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Will Providers Provide Equally?
theodp writes "Imagine the chaos if your power company could take money from Sony so that its appliances got a higher quality of juice - and thus worked a tad better - than those of Mitsubishi. The power system wasn't built that way, but ISPs have that very capability. It may seem like a dodgy competitive tactic, but Yankee Group analysts envision that broadband network providers could give precedence to their own revenue-generating services, possibly leading to the demise of the biggest VoIP player today, Vonage."
They'll never do this. As much money is dangled in front of them, there's a bigger trap door.
Right now, ISPs stay out of the RIAA/MPAA lawsuit fights because they are common carriers. The moment they stop being able to claim that by giving disadvantages to those who they choose to spite, the RIAA/MPAA will demand that the P2P client of the week be spited as well...
That's just too much of a headache for them. They don't want to become liable for their user's usage. They'd rather that users keep using without them being bothered. They're not going to open themselves up to such exposure.
Of course, this is the Yankee Group we're talking about, so logical analysis is not to be expected. This is the same bunch of boneheads that has Didio doing their "analysis" of the SCO lawsuits.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
It seems like everything these days is self serving and dishonest.
So sad, so sad.
Would be to declare ISP (and the internet) as an 'essential service' or utility. And as such the ISP would have rules governing thier behavior, including anti-trust laws.
Wouldn't such tactic actually drive customers away?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
...companies are looking for a profit, not to make you there best friend. As long as they can keep the profits coming, they could care less what you think of them.
Unless Vonage pays fees to the network provider, there is no reason the operator should not make the service a lower priority on the network.
Oh yeah, no reason at all -- except that if they do that, it's not the internet any more. And if they call themselves "internet providers," they're lying.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The idea is not that they lower the priority on the packets to their competitors, but that the raise the priority on packets to their own services. This has a slight effect by lowering priority to everything not theirs, but the point is that their stuff would work top-notch on their own networks, while competitors wouldn't get such a boost.
If you used encryption and decentralization, it doesn't help you, because they're giving their stuff a boost, not directly giving other stuff a kick in the teeth.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
As time passes, I'm thinking about just switching to commercial DSL service. Current broadband offerings for the most part are targeted to the uneducated masses, and are cheap for that reason. My ISP had the nerve to tell me that my connection was "For entertainment purposes only" when I asked why the windows file sharing port was blocked (I have a static IP and I needed to share some files with some non-Mac friends of mine). So instead of bitching, the easier solution seems to be to pay for quality. The same applies to every other consumer product out there.
They could do it based on MAC address, different manufacturers have different allocations of MAC addresses.
Although many devices (Linksys cable/dsl routers for example) provide an option where you can manually set a mac address to replace the default manufacturer provided one. If this practice went into effect it probably wouldn't be too long before we saw a much more widespread use of this feature where people could change the address to something in the range of a "preferred product"
How is this any different than mega supermarkets that give shelf space preference to various brands with respect to location and quantity?
I choose to use a small ISP. They have their own problems, but this kind of behaviour isn't one of them. I can almost do what the hell I like with my connection and it's only their peer connections and BGP issues that ever screw me up. I have a choice of other ISPs too who also don't behave like this. Thank goodness for competition!
Vonage's device they send you doesn't adjust the TOS value in the IP packet. I checked with a hub and ethereal. I have the Cisco device, newer customers are getting the Motorola. Don't know about that.
So, it's at the class of service level of everything else. Which doesn't have any packet loss and has low latency. In order to give themselves competitive advantage, Comcast could only trust the TOS and DSCP values in VOIP flows coming from their equipment, but the ENTIRE CONCEPT OF QOS is predicated on the idea of congestion!
Now, if they deliberately threw competing VOIP flows into a low queue and INDUCED loss, well - that's actionable as anti-competitive behavior. And in the standard IANAL disclaimer, I have no idea what the remedies available are.
Also, as another posted that got modded up pointed out, Vonage could use VPN or otherwise mask the RTSP stream. But that's silly. It's also counter productive long term.
I think the parent article is kind of a troll to get legislation by the FCC and others regarding QOS. It's a tactic to cause dissention because of the pass the FCC took on regulating companies like Vonage.
You're damn right they will. They've already started blocking port 25 outbound (one thing that I might be okay with) along with a variety of inbound ports. They've taken complaints again and again. They respond with a resounding "We don't care."
And why should they? Joe Schmoe customer doesn't care. He doesn't know if it's his ISP that broke it or the client or somebody else. If he calls someone for support, it's almost certainly not going to be his ISP. After all, he's using someone elses services. His VoIP connection is slow? Why would he blame his ISP? Everything else is fast.
Will they lose a few customers (i.e. the Slashdot crowd)? Yes, but they don't care. Our money isn't worth that much to them. And since we're the only crowd opposed, there's not enough business to start-up competitive ISPs.
the "original spirit" of the internet was milirary defense and government funded research.
if you looking for idealism, look elsewhere.
Somebody, sometime, is going to offer an ISP a boatload of money to do this, and the ISP is going to calculate that the probable cost of interfering in connection usage (P2P monitoring or whatever it is) is dwarfed by the amount of revenue they're getting for a sweetheart deal like this.
If the ISP is a major nationwide network, the monitoring could be a huge burden, but the cash rewards could be just as huge.
At least it'll create a few hundred IT jobs.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
The answer is easy. Power companies are monopolies. I don't have a choice with whom I do business. The reality is that you only get a choice of one power company, one local telephone service, and one local cable company, simply because there is only one set of lines coming into your home.
Internet connections, at least in the US, or different. You have an extensive choice of providers. I live in a metropolitan area, and I have a choice of about two dozen providers. A friend who lives in a rural agricultural area still has a choice of four providers, two of which are high speed. You might have to pay a tiny surcharge to your local telco monopoly, but the choice is there.
A provider that gives one person preferential treatment over another for the same fees is going to be at a competitive disadvantage.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
As an employee at an University that is restriction Internet through-put for P2P protocols, I would like to point out that such restrictions are only desirable when resources are tight. The restriction was placed because the cost of adding another T3 to the Internet was prohibitive in comparison of the cost involved in doing Quality of Service. For the University's connection to I2, the reverse is true. The cost of doing QoS on a gigabit connection is prohibitive and it is desirable to just allow the resource utilitization to more "naturally" handle itself.
One thing that I believe would help third party companies provide several interesting services (pay-per-view over IP, party-line VoIP, etc.) would be multicast. It seems to me that there is a conflict of interest with most Cable/DSL providers in regards to providing multicast support on their networks since it benefits external companies more than themselves.
That was why it was developed initially.
But as a community, it stemmed from universities working together and the development of UNIX, which, at the time, culminated in BSD.
So, as a community, the Internet had a free-flowing spirit. Read Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg for an idea of what that community was like. (The cracker in the book being the exception, not the norm.)
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IF history is any guide, we will see the cable companies totally abuse this until Uncle Sam is forced to make them play nice (after first letting them suck us dry in exchange for superior campaign contributions). Can anyone imagine Charles Dolan (Cablevision Systems) NOT taking advantage of something like this. Bon Vonage!
No...it's okay...I wasn't using my Civil Liberties anyway
I've noticed some interesting things about my access:
Conspiracy!
Why would we expect a cable companies VOIP be any different?
Declaring a service as 'essential' or 'utility' tends to lead to a local (and in the case of AT&T national) monopoly. That will only remove the likely-hood of competing ISPs for certain areas, assuming you could even craft a scenario where one ISP could be declared a utility. Do you use a dial-up, dsl, cable based, or fiber optic only as a basis for the service? Nor does this offer any sort of grantee that you prevent utility from favoring their own products, in fact you encourage the opposite by way of bundling.
Nor does the government have to declare and ISP a utility for it to regulate it, they already regulate ISPs. The 'simple' step is to make it illegal for an ISP to use packet shaping or throttling ports; however, that isnt so simple when you know ISPs need to be able to control the traffic to certain ports.
I hate to break it to everyone but this is already happening. Here in California SBC is getting sued by EarthLink for DSL customers getting a message that all lines are full when they tried to sign up on the EarthLink web page then getting a call back from a SBC rep trying to sign them up with SBC instead.(EarthLink had to connect to telco computers to check for available trunk lines.)
No amount of encryption is going to get around the telcos giving priority to their own traffic and having a high enough lag for other companies that when reviewers test their service they will say that the telco service had less problems.
Maybe the ISP integrating "those services" (VOIP, others undoubtedly to follow) into their service is a "win for the customer" on that specific service. But I worry that it could well put a damper on innovation of new Internet services. If individuals and companies are unable to innovate w/ new services b/c only the established services are given good QoS by the major ISP (Comcast, for example), then this is a Bad Thing in the longterm.
"I see no legal difference"
You make a sound point. I would point out, though, that there is also no legal difference between beating someone to death with a baseball bat in a crowded room and quietly dropping some slow-acting poison into their water line.
They end up dead both ways, but in the latter case, it's a lot less obvious that a murder was committed, and it's certainly harder to prove you did anything wrong.
I see no legal difference between taking a competitors traffic and putting in a low queue, and simply blocking Vonage's entire IP range for the PSTN gateways totally. Poof, end of competition. The effect is the same, why not just be explicit and target individuals?
I do. It's a lot easier to prove that someone is blocking your service than it is to demonstrate that they are degrading data transfers to/from you, especially since it would only result in intermittent outages under load, which the company could plausibly claim as normal behavior.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
All the major carriers are moving towards this model. The new requirements coming out of the DSL forum require equipment makers have the ability to do all kinds of fancy traffic shaping and quality of service.
The company I work for makes equipment that does this. We set it up so an ISP can create a portal where a subscriber can select services and the network will automatically adjust the shaping and priority settings so the subscriber gets that service while allowing the provider to charge for it.
If Jane Doe wants to watch a certain movie, our box will guarantee the bandwidth between the video server and her DSL line while still limiting other traffic to the normal rates. Or if John Smith wants to download a huge ISO and doesn't want to wait, he can click to up his bandwidth to download it and lower it back down when he's done and gets charged extra for the amount of time he has the higher bandwidth.
Anyone can provide a pipe, but it's not real profitable for the providers. They want to make money off of things like pay-per-view or other special services.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.