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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."
So, they really DO care what you think of them if it means you could be switching to another provider...
I'd say its more a case of "they care about finding the cheapest way to keep you and prevent you from switching to another provider, with what you actually think of them being secondary"
ie: a company can sometimes get away with having horrible customer support as long as the service is outstanding. Likewise, they may be able to get away with "features" which would generally alienate its customers as long as it has something else up its sleeve that puts it ahead of its competators in terms of the overall value to the customer.
*shrug*
What we need is a labour union for geeks.
On our own we can't do anything about this, but we are numerous, together we do have the power to make companies behave themselfs. It's time we bring together this power and use it to get all the wrong do-ers back in line.
We won't accept no DMCAs anymore, we won't bow down for DRM, MS shall not control us. RIAA will not lead us quitely into the night.
Geeks of the world, now it's time to rise up and tell them "no" in one strong, united voice.
Geek power!
The issue is them raising their own priorities, not lowering anyone elses.
So vonage over ssl would be the same as vonage over nothing (well +performance hit).
I'd have no problem with this so long as they guaranteed internet as it is.
Ie; Comcast gives me about 3mbit down now, if they had their own content on local servers (movies, game downloads, VOIP etc) that I could access at 10mbit or higher, I'd probably pay for it - so long as my 3mbit pipe to the rest of the 'net isn't affected.
Reliability is a big hurdle for VOIP as it is, if comcast had their own route that guaranteed the service, and it was still cheaper than Ma Bell, and didn't interfere with regular internet service, I think that'd be cool.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
That said, I find it generally unlikely that ISPs would do any type of overt targeted network shaping. They make their money by moving packets, and for more and more contracts these days, the more packets you move the more money you make.
The benefit of ISPs getting into the VOIP, streaming, and other services where network properties matter is that those are exactly the kind of people who can optimize their networks to give the customer the best experience. ISPs want to displace Vonage because Vonage isn't their customer, but they have to deal with all the network issues generated by customers that use Vonage. It is cheaper to offer an optimized solution designed and tested to work beautifully on your network for free or nearly free than to support the problems caused when people use whatever random VOIP software suits their fancy.
Not all networks are created equal, and this really starts to become apparent when using QoS sensitive services. It is cheaper and generally gives better results for the ISP to integrate those services vertically, which ultimately will be a win for the customer.
While MAC addresses would provide a way for ISPs to uniquely ID servers, it wouldn't prove was using the service. All the manufacturer ID would tell them is for example, that the server was using an Intel network card. Certain MAC addresses could be given lower priority, but if a large infrastructure company were providing the connectivity on a round-robin system, there is no gaurentee that such action wouldn't also downgrade a bunch of unrelated sites/services. Also, the overhead required to do this could quite quickly become cost prohibitive. Think how many more resources it would take to inspect each packet for several different criteria and prioritize it differently based on the results than just letting most things through unchecked, and perhaps lowering the priority of things that are easily flagged.
Some priority checking is already in wide use; I use it on the LAN I run to raise the priority of email and DNS queries over web traffic/FTP-data, and SSH/Telnet/FTP-control over both. This type of prioritizing is actually a Good Thing, because it makes letency-sensitive services run better without noticably hurting other traffic. But that's a far cry from deliberately making your competitors's services run badly.
Of course, the best way to keep companies from doing this is to speak with our money. But the truth of the matter is that the average user won't know enough to realize why their fancy new VoIP isn't working well. They'll just write it off as another failed internet idea that only the nerds will use. Hopefully VoIP will become popular enough before this type of thing is implimented that people will expect good service, but it seems like people are much more willing to accept shoddy service and bad reliability with technology than with just about anything else that is so pervasive in daily life.
Apparently, comcast has been doing some Very Nasty Stuff with vonage, such as not resolving DNS addresses to vonage. A vonage tech commented that it looks like the only way this is going to get solved is through the courts.
This has been an ongoing issue since comcast entered the voip market.
Any vonage (or comcast) moles want to comment?
I was under the impression that such regulation is generally effective in protecting the consumer AND thier choices. A good case in point is what happened when the airline industry was de-regulated. And very few can complain that we are worse off since the ATT break-up (though SBC no longer falls into the 'baby bell' status). But not having oversight in essential services ? Almost like drug companies: you MUST pay what they ask for ! I am a strong supporter in free-market economics, but we have seen (Enron comes to mind) when CEOs run un-checked. And your argument about cell phones needs a little work: it was the gov't who forced number portability. Is that bad ?
Look here. Metanet
I know that many of you do check it out, even seem interested. Contact me if you're not in the USA, for an immediate invitation, and be prepared to install openvpn.