
This is where capitalism almost always seems to fail "new" technology.
We see it with MP3s, vidoe streaming (known as "broadcasting" is Oz), alternative fuels for cars; and a whole range of other essentially good and sound technology having the wind screwed out of its sails (and sales) due to the threat it poses for an existing, secure, cash-cow market filled with very large companies with far reaching opinions, that were built on the back of past "new" technology.
Given the profit margins most telcos can generate - they've more than covered any initial infrastructure outlays and on-going maintenance costs...
Besides, the telcos shouldn't be looking to lock out and regulate the voice over IP technology, they SHOULD be pioneering it!
'sapientia potestas est'
Voice over IP is cool stuff. The thing is, unless inet protocols change, there are some serious problems with it. The current courtesy system of the internet makes TCP back off when it notices that high priority UDP packets want space. This could cause some problems. A friend who uses VoIP said once that since he is on a subnet which sees a lot of traffic, he initially gets delays of up to 2 seconds for his datagrams to get where they are going.. but as TCP notices the UDP packets, and backs off, he gets a solid stream. Any decent hacker will notice potential to use and abuse this feature to get priority bandwidth. Should VoIP be regulated because it 'infringes' on traditional telcos? No.. if the telcos become irrelavent, then they become irrelavent. It's happened before, and it will happen in the future. Should VoIP be investigated further, because the 'polite' nature of the internet allows possible abuse of bandwidth resources? yes -Laxitive
In the fall of 1999 Era GSM, a private GSM company in Poland, began to allow customers to make international calls via VoIP. It was transparent to end users, as all VoIP should be.
This lasted two months? Maybe three? By law all calls leaving Poland have(had?) to go through Telekomunikacja Polska (TPSA), the national telco. The courts found out about the service and of course ordered it stopped.
(One wouldn't want a Pole paying less than 15% of their monthly income for a one-hour call to the states now, would they?)
People commenting "how do you detect..." need to realize that governments don't need to detect anything. (Though it would be easy in Poland where the vast majority of Internet traffic goes through one TPSA link to the US via teleglobe.net... even traffic destined for Germany!) Just hearing about a business circumventing laws is enough to start the machine moving, and let me tell you that machine is frightening.
And since VoIP is recognized as just another way to make a telephone call, it is regulated as such. Why should it receive any special consideration?
On a more serious note, VoIP needs some regulation...
Ok, dumb question here, but.... why?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Yeah, ok, it's proprietary. So what? Do we really need government to step in and dictate that they must agree on a common protocol? Of course not! It will happen in time no matter what. Just like with ISPs who limited users to their own content, any major product that does not interoperate will change or die as VoIP becomes more popular.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
From what I understand, VOIP works by using a standard UDP connection, and simply sends packets representing voice information. How can this be detected as being VOIP, rather than any other UDP-using application?
Any enforcement mechanism is going to go after large scale providers, which essentially will mean standards-based VoIP, which means that a quickie protocol decode will be able to spot telecomms traffic based on the payload.
You and your buddy using some homebrew system may easily evade this, but two guys talking peer to peer isn't a telecommunications system any more than two kids talking over tin cans and a string is and the FCC ain't interested in regulating you and your pal, string or tin cans.
First of all, IP telephony is useless without the ability to get at the voice network. If you and everyone else you know and possibly want to call are using the same VoIP scheme, you're fine avoiding the telcos. Until that time VoIP really needs gateways to the established voice network -- somebody has to be able to hook my VoIP-originated call to a voice network in addition to letting someone on the analog network call my VoIP phone.
Traditionally the phone companies have made loads of money doing this very thing -- letting MCI customers call Pacbell customers and so on. The FCC has long regulated this practice among people that call themselves "phone companies", but doesn't have the ability (yet) to regulate people who call themselves "internet providers".
The telcos are likely scared that not only will they be competing with a network far more modern than theirs, they're competing with someone who isn't burdended by regulation. It's kind of a legitimate concern.
-Lunatic
It should not be regulated. Or rather, it should depend on how the service is sold. Yeah. That's it.
There should definately be an unregulated class of service. I mean, it's simply using our networks to encode and send voice data.. very trivial. Who can regulate that? If they regulate 'VOIP' as a standard, we'll just use something else.
The telcos are selling these VOIP companies bandwidth. What's their problem? They are only USING THAT BANDWIDTH.
So they *are* paying for it.
Disclaimer: IANAL, but I supervised a Master's student [1] who researched the relation between VoIP and laws and regulations in Europe, especially The Netherlands.
There is a lot of regulation on voice telephony, but the question is whether voice over IP (VoIP) is to be regarded as voice telephony. The European Commission has stated [2] that voice-over-internet should be regulated as voice telephony if
(1) The communication is offered on a commercial base
(2) The communication is offered as a service to the public (e.g., not only internally in a company)
(3) The voice communication should be made between termination points of the switched public telephony network
(4) Use of direct transport, and delivery of speech in real time
(5) VoIP is offered as the main component of a service. This means that an ISP that offers VoIP "en passant" with Internet access, without extra charge, is not regulated as an voice telephony provider.
(6) There has to be some kind of "any-to-any" communication
(7) The VoIP service provider should guarantee that the voice quality is the same as the quality of the PSTN (public switched telephony network.
All of this means, that there is at the moment not a ground to regulate VoIP.
But also think what regulation of VoIP under the voice telephony regime would mean. The following list was made especially for The Netherlands, but most rules follow directly from EU guidelines, and should be applicable in all of the EU:
(1) VoIP operators should register with the local telecommunications regulator (UK: OFTEL, NL: OPTA,etc.)
(2) Numbering schemes: telephony numbers are usually organised according to a numbering scheme. Regulation of VoIP should result in incorporation of VoIP numbers, screen names or other handles in these schemes.
(3) Number portability: A consumer should be able to retain his telephony number/screen name/handle when moving from one VoIP operator to the other
(4) VoIP operators should interconnect with each other: this means that a consumer should be able to make a call to a friend who uses the VoIP service of another VoIP provider, and also to another friend that uses PSTN ("normal" telephony)
(5) The European emergy number "112" should be available at no costs to all VoIP consumers
(6) VoIP operators should cooperate with tapping voice communications
There are of course more details, but these are the most important results.
Jan-Pascal
[1] His report is public, if you need it I will ask him to e-mail it to you.
[2] Commission Notice concerning the status of voice on the Internet pursuant to Directive 90/338/EEC, OJ 6, January 10, 1998
--
Jan-Pascal van Best
Delft University of Technology
The Netherlands
http://www.ict.tbm.tudelft.nl
Nope.
You pay for a phone line, and your ISP pays for their phone lines. The telco gets paid for their job of local data transfer. The ISP buys their backbone from someone else.
I don't see how the telco pays anyone in this, but they do get paid by the people on both ends of the telephone call.
The only way the telco pays someone to carry the data farther is with long distance. If they don't carry it long distance, then they don't have to pay anyone else.
Anyways, as everyone else said, if the telco contracts to provide flat-rate local service, then they should provide flat-rate local service, it's a contract they entered into fairly.
If they can't handle it, well tough, maybe they go out of business. Someone will jump in and offer bandwidth (for voice or data) at a price that they can sustain. This is the case where a free market economy works.
Umm ... clients pay for local call to ISP, same as any other local call. ISP pays for bandwidth from phone company or other owner of infrastructure. In turn, this provider often pays a chain of upstream providers that are generally phone companies or similar.
Nice, except my ISP isn't a dial-up, and they don't get their bandwidth from a telco. It's not just telcos handling the cables anymore.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
But, Telco's in the states already *tried* this tactic. They attempted to get the FCC to cover ISP's as 'common carrier', simply because, they saw the writing on the wall. They failed miserably. As well they should have. Such a course of action would have instilled stiff tarrif's and other growth slowing penalties on the then growing net. The Death Star (AT&T) headed up the whole thing.
The FCC refused. And, I dont see it happening here any time soon. Simply put, the telco's are also the ones who are bringing us DSL, and other service, and, having been told already they arent getting their way with VoIP, I am sure they are looking at other avenues of control. If anything, they may have better stakes in being the only onramp. A good example of this is: my local ISP used to do all of the setup for a DSL, and now, the phone company makes you order the line seprately, and then choose your provider.
My $0.02
Supernaut
In the old days, the organisation that ran the mail (usually government-owned) also distributed telegrams. (After G. Marconi pulled his engineering/marketing magic, this went international). Then these scary 'telephone' devices became available.
There is an apocryphal tale (references, anybody?) of a mayor of an American town saying 'The telephone is a wonderful invention. One day, every town in America will have one.'
However, the postal companies were the ones who delivered the telephony. To this day, the 'big' telecoms provider in any region is referred to as 'The PTT' (Post, Telegraph and Telephony). British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom are the obvious examples.
Unfortunately, these dinosaurs have failed to wake up. Small, agile little companies are desperately trying to eat their lunch.
Even more unfortunately, the PTTs are desperately clinging to their last monopoly - the local loop. The PTTs own the copper from the local exchange to the customer's wall socket, and they will do *anything* to cling to that.
Cable providers are working hard to get more delivery to the customer premises, and deliver bandwidth to the home that is scary ( I have seen cable modems achieving 10Mb), but that is irrelevant.
Here is my point: The PTTs are used to charging by the second, at 64Kb. That business model is dying. The smaller service providers know this. They are hanging in there until the dinosaurs die. Trust me, the dinosaurs *will* die.
Modern customers are happy to pay for bandwidth. Burst bandwidth, commited bandwidth, quality of service. These are the things a customer will pay for. Charge by the minute, charge by the megabyte and you are dead.
Message to the PTTs: Wake Up and Sell the Bandwidth. There are plenty of hungry people out here who are waiting to eat your lunch.
Or, put simply (and on-topic again) charging extra for VoIP is the death-rattle of a PTT. We shall feast on it's rotting flesh.
Another question is whether it is even possible to regulate sufficiently advanced VOIP. From what I understand, VOIP works by using a standard UDP connection, and simply sends packets representing voice information. How can this be detected as being VOIP, rather than any other UDP-using application? Even if the contents can be uniquely identified as containing sound data, how can we know this isn't some internet equivalent of a radio station? And lastly, what if we slap a thin layer of encryption over the packets (currently, the computational cost of encryption/decryption makes this unlikely, but that will soon change) so that they're not recognizable? Given this, peer-to-peer VOIP is indiscernable from acceptable, unregulated traffic.
I've had this sig for three days.
...screw 'em both ways?
IE - VOIP for both local and long-distance calls?
Heck, get rid of the "middle-man" so to speak (although I guess there will always be a middle-man, until we build our own wireless optical link network) - use a broadband service and "dial" the IP address of your neighbor - so to speak.
Corporations (not just telcos, but broadband providers, media corps - especially them - and others) are SCARED of this tech falling into the "masses" hands. They would be just as scared of email and such if everybody understood it, but they don't. Why? Because it makes it harder for them to segregate us from one another - from forming communities.
Community is a threat to the corps - they will do anything to stop it.
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
VoIP carriers in the US are not exempt from tariffs, and they will charge that back. Note that this won't tariff all VoIP calls, but then is VoIP usefull if you can't call for a pizza or the ambulance with it? In order for it to be usefull, it has to interconnect with the regular old PSTN, so it can be billed appropriately at that point.
Jason PollockAn American "unlimited" plan is actually a rate-averaged plan, wherein the price is supposed to cover the average local usage. Toll calls have always been charged for at a higher rate, again well above cost, in order to subsidize basic local service (the base monthly residential rate rarely covers cost; they make up for it via tolls, optional features, and much higher business-line local charges). That's done to promote "universal service".
If people use dial-up voice calls to access somebody who carries calls a long distance, then they're making long distance calls. It shouldn't matter whether the LD haul is coming via PCM fiber optic circuits, ancient analog microwave, the Internet, or modulated smoke signals. That's the LD carrier's business. Letting LD carriers use "the Internet" (which is NOT a clearly-defined term, and can be easily stretched to refer to semi-dedicated voice circuits) to carry voice, without paying the same as other LD carriers, is simply a way of subsidizing bad-quality carriers at the expense of good ones.
Note that if dial-up ISP calls become identified with LD, then it will be all the easier for the telco to demand toll charges for them. That's incredibly counterproductive.
In a country like the Phillipines, they haven't gotten as far as the USA has (not all that far!) in demonopolizing the phone business. So there is a real sensitivity to VoIP, which costs the local telco (PLDT) a lot of its international settlement revenue. And that will make it harder to provide basic service in what's basically a fairly low-income country, where most people can't even afford a phone.
Monopolies are generally bad and the old telcos made their own beds, but short-term disruption can hurt lots of people, even ISPs and their customers. In the long run this all shouldn't matter, but you have to be very sensitive to the economic interactions when an old monopoly faces competition in unexpected ways.
No, they are losing out fairly. They will soon offer a service that has less value to me than I am paying for it, and they will no longer get my money.
I already pay for my phone access to my ISP. And I already pay for my ISP for my access to the internet. Fact is, as soon as it seems to be reasonably priced, I'll ditch my phone company for an all in one phone/internet access provider (I don't watch television, so I don't care about cable access).
The telcos are the buggy whip manufacturers of the 21st century. This is cruel and efficient capitalism at work. I wouldn't want it any other way.
In many respects it is the best VOIP package available, because source code is available (public domain, which doesn't fit the stricter definition of an open source license), it allows a choice of both transmission protocols and compression algorithms, so you can adjust each for your particular setup to get the best results, and it offers strong encryption (a non-encrypting download is available for places where that's illegal).
The main disadvantage is that because of all the options it is rather difficult to use. And because of some architectural features of Linux, it's hard to get working at all under Linux (but it can be done).
Usually what you need to do is learn how to use it, then get someone on the other end at a computer where they have both the telephone and internet available at the same time, and talk them through it. But I have worked with Speak Freely with novice users after giving them a little while of instruction.
It also has ICQ integration and if you have a full-time net connection you can use it in answering machine mode.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The bandwidth required for a voice quality phone call that has been compressed by a modern voice compression algorithm (such as one of those available in Speak Freely) will be much less than someone using Napster, Gnutella or browsing an, uh, "image archive".
A good voice over IP product will work fine over a 28.8 modem. I know this because this is how I used to talk to my brother in law from California to Newfoundland.
You do occasionally suffer some dropouts or delays, but it's pretty tolerable, especially if you have a higher bandwidth connection, like at least dual-channel ISDN or 128 DSL. But still that's pretty modest as net connections go these days.
Probably your biggest concern is to make sure your ISP's connection to the internet is fat enough to support all their customers. Once it gets on the backbone its insignificant.
What I would like to see is voice over IP where the compression algorithm was streaming MP3, and we could have high-fidelity audio speech conversations at 16 bits and 44 khz. There's no reason we should have to deal with crappy 8-bit voice with 3 khz bandwidth in this day and age. But even this wouldn't require a terrible lot of bandwidth.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
You'll find some discussion about interoperability here.
Also see Speak Freely's development plans.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
While the strictly correct file format would require 1-second blocks (I wasn't aware of that, thanks), the basic principles of psychoacoustic audio compression should still work fine if the blocks are made shorter. Perhaps it might not be as efficient.
I sent email a couple of hours ago to the Ogg Vorbis folks about this, suggesting they look into it. I'm curious what they say; I'd be astounded if no one has considered it before.
Ogg Vorbis is a patent-free open specification and open source audio compression format meant to replace MP3.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
And I recall that he placed this call from inside of India, I think to the U.S. (although I'm less sure of the destination).
This works because you can configure Speak Freely's UDP port, so it gets through VoIP-blocking firewall software.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
What you get is transmitted as 8 bits, although since it's mu-law encoded it's approximately as good as 13 bits. But it has only three kilohertz bandwidth.
The audio quality of the modern telephone was decided decades ago as basically what was required to make speech easily intelligible, but not what would make it enjoyable.
It is not really within the telco's power to change that because all of the equipment from one end to the other, as well as all of the communications protocols and software are pretty hardwired for that limitation.
Many VOIP products observe this limitation and in fact are often not as clear sounding as a real phone, either because they need to work over a 28.8 modem, or because you're using a commercial carrier (even though it's over the internet) who doesn't want to pay a lot for a lot of bandwidth for high-quality calls.
This was my experience when I got an "Internet Calling Card" which worked just like a regular calling card, but the voice was streamed over the net in the middle. The audio quality was terrible, much worse than a telephone, and my then-girlfriend (now my wife) asked me to stop using it as it disrupted the closeness of our conversations.
I was investigating all the options a couple years ago, as I was in California and the woman who is now my wife was in Nova Scotia. I eventually settled on AT&T One Rate International because her 486 wasn't powerful enough to run VOIP.
But these days we have powerful processors and fast net connections. I believe that it is within our grasp to have two-way voice conversations with 128 kbps streaming MP3 with real-time compression.
Just voice over IP isn't going to win that many people over if all they're saving is some money, because most people don't make that many phone calls that the expense is worth the extra trouble. But imagine if they could get CD quality sound during their conversations!
And there would be nothing the telcos could do about it because they would be hamstrung by their legacy technology.
Probably it would be better to implement this using Ogg Vorbis so there would be no patent issues.
And I'd like to suggest that it be built with the ZooLib cross-platform application framework so clients could be built for Mac OS, Windows, Linux and other Unix variants and BeOS from the same codebase - note ZooLib includes networking.
Ah, but not UDP networking. Not yet...
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Cable modems, satellites (yeah, I know I spelled it wrong) and any new methods of connectivity not yet developed are not under the control of the telcos.
For those using voice over IP on telephone dial-ups, then perhaps the telco will have a legitimate claim. However, I do not make any use of the telco's infrastructure, and I would gladly take them to court for stealing fees from my ISP!
Just more people that don't understand making laws that they can't fully comprehend...
If you are in the business of providing voice service, you are subject to a huge maze of rules, regulations, and taxes. People doing voice over IP are not forced to deal with this maze. It's unfair to the telcos.
Now, the solution the telcos are asking for is to force everyone else into the maze with them. This is entirely rational from their point of view. I, and other libertarians, would prefer a different approach: wipe out the maze and leave the telcos alone.
One poster suggested that a small farm town would be unable to get affordable phone service, but I find that very difficult to believe. Is that same small farm town unable to get affordable food? How about affordable computers? What is magic about telephone service that makes it impossible for a free market to deliver it cheaply?
Just maybe in the early days of telephony it was actually necessary that government set up monopoly telcos and regulate them, but it certainly isn't true now. If there is a problem with getting a phone, you can get a cell phone. If company A owns all the wires going into a town, company B can set up a microwave relay, route voice onto an Internet backbone, or maybe make a deal with the power company to put voice data on the power lines. (Don't laugh; I've heard that some places in Europe already do Internet service through power lines.)
If telcos have to pay the Al Gore tax, every voice user should have to pay it. But I say get rid of it instead of spreading it around even more.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
You are right, of course, in saying that it's none of the providers business what you use the phone line for, and that they should change their pricing if they feel the costs they are incurring do not match the revenue they get from you.
This is precisely what the Dutch PTT did in the 1980's, when they realized they were building central office switches like there's no tomorrow for the sake of just a few users who spent all their days on BBS's. They scrapped the unlimited access. This was in the days when CO switches limited the number of open lines to seven per one hundred subscriber lines, so they had little option but to do *something*.
Of course, paid-for local access is an anachronism nowadays.
Another small observation about the way the decision was made then is that they made this change precisely to avoid having to raise monthly charges for the average user. Bad for nerds, good for grannies. Economy is about distribution of both wealth and costs, and politics is about what's the definition of "fair". It's funny to see the government owned juggernaut at the side of the consumer.
Sigh. These days, the Dutch government has all but took its hands off the telco's, which results in the weird situation that even though our montly charges are far less than in most other places in the world, it is now cheaper to call from my home to anywhere in the US than it is to call to Amsterdam, which is only 30 miles away, and that I *still* pay about US$.50 per hour for local Internet access.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Of course, this was in a friendly network setting, mostly TCP and no way for abusers to hide from the network managers.
And this was the easy case, prioritizing TCP. The problem with UDP is that it has no inherent flow control mechanism. Stuff like RealAudio has its own heuristics to avoid overloading a line, but as heuristics go, the time to respond to changing conditions is quite noticable, and because UDP doesn't back off by itself, in the mean time the link is loaded with packets that don't reach their final destination in the first place. On overloaded Frame Relay circuits, it is not unusual to see 50% of traffic consisting of TCP retransmits, and in those cases, tuning the rate down can actually improve performance. I don't want to know what happens to VoIP in those circumstances...
VoIP really hinges on the availability of fat pipes. They're cheap in the US and parts of Europe and Asia, but try getting a reliable circuit in South Africa...
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Speak Freely is a marvelous program, I have used it to save literally hundreds of dollars on long distance! It has been around for a long time, but hardly anyone new to unix these days seems to have heard of or use it.
... comes with full integration of IDEA, DES, Blowfish cyphers, and can call pgp to exchange a key with someone else if they have pgp installed too.
It is a marvelously solid and robust package, supports 4 types of compression [even one which allows robust [4 duplicates of every packet] communication over a standard POTS 33.6 modem (albeit at less then ideal fidelity)], as well as GSM compression [at a mere 1.5KB/sec], which I find delivers notably better fidelity then your normal telephone link! [Maybe this is just a matter of the higher quality analog-to-digitial converters in modern sound cards plus better mics then normal phones]
It is available, under a BSD style license, for download at this site [full source]
Best of all [or pehaps not, depending on your degree of elitism] it is also available for windoze... which, although I hate to think of another example of the win32 world enjoying the fruits of hardcore unix ingenuity and altruism [they even slapped a bloody GUI on the thing for the win32 version...sigh...], nonetheless is cool because they interoperate.
This means that other less CSCI friends/aquantainences of mine can download it and talk to me for free. I doubt I could convince them that "well, you just need to install a copy of linux on your system to use this amazing product, come on, it's easy enough, I'll talk you through it!" heh [PS. not saying linux is hard to install at all, but it is for those people whose VCR's are still blinking 12:00]
An amazing program. Enjoy saving lots of money!
P.S. Did I mention that it also natively supports high-grade encryption for all conversations?
P.S. I am in no way affiliated with the fine group that has developed speakfreely. I just think that the program rocks.
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man sig
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the pen is mightier then the sword. the sword is mightier then the court. the court is mightier then the pen.
You need higher priority packets for VOIP. Well, you don't NEED, but if you don't get, then your audio stream tends to break up.
Higher priority traffic has to be marked as such and jumps the queue over non high priority traffic. Your payment for your IP service will include a certain amount of high priority traffic. You'll pay more for more high priority traffic.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I beg to differ. Only if there is a LOT more bandwidth than everyone needs will dropouts not be a problem. Basically if that's the case the telco will slow their deployment until there is JUST enough equipment for the demand. They have to do this to maximise the profit for their shareholders.
Don't forget there's a lot of pent up bandwidth demand out there- web is the least of it- video on demand...
As for 'no' tarrif. Wrong. You've just got a flat rate tarrif now; that's all.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"No problem. Lets say that comes out of your allowance per month. Above that- they're gonna bill you.
The thing they're trying to stop is you marking ALL your packets as gotta-get-there-right-now-or-the-world-ends. Unless there's a significant disincentive- right now there's little to stop it.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I don't want to pay anymore than the next guy.
One of the problems with VOIP is that it needs to be higher priority traffic than normal traffic- it pretty much needs guaranteed bandwidth. The problem is that we probably can't have ALL the bandwidth on the internet being high priority.
Therefore having a higher tarrif for higher priority traffic probably is the way to go.
(Some scheme like a free number of packets per month might work too...)
Still, even in the short run the amount of bandwidth we get on the internet is going to be pretty high. More than 24 hours 7 days a week free voice bandwidth isn't an unreasonable demand for us to make.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I respectively suggest that the client missed it.
Voice/Video maskerading as Data isn't the ultimate problem. They get worse service, but they pay less so who cares? If its ok with them, then who are you to complain?
Data maskerading as Voice/Video IS the problem... they get better service but everyone else suffers.
UDP packets can blithely ignore all the anticongestion techniques that TCP uses. Everyone else gets screwed but you get reasonably good service...
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"If I can bypass the telco network completely, no regulation should take place.
Oh, and don't feel too bad for the telcos - wiring up the US wasn't exacltly a sacrifice play for them. They raked in billions upon billions in profits after all the infrastructure costs had been met. I'm sorry that copper's obsolete, but hey, thats business. We don't owe them anything.
Why? Because ultimately, providing bandwidth is a sucker's deal - look at the glut in dark fiber, look at the oncoming glut in submarine fiber.
The actual cost per bit is rapidly approaching zero - without a metering system, however artificial, none of these companies will be able to stay in business.
Excuse me, but outside of your world, a substantial part of the internet is not controlled nor provided by your CO (I can assure you that the connection I am writing from (Comcast@Home) doesn't use telco equipment.). Besides, ISPs should have the right to pass any IP traffic they want to over their pipes, as long as it doesn't involve DoSing or cracking remote hosts.
VoIP would also open up the market for voice service, breaking the stranglehold that most local telcos have on the pricing. Remember, competition is a Good Thing(TM).
Finally, if the telcos want to keep their voice business, they damn well better adapt to changing market conditions introduced by VoIP. It's not the role of the government to provide welfare for the telco industry through illogical regulations such as this, and I hope it doesn't turn out like this in the U.S.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
rural charges of $120 a month for basic service
911 calls billed at $20
"This voice mail brought to you by Blockbuster, rent Die Hard 27 and get a free 500ml Pepsi..."
Like it or not, telephones are an essential service. The only way to ensure that they stay as such is via regulation.
In Alberta, our notoriously right wing government has initiated a program of mind-blowing foresight (foresight, btw, is a rare quality in the Klein regime) and will be subsidizing the installation of province-wide, rate-regulated broadband net access. They're taking the same model that gave us phone saturation and applying it to the internet.
2 1337 4 u!
The phone companies received major tax cuts and revenue from the federal government (in the US, at least) for the running of such telephone lines to not only major cities, but to rural areas, where the cost of running such lines far outweighed any amount they might pick up in the distant future.
Once a signal decides to go overseas, the majority of large fiber optic cables capable of carrying national sized traffic were run by the U.S. Navy, and, up to a few years ago, were only "leased" from the US government.
The telecommunications network is controlled by the federal government, in that it can be shut down at the drop of a hat due to national emergencies. The telephone companies also receive large subsidies for this.
All this comes to a certain, specific point. Since the US government hands out these subsidies, and lines to the companies, those lines are in the public trust. Taxes paid to support the running of the fiber optic cables, and subsidizing of telephone companies mean that any tax the phone company can think of, we have already paid.
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
Without regulation, businesses always manage to stomp on the consumer -- but the laws going through congress are doing the consumer more harm than good. Voice over IP, even between private parties will fall under the same regulations a telephones, and then we see all sorts of problems with the government stepping in so we can't avoid paying AT&T or Sprint their nickel a minute.
Ask your local Cisco OS expert ...
Wait just a sec. You contract with the telco for phone service for a unlimited use rate. It's a contract, with both sides agreeing.
Now that some users decide to take the telco's at their word and really use the lines in an unlimited manner, and the telco realizes, "Uh oh, when we said 'unlimited' we didn't really think they would actually use it that much" and decides to change their contracts, you defend them because they are "losing out unfairly"?
What's unfair? Unlimited means unlimited. If you go to a restaurant that advertises unlimited buffet dinner for a certain price, and you keep going back for seconds, and the manager finally kicks you out, do you defend the manager because they were "losing out unfairly"?
Sorry, they made a bet about consumer behavior and lost the bet. Nothing unfair about it, just short-sighted on the telco's part.
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Private Essayist
I think most people here seem to be missing the real reasons that telecoms companies are keen to curb VOIP. It has nothing to do with interconnection, and while it does have everything to do with control and profit, you're getting the wrong end of the stick.
Almost all telecoms companies make profit exclusively on long distance communication. Local comms are expensive to maintain and low profit - in fact sometimes they are even free and therefore generate no revenue.
VOIP is an effective means of circumventing the long distance revenue stream - cut all long distance traffic down to data only by encapsulating voice and fax in IP, and you bring a telecomms company to its knees.
Now while I like the idea of telecomms companies in a compromising position, I have a serious problem with the idea of having my local phone call costs increased because the company cannot break even when its long distance lines aren't being used. Its either they (long distance) carry us, or we (local call to ISP) carry them. I prefer the formed. So do you.
As for the technical "it can/can't be done" argument - there is no way to prevent such technology (VOIP) from being used. By telecomms companies can limit it. The vast majority of 'people out there' are scared of words like "illegal", and a sufficient awareness campaign will have them cowering and running "VOIP insta-remove" programs on their computers without a second thought. The minority that 'abuse the system' and slip through the cracks aren't going to break the profit margins.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Who ever said this was about fairness? Unregulated territory is always the best, especially when it undermines something traditional, such as a telco. Try to regulate VoIP is like trying to regulate the...wait, it is trying to regulate the internet. You can't regulate the internet. Ok, fine, let's have the telcos try to regulate VoIP just to have them waste money on something that's not going to happen. That will drive up the prices on "traditional" services, forcing everyone to switch to VoIP; essentially, the telcos would be puttying themselves out of business. Yes, let's regulate VoIP. Rather, let's let them regulate VoIP.
Um:
The Market. Is. Supposed. To. Reward. Cheapness. and. Innovation.
This does not. Regulations like this hamper efficiency.
and these people call themselves liberals?
Goat sex free since 2001
How they have any right to complain. Mom Bell and co have been gypping Americans for around 40 years now, and now that we can turn the tables on them, they want to go whine to some paid congressman? I say to hell with them. In fact, I say to hell with the entire telephone network, once broadband solutions that don't require telephone lines make up the bulk of internet access. I'd rather just give various groups my email address or an internet telephony number or name than bother with telephone numbers. Essentially, telephony, email, and IM outdates telephones, and all the more so once we have wireless PDAs (which are the future, whether everybody likes it or not). By that time, telephones will be completel obsolete, and, given how little I and many other people I know use them, I say they won't be missed. Teenagers are switching over to IM, and presumably will use the telephony services that both AIM and ICQ (and probably others, I don't know) provide already, they certainly don't need telephones. Ah well, chalk up one rant. I need to go outside and take a walk. /TF
A CD from iTunes: $10 A Song from iTunes: $0.99 Not paying a cent to Microsoft: Priceless
As we know it... This will be the thing that will change everything. VoIP is a low bandwidth application and is essentially unstoppable. In the US, unlimited free local calls, are considered a birthright. (and hence unmetered Internet Access). The internet allows packets to move freely over the entire internet. Phone Companies SURVIVE off of pay per minute LD. This is going to be the biggest conflict of all on the Internet. Billion Dollar companies do NOT die without a fight....