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VoIP Receives Warm Reception From UK Regulators
"In stark contrast to the U.S., where VoIP providers may be stifled by wiretap costs, the UK telecoms regulators seem to be welcoming the technology. The BBC is reporting that a block of phone numbers have been assigned to VoIP users -- and that Ofcom, the regulators, have said 'Our first task as regulator is to keep out of the way.'
It's interesting to note that when CCTV cameras in public places in the UK were mentioned on /. the other day, there was an immediate outcry from US people about "Invasion of privacy" and "Thank God the authorities here can't spy on me when I'm outside!"
And then when VoIP gets mentioned, it has to be pointed out that it's being stalled in the US by the authorities complaining that it'll make it harder to spy on people who are in their own homes.
Six of one and half a dozen of the other. . ?
So.. it has come to this
Just wait until David "Hitler" Blunkett hears about it: there'll be new laws in parliament outlawing it or requiring any VOIP users to first prove, on pain of becoming Blunkett's new guide dog, that they are who they say they are. Edward PS: The fact that David Blunkett, a "Labour" (eg Socialist, left wing), is best mates with the editor of one the most right wing tabloids (the Daily Mail) has nothing to do with him behaving like a rabid dog: I think he must be trying to out right-wing Margaret Thatcher just to impress his editor friend.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
"Our first task as regulator is to keep out of the way."
Lets hope they don't stay out of the way for too long, like they did with BT, especially given how quickly businesses get a foothold in these kinds of markets.
I think you're confused, because this is a story about VOIP in the United Kingdom, not the US. There is no "Congress". There are no convoluted tax laws that only apply to telecoms. VOIP users will pay VAT on their service just like any other telecoms user. Total impact on tax revenues would be expected to increase slightly, not decrease.
Which include - What does the future hold? and Have we forgotton about anything?
One thing I'd say they don't discuss is vunerbility to things like DDOS attacks... they also don't comment on phone tapping (Though that's covered in other legislation it would be good to have included the relavant pointer here)
UK Laptops
The story for us Brits here is not the rather waffly statement that ofcom "seem to be welcoming" VoIP, it's the hard fact that they are having a consultation period on it.
They want to know our views on issues such as mandatory provision of free 999 calls (our emergency number, equivalent to 911 in the USA).
The consultation ends on the 15th November. Here is how to respond. If we want a sensible VoIP policy in Britain, now would be a good time to ask the regulatory body for it.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
parent has a good point (despite the typical yank viewpoint of "Congress controls the world")
It seems like this is a good deal for everyone all around except that in the end VoIP is still another manifestation of the infinitely malleable POTS system. All those bits are travelling over the same wires as those expensive long distance calls are. The only difference is in who is paying for that bandwidth.
With normal long distance calling, the burden is borne by the person making the call or the receiver in the case of a collect call. In VoIP, the burden is already being paid for by the backbone ISPs who provide overseas network connections over their fat pipes.
Guess who owns those fat pipes. If you said the phone company, you would be correct.
Once revenues start dropping from standard phone charges as more and more people switch over to VoIP, the phone companies will start looking for ways to gain more revenue via their most active systems, i.e. the long distance channels upon which the ISP backbones are structured.
A general rise in prices charged to ISPs will find their way down to the end subscriber and all those pennies saved using VoIP vanish in a puff of logic. Add to this that once consumer groups figure out that the burden of *your* high VoIP usage is borne by *all* subscribers, they will start demanding tiered service and your delightfully cheap long distance calls will suddenly be just as expensive as they were on the old POTS program.
Be careful what you wish for.
OFTEL don't need to push the interception stance, because RIPA already covers it.
The US survelliance laws are _totally_ different to those of the UK.
In the UK we don't have control over the laws on this sort of thing anymore, we are just waiting for European guidence to be issued which we will then have to follow if it's in our interests or not. This is just intermediatry guidence while we wait for the European machine to come up with something - though perhaps it does put us in a good position to shape what that something is.
UK Laptops
You say it like it was just a lie that they are the greatest and freest. But surely our American friends would not lie to us about important issues like that!
That I'll be able to get a London Telephone number, while I remain in the US?
I'll finally be able to call the telephone numbers that are in European magazines.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
As most people in the UK who get broadband do so via their (regulated) phone line, regulating VoIP too would be overkill: most people will still have their emergency service via their regular phone and be able to make other calls in the same way.
When/if there is significant competition for the "last mile", I'm sure regulation will be revisited.
What's next, American public schools that teach and don't allow bullying? Parents that actually take care of their kids? Lions that like to frollick in a pasture with sheep?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
This is the kind of crap that Euro-skeptics would have us all believe: that the European Union is taking all power from its member states and that the individual parliaments of countries such as the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, etc are all becoming toothless entities.
Please, realise that this is a troll attacking the EU. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Oh come one, the US federal government has been bending over backwards to avoid taxes on VOIP. I hardly consider the contrast between the UK and the US to be "stark."
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Not that it makes much difference to what you're saying, but it's being replaced with the EU standard 112
Single European emergency call number 1-1-2
AFAIK, they're currently parallel running both numbers.
Dispite some of it's best efforts, the EU still doesn't control tax laws in the member states. You'll pay VAT on your VOIP calls just like anyone else, EU or no EU.
No matter what those poor Americans do to try and stifle VoIP its not going to work because any legislation will appear to have been put in place to secure the existing monopolies.
People will inevitably find offshore alternatives just like most of the big US corporations did! LOL!
That should bring the democracy treat level to Holy Shit - Pink or whatever it is...
An idea of the low level of discussion the European consultation provoked can be seen here.
More interesting is the fact the European document is very very very similar to the one issued by Ofcom.
I'd say Ofcom's done a poor and copy and paste and rephrasing job - too late to enable people in the UK influence the law that will affect them - and our journalists - on and offline have failed us in not bringing the European consultation to our attention.
UK Laptops
You don't start squeezing the industry until it's reached a critical mass. Otherwise, you kill the golden goose before it's laid its first egg. By waiting and pretending you'll regulate lightly, you encourage investment. Once there's a lot of money sunk in, you can tax and tighten all you want, so long as there's an economic profit for the investors.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
"We have to hand over power to the EU to gain power" - Tony Blair, just about any other politician ever.
"Handing over 100% control of our currency to the European Central Bank increases our power over our curency" - every europhile ever.
What can I say? I'd really hoped the old British lust for Empire and Imperial Control had died down, but it is still alive and well among the patrician classes of the British Establishment, who, frustrated in their desire to control a might British Empire, wish to steer us into this new Empire where they can share the gains, some new, continental, Roman Empire.
Eurosceptics, us "little people" with no desire for this imperialism, who want to see a Britain unafraid to stand up on its own two feet, face a big fight. The Europhiles have dragged us in this far by dirty tricks and avoiding democracy, well aware the british people are almost universally opposed to their plot. Luckily, we have managed to set things now such that we can't be dragged in any further without a referendum - on the currency and on the constitution, both of which the europhiles know they will lose massively and humiliatingly should they ever decide to hold them. So now we have stalemate while the europhiles try to think of non-democratic ways to drag us in further, and us eurosceptics try to think of ways to make the democratic will of the british people heard and pull us out!
What I want, if I understand it correctly, is something that looks like a regular phone that I can plug into my home LAN, and use to dial regular phones anywhere else.
Do these things work on a network with IP masquerading? I use a debian box for a gateway & firewall, I could do port forwarding or something if it were needed.
The problem is finding a service I can use in Canada. Just try using Google to find products sold in Canada, or any other country other than the US. You can't really do it.
I've been spending about $300 a month in long distance. My clients and my family are all in the US, and my wife's family are all in another province. VoIP could really help.
Thanks for any advice you can give me.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Try Vonage. I live in Canada, and I have a Vonage phone for work. Free long distance to anywhere in US and Canada, for cheap. I haven't had any complaints with the service, either. The only times I've had trouble were when my ISP crapped out.
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1. I'd have a lot more respect for you and your opinion if you didn't feel the need to hide behind an AC comment.
2. Made up quotes really add so much weight to your argument. No, really, they do. Why not just say that the EU demands that you hand over your first-born for summary execution? The fact that it's a lie shouldn't bother you.
3. The debate about Britain's role in the EU and how it will affect the everyday lives of Britons, today and tomorrow, is so distorted by the majority of the press. In particular, Rupert Murdoch's The Sun misses no opportunity to bash the EU over anything and everything, and the right-wing Daily Mail and Daily Express are no better.
4. It is possible to have a sensible debate about the pros and cons of the EU. When you're mature enough not to have that debate in the gutter, by making up facts and building delusions of some pan-European empire, then we'll talk further.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Does anyone really believe that anymore ? Despite the constitution's demand for "checks and balances" The Republican congress has pretty much abrogated its responsibilities to the Executive branch. And, Cheney has explicity said that's the way he thinks it ought to be. Thus, the statement ought to be :"Bush controls the world (by fiat)."
[...] Cheney says, presidents have stood by as Congress has chipped away at their executive powers.
-S
Unfortunately, many eurosceptics are interminably and rabidly pro-American, to the point that they would love to see the UK join NAFTA and be ever-more slavish to the US. See the Daily Telegraph under Lord Black for this instinct.
Both these points of view are merely debates about precisely how Britain should continue the imperial project - ie in which imperial power structure should it throw in its hat and be the junior partner?
For myself, I reject both, and I want a Britain that eschews imperialism entirely.
My journal says nothing of the sort. I'm decidely anti-imperialism and pro-free trade. The EU, first and foremost, is a free trading block, with people and goods able to move freely between states. Someone who's born in Denmark has just as much right to work in Britain as someone born there. A company in Spain can sell its goods in Sweden without any tarriffs being applied. Etc, etc.
On the debate about British imperialism in the past, I firmly believe that it's part of British heritage that can't be dismissed or shed but I just as firmly believe that imperialism (of any sort) isn't the way forward. It's precisely because of this that I'm for global responsibility and globally accepted solutions than unilateral or partisan ones, such as the short-sighted US-led invasion of Iraq and current US foreign policy in general.
If from that you want to (incorrectly) extrapolate that I'm pro-EU imperialism then that's your perogative. But that's about as logical as saying that anyone who opposes communism is a fascist, or vice versa.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
But in practice, they need probable cause and a warrant to use a wiretap. Though I'm sure you're like most Euros who think they're spying on us anyways, collecting all that damning evidence against us every day. And of course it's not worth mentioning that illegal wiretaps can't be used in courts. Oh, but that's right, we won't get a trial will we? Good old secret black ops will come into our house and drag us into Camp X-Ray and we'll never see the light of day again! Oh the agony, I wish I didn't live in such a country where they respect no freedoms!!
As of this past weekend, the beforementioned "wiretapping" costs have been alleviated within the Asterisk community. One of the contributing members released ChanSpy, which allows eavesdropping on all channel types support by *.
If a member can crank out code in a weekend to alleviate this issue, I seriously doubt the new wiretapping regulations will hinder any service providers in the long run.