Will FCC Regulate Internet Phone Calls?

Ridgelift writes "The FCC will begin hearings on Monday December 1st to see if they will get involved in regulating calls placed over the internet. Since a federal court in Minnesota ruled a month ago that calls delivered over the Internet are not subject to state regulation, Qwest, Verizon and SBC have all announced their intention to deliver more calls over their data networks. "The stakes in the debate are huge. Federal and state governments could lose billions of dollars in revenue from regulatory fees if calls moved onto the Internet are no longer subject to the charges.""

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How?

[pdaoust007]

This is all nice and all but how the hell are they going to regulate this exactly? Sure it might be easy to target companies like Vonage but what do you do with all the free services out there like Skype or Free World Dialup?

Re:Detecting internet phone calls

[nodwick]

How could one possibly even detect phone calls?

They're not talking about PC-to-PC voip calls a la Skype, they're talking about regular phone calls carried over voip such as Vonage. The Detroit News has a good layman's summary of the regulation involved now. The highlight:

Vonage typically pays the Bells or Bell rivals sharply reduced fees to carry data traffic at the other end of a call. Some of its calls are handed to long-distance companies, which pay traditional access fees. Similarly, AT&T has started carrying some long-distance calls over Internetlike VOIP networks and paying cut-rate fees to connect at the other end. In this case, the customer has no idea VOIP is involved.

Although this approach lets them dodge many of the regulatory fees due to the internet being untaxed at the moment, they still have to hook into POTS for the local loop. If legislation goes through on taxing voip calls, it'll be relatively easy to meter the incoming calls at the POTS interface and tax accordingly.

That still leaves open the possibility of pure voip to voip calls being undetectable (e.g. between different Vonage customers), but in the near term those sorts of calls are likely to still be in the minority.

Live Streams...

[deathinc]

There apparently will be several live feeds available of the hearing tomorrow for those away from their TVs.

Re:Detecting internet phone calls

[Jason Pollock]

If you want to talk to anyone other than your immediate friends, you will need to go through a directory service, and possibly some gateways. Once it crosses a network, it can be detected.

Even better, there are a lot of police-driven requirements, such as call identification, tracing and intercept. Those WILL NOT be going away during the transition to VoIP. At the end of the day, if the government can't find any other way to do it, they'll force ISPs to put in VoIP proxies and regulate all of the VoIP carriers to route through them. Instant detection and billing. Heck, I wrote one for my last employer!

ISPs already implement charging by destination (mine does) and HTTP port proxies. It isn't hard to go from there to per-port billing.

Even better, SIP (unlike) H.323 tends to play nicer with proxies...

Someone also mentioned routing through Canada. I seem to remember that a US carrier is already in trouble for doing just that, so I think that people will be on the lookout for that one. :)

Regards,
Jason Pollock

On the flip side, has anyone considered what VoIP telemarketing spam would be like? Would the "do not call" list still apply? It would be very interesting to see a spammer initiate several thousand calls and only handle the ones that answer... No longer limited by the number of outgoing trunks...

Re:Sadly,

[orthancstone]

Only 5 states are without a sales tax rate. Yeah, that may be 10 percent but that still isn't many.

Let your voice be heard!

[spiritraveller]

Monday's forum is open to the public and there's going to be a webcast too.

Those of us who feel strongly about this should watch the webcast or attend in person. Be sure to submit your comments to the FCC afterwards.

It's your government. If you think regulating VOIP is a bad idea, let it know.

Usually, only the big companies and their lawyers take part in this process, but we all have the right to take part and let our opinions be known.

Re:Does anyone actually do this?

[AKnightCowboy]

Qwest (or whoever) could take your analog call and digitize it at the CO, route it over IP to the destination CO, then pump it back out analog. Its cheaper for them.

How do you think they do it right now? Lily Tomlin is sitting in your CO in front of a huge switchboard plugging in wires? The telephone network is already packet switched. Putting it over IP doesn't necessarily make it any cheaper. If anything it'll make it less reliable. You'd be going from a protocol that's specially designed from a QOS perspective to a best effort protocol.

The issue is hottest where VoIP meets the PSTN

[isdnip]

The FCC really has no interest in regulating VoIP per se. A telephone call between two IP nodes (computer to computer) is simply not of interest to them. It is competition, sure, but that's okay; they're supposed to support competition. They generally don't, but they're supposed to.

Here's Chairman Mike "the lesser" Powell on the subject, from http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/ DOC-241750A1.pdf

And I think the first thing is to truly commit ourselves to understanding the technology
and the market and the nature and the way in which it's unfolding so that we're not fearful --- we
don't approach this with fear, but we approach it with excitement and optimism that this is
inherently a good thing for the world, a good thing for the country, a major breakthrough in
telecommunications and communications, and a great new opportunity and promise. We shouldn't be afraid of that.

I personally think we should be embracing it. And so I think that that's an important part of the debate. And so we're very excited about it.

I have decided that the Commission is now going to start exerting itself in this area much more directly. And that is not to say regulating it either, only to put a marker down that it's time to start having these policy questions in forums that matter. I really don't. And I think that we
run the risk that if we don't move quickly to at least show that we're focused on it, then if you
don't have a state jurisdiction do it, you will have a court do it.

There are some big issues still unresolved. The current FCC policies, which are largely supported by the language of the Telecom Act, classify calls made through regulated local telephone companies (VZ, SBC, etc.) as "telephone exchange service" (basically, local) and "exchange access service" (basically, end legs of a toll call). Those have different prices; LD carriers usually pay more for "access". VoIP is sometimes used as a way around that. So it threatens that subsidy mechanism, which is particularly important for rural telephone companies.

So the big questions focus on when does a VoIP call become long distance "access" rather than "local" or ISP-bound "exempt information access" (ISP access dialup calls, for now, are legally classified as not local. but telcos are usually required to treat them as if they were). And if VoIP calls are exempt, when is a call exempt? If AT&T sticks IP headers on the middle of its LD trunks, transparent to the user, does it become exempt? If the trunks are dedicated VoIP circuits? If the calls sound crappy enough?

I'm not sure the FCC is going to come up with any great answers in a hurry, but they have enough problems figuring out what the telephone companies can charge VoIP users without having to worry about messing around with Internet user traffic.

Re:Does anyone actually do this?

[calstraycat]

You are both right and wrong. No, Lily Tomlin is not sitting a manual switchboard. However, the public telephone network is not packet-switched, it is circuit-switched. With very few exceptions your calls are routed using a Class-5 circuit switch. The phone companies are doing trials using packet-switched calls, but the vast majority of switching is done the "old fashion way".

Even the DSL data service is transported and switched using Asynchronous Transfer Mode which cell-based and not really considered packet switching. Most of the installed equipment doesn't even support QOS. The truth is that packet switched networks are the wave of the future, but they currently do not provide the quality of the existing network and it will be quite a while before you see the Babybells completely abandon their huge investment in circuit-switched equipment.

Re:What will they do?

[Arker]

Most of the rural US has no Internet service, and likely never will unless some government steps in and either mandates it or provides it.

That's simply untrue. I left one of the most rural areas in the states a couple years ago and we had internet access there and had had it for years. I've friends in other similarly rural places and they have it.

No, they don't have cable modems. They do have dialup, they do have ISDN if they're willing to pay for it. DSL lines are getting put in, slowly, even in the most out of the way spots. And satellite dishes have been available wherever you are for years. They're quite inexpensive today.