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?

Comments

What now they're going to double charge me?

[Ex-NT-User]

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.

Also, A Tax On Pedestrians...

[Seumas]

In the spirit of this regulation, I would also propose a tax on pedestrians who walk on the sidewalk and cross streets -- after all, they are depriving auto-makers of their rightful monies by taking alternate methods to transport themselves to their destinations.

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

Problems with VoIP

[Laxitive]

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

Heinlein summed up...

[Lunatic]

...this type of situation quite succinctly:

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all."

-- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")

-Lunatic

Uhm, Correct me if I am wrong...

[supernaut]

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

WTF is a Telco anyway?

[chazR]

I am British and European, so this rant is flavoured.

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.

Is it possible

[addaon]

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.

Conversation Over Streaming MP3 Will Kill Telco's

[goingware]

Are you, like me, an audiophile who's really annoyed with the poor acoustical quality of telephones?

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

isn't a matter of should, but when

[XneznJuber]

HR 3234 dictates that "all data transmission which through a procedure can be reformed as human speech falls under jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission and shall fall under the regulatory powers of such". The general move in the United State, at least, as been to try to adopt old legislation to fit the Internet. I would imagine that in part has a lot to do with the telecommunications industry lobby.

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.

Re:There is no such thing as a free lunch.

[Private Essayist]

"The great majority of Internet Users dial in via their home telephone line. If they start making phone calls over said line, the phone company (which owns the line) is losing out unfairly"

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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