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FCC Forum Divided on Future VoIP Regulation
ElCheapo writes "As the great philosopher Eminem once said, 'The FCC won't let [VoIP] be, or let [VoIP] be free.' In Washington today, the FCC held a public forum 'to gather information concerning advancements, innovations, and regulatory issues related to VoIP services.' Slashdot has seen numerous stories on VoIP regulation recently, but Tom Evslin, CEO of ITXC, brought up another point: If VoIP is over-regulated, it will not go away, it will just move to other countries and reach the point where regulation can no longer be enforced. With or without VoIP regulation, will a global P2P (PSTN-connected) voice network emerge? Will it start out as hobbyists setting up Asterisk Open Source PBX boxes connected to their home POTS line? Will some form of ENUM allow least cost routing to boxes sitting in basements and garages around the world? If an ITSP in Europe can setup an Asterisk box with PSTN access and start offering US phone numbers and vice-versa, will global number plans become obsolete? What effect will the ridiculously low barrier to entry for VoIP have on telecommunications?"
The FCC has already made up it's mind: it will hand over the business to the telco conglomerates. The little man has no say in this, these "public meetings" are all a charade.
is a global voip network, and pots will become largely irrelevant in connected areas.
The need for pots to internet gateways is what holds us up now.. think of how things owrk once most people are all using voip.. suddenly, it's all software.. adn hooking people together for voice stuff no longer needs ANY kind of centralizing....
it won't be regulated, as ultimately, it can't be.
I don't really understand how any regulation on VOIP would work. Living in England, I speak to my family in Spain on a daily basis using VOIP. At the moment I sit down if front of a computer and use microphone/speakers. How long will it be until someone comes up with a telephone type device which you plug into your DSL modem?
How long until we start seeing the P2P-based net phone networks able to connect to POTS?
All it would take is one 10-10-whatever-like pay service where you call a node on the P2P network, then enter a real-life phone number, which they connect you to..
Sure, this could drive some VoIp offshore, but what they're likely controlling is the call itself. If the call originates or terminates in the USofA, then the call falls under FCC control and they will want their slice.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What this comes down to is companies suddenly realizing they are set to lose market share. We are rather successfully using iChat AV to remotely collaborate from N. America to New Zealand, but here is the deal. We are already paying for access to the Internet out of our grant indirect costs to the university. So are others that are paying to have access to the Internet from their homes and businesses. If the major phone companies have not been on the ball enough to see this one coming, perhaps they need new boards of directors or CEO's as voice over IP has not been an overnight phenomenon. Furthermore, the government should not be stepping in to attempt to rescue companies that have not been smart enough to adequately compete. Right? Is this what market consolidation and deregulation done for us?
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Allow VOIP to be unregulated (you can't really stop this anyway). If it causes the phone companies to start losing money then they raise prices to compensate, and our home phone lines cost more.
I don't know where most of the revenue stream for telcos comes from, but if it is from long distance phone calls - then they need a new business plan. Those days are over. If they are spending too much money to keep the internet working then they need to raise prices on access to the internet lines and the price will rise at our ISPs.
I think the real problem is the stupid white men are seeing their business replaced by better technology and they are crying to Sugar Daddy Bush to help them out. New technology almost always means business die.
RIP phone companies.
Once you have any data stream over IP, it is pretty difficult to regulate, since it can be disguised on varying port numbers, encryption (which is probably a good idea anyway) and other techniques. Regulation tends to work on the big conglomerates, since they operate so much in public. A homespun underground cottage industry movement is very difficult to control (see P2P). Therefore I find the discussions about regulating VoIP rather irrelevant.
I listened to some of the FCC discussion on CSPAN, and with all the mindless "let VOIP be free" perspectives being spouted here, let me raise a few of the more valid concerns I heard with letting VOIP go completely unregulated (and forecasting a dramatic drop in POTS usage as broadband spreads and people use it for phone):
1. Emergency use:
VOIP will not have the level of reliability of POTS, especially during natural disasters and other emergencies. In theory an IP network can be made just as reliable, but the simple issue of powering the phones is a big issue... the phone system generally has been significantly more reliable than the power system. With a VOIP phone, you're dead if you lose power. Traditional phones keep going.
This may seem like a small issue, but an example cited during the hearing was a major weather-related power outage in California, where the utility determined after the fact that customers were less annoyed by the fact that the power was off than the fact that the phone system at the power company was not equipped to give them good repair status information. People count on the phone system, and it needs to be there, especially for 911 emergency use.
2. Funding and effectiveness of 911
The 911 system is funded by POTS and cellular surcharges. Even a 25% drop in POTS usage due to VOIP would be disasterous from a funding perspective. And remember that when you call 911 from a landline (and in more and more areas, cellular), they know where you are. VOIP is extremely far away from having any sort of location capability.
3. Funding of Universal Access
Everyone in the country has access to phone service, no matter how rural / remote they are. This has been a tremendously important program, but would have funding problems similar to 911 if a big chunk of POTS goes away.
Anyway, my point is that despite how "retro" POTS is technically, it has significant merits that VOIP currently does not provide. I'm not suggesting that any of the problems described above are unsolveable for VOIP, but I think it's awfully unlikely that "market forces" will magically provide the answers. There needs to be some regulation in order that the good in POTS is preserved going forward.
First of all, what about the regulations which mandated performance expectatiuons. Phone service has traditionally been viewed as an essential service, some of these regulations stipulate uptimes for phone networks, etc. etc. The net effect of these has been that the consumer expects the phone to work, reliably, every time. VoIP providers (other than the big telecomms players) by and large will not be able to meet this expectation, or rather will be at the mercy of infrastructure they don't control, and organizations they have no binding agreements with.
Some of these regulations have also made it unlawful for private individuals to tap each others phones. (This being a right reserved to the government, who supposes they own the electrons involved anyways...) Without the private networks owned by the telcos, and the regulatory controls placed on those networks, wiretapping becomes a skill that the current generation of script kiddies can master in three hours. It's all data folks, it can be diverted, copied, folded, mutilated, spindled just like form data. Sure it can be encrypted, but there is some fairly significant overhead involved, without crypto hardware, I think you would notice degraded conversation quality.
Besides, do we really want to offer the marketing organizations a way to converge SPAM and telemarketing?
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