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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."
It seems to me that all one would have to do to get around this is to use SSL. ISPs wouldn't be able to lower the priority of such communications without affecting many other applications, such as VPNs. They could still do it based on IP, but not if the providers of a service used some large provider like Akamai.
Anyway, regardless of whether it could be circumvented, and at what cost, the implication is still a further push away from the original spirit of the internet towards a network that is solely a means of extracting as much revenue from consumers as possible. I just wish it were more realisitc to create an ad-hoc network with all my friends...and their friends, etc. I think some day that is what the tech community will be forced to turn to someday, in order to retain the usability we have come to cherish.
Of couse keeping this theoretical peer network free and uncommercial would be very tough, if it got popular. Call me paranoid, but I'm looking into affordable methods of connecting my friends directly together, using wireless technology and encryption.
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.
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.
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.
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*
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.
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!
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?