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California PUC Calls For A Public Hearing On VoIP
Vick points to this story at Voxilla.com, which says that "A California Public Utilities Commissioner has called for public hearings on the agency's recent demand that Voice over IP service providers apply and be certified as full-fledged telephone companies." The anti-regulation arguments, though, mostly seem to hinge on timing and protocol -- I wish more objectors would argue that there are already too many phone regulations, instead of seeming to promise a boatload more captured users (dollars) if we just let VoIP develop for a few years before unchaining the regulators.
The big difference between VoIP companies like Vonage and the traditional phone companies is that Vonage doesn't manage any physical connection to its customers. The implications of that one fact are huge.
First, it means they aren't a natural monopoly. Anyone can start a similar business without investing millions of dollars in each community. The regulatory approach to a non-monopoly should be completely different.
Second, it means that taxes based on physical connections aren't appropriate. Vonage shouldn't charge for the Universal Connectivity Fund. Granted, there may be good reason to create a Universal Broadband Fund, but that would be based on charges levied by the ISPs, not by secondary service providers.
First, let's clear up a definition issue here: The VoIP we're talking about here isn't the actual protocol, it's the use of VoIP to provide a connection into the PTSN, effectively it's POTS-over-VoIP.
POTS is a regulated competitve system at this point. You've got the ILEC former monopolies who now are required to bend over backwards to let CLECs into their interfaces. However, everybody in the POTS business is required to submit their payments into the USF, provide free priority 911 connectivity, and other basic things. What the POTS-over-VoIP services are trying to sell themselves as is a replacement to phone service that costs less, but they're making a lot of their cost savings by cutting corners on the services that the companies they're trying to compete with are required to provide.
That's unfair competition, and something the regulators need to step in on.
Once there is enough high speed IP deployed, we can bypass the traditional voice phone network entirely, and run voice over encrypted end to end IP connections. Imagine "dialing" in the form of domain names. The only reason the regulators are getting into this is because VoIP services are interfacing with the existing voice network. More work needs to be done to phase that voice network out of existance (which will be a long slow thing).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The whole reason why telephone providers are so closely regulated by the government is that the market for land lines is a natural monopoly - that is, competition is impossible because a competitor would have to install a redundant network, which is prohibitively expensive. So, since monopoly is inevitable, the government regulates it to ensure the providers don't take unfair advantage of the monopoly.
With VoIP, there is no monopoly. There can be dozens of different VoIP providers just as there's dozens (ok thousands) of pr0n sites or dozens of online bookstores.
When we have a new technology, why don't we rethink the way we regulate things instead of just applying the old regulations to the new technology regardless of whether or not it makes sense to do so?
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You pay your telephony/data tax/fee when you pay your ISP, you should not have to pay again when you use send one kind of bit/byte as apposed to a different kind of bit/byte.
If you do have to pay then you should be able to subtract the amount from the tax/fee you pay though your ISP.
Now the moment one of these DSL providers starts connecting lines to peoples houses or other locations then they are a Telco and should act like one.
I think this is more like a regulatory barrier to entry into voice communications or protectionism for the existing Telco.
I worked on a major telco VoIP project and we were working with SIP as a real telephone alternative. Cisco was involved as were other vendors. The whole scope of our project was to replace analog telephony with VoIP with a reliable and clean alternative. VoIP traffic has its own inherent problems which the industry is still trying to resolve.
So, if the telco I worked for was trying to replace conventional telephone service with VoIP then why wouldn't it be considered a telephone service?
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C'mon, a Public Utilities Board, who make their living imposing regulations telephone companies want to regulate telephone traffic, and everyone is surprised? PUC's exist because of a lack of competition. VoIP is competitive and therefore poses a threat to their existence. It is self-serving mission creep that they should extend their own charter by thinking that they exist to regulate all forms of voice traffic. What is surprising, is, that it took this long. It was inevitable.
Can someone please tell me why we are looking to a centralised (and billable, taxable) VOIP strategy, instead of a direct peered (or even client/server) model?
So that you get a real phone number that anyone can call.