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Vonage Says VoIP Traffic Blocked By Providers
Anonymouse writes "Advanced IP Pipeline reports that Vonage has filed numerous complaints with the FCC over their VoIP traffic being blocked by major providers, something providers have long worried about but had not yet been seen 'in the wild.' Analysts expect the issue of network neutrality (or network discrimination) is only going to get larger as the bell and cable companies expand their VoIP efforts and bump heads with smaller providers."
What the f&ck?! Phone companies are COMMON CARRIERS. They have to carry ALL calls!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
It takes a lot of money to build and maintain a solid infrastructure to support widespread VOIP, whereas Vonage, et al, are pretty much leeching on. Of course, the VOIP startups can try to make a partnership with the broadband providers. :p
For the purpose of disclosure, I do work for Comcast. That also gives me insight to how much money we are going to spend to upgrade our network so we can do a widespread VOIP rollout.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
As more and more broadband companies (Cable and DSL) offer VoIP (Digital Voice) services to their customers, they are going to have to ensure the product they provide is hardened against competative network resrouce usage (i.e. ANY other traffic). In the Cable world, MSOs are going to be applying QoS tags to the bits containing Voice calls from their customers. When a call originates behind one of their MTAs or eMTAs, they are expected to do this. As a result ALL other traffic should, and will suffer to some degree. Whether they are deliberately trying to break the Vonage call or not, it is going to happen.
The simple fact of the matter is that the Triple-Play threat (Voice, Video, Data) should be more of a concern to Vonage, as bundling will end up being more of a concern than network performance.
Oh look, a Vonage advert at the top of the page.
If a network or a local provider is trying to block VoIP by detecting the TCP/UDP port, or the type of service (inspecting the payload), why not just run it through SSL?
I have had a lot of trouble making calls to India on Vonage. It couldn't be an IP problem because I get my Vonage dialtone just fine. But I dial a number in India and it doesn't go through, or it says "this number cannot be reached." Is it possible that Indian telcos are blocking incoming POTS calls originating in the telco side? Has anyone else experienced this or am I just imagining?
I guess this has been the presumption of the Internet for corporations, but this has never been presumed for consumers.
How many consumers are using broadband providers that prevent them from serving web content on port 80?
What about users who get stiffed when their "unlimited monthly Internet" gets terminated due to "excessive usage" (hence leaving us to wonder what part of the service was "unlimited"?)
I think this is just a case of corporations get preferential treatment, when consumers would never be presumed to have the same rights.
I used to work for the Nasdaq stock market. What's interesting is that Vonage's founder employed a very similar strategy when he started the Island ECN. He essentially piggybacked off of Nasdaq's infrastruture in order to avoid the costs of building a network. He has since left the securities industry to venture into telecoms, but not before selling Island to some private equity firms for BIG $$$. Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining. In fact I am somewhat jealous that Vonage has come up with yet another way to capitalize on this model. These guys are very smart. And don't expect the FCC to do anything about it--in the end the SEC ended up as a major cheerleader for Island (lots of rhetoric about encouraging competition, etc.).
So this is a mixed blessing.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I work for a major backbone company who provides VoIP services to a number of players. We are getting ready to roll out Enhanced 911 (E911) service. Any company found to be arbitrarily blocking calls (including 911 calls) might be in for a bit of a legal surprise.
It's easy to block H323 traffic, but try blocking SIP or IAX traffic, it's not that easy, it can go through proxys, and you may even use it over SSH. Absolutely undetectable. The only thing that may tell that you are using VoIP is the network activity, you can easily identify a voip conversation with ethercap (forget about open ports and/or content), it's usually a constant flow of packets, in both directions, using a somehow stable bitrate. But even that can be hidden under a ssh connection.
ALMAFUERTE
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
That is not, by the way, modified by any fine print in their service agreements, unless they can show that customers in general read and understand the agreements. You cannot morally or (in the US or other former British possessions) legally bind somebody to a contract when you are deliberately relying on that person's not understanding the contract's terms; I believe the term is "meeting of minds".
ISPs routinely rely on, and indeed encourage, their customers' technical and legal ignorance. They also prey on people's basic good nature, people's bizzarre respect for arbitrary corporate "policies", and people's unwillingness or lack of energy to assert their rights. They should not be allowed to get away with it. The ISP industry has become a really, really dirty one, and needs cleaning up.
When ISPs start putting these restrictions in all their advertising, with the same prominence as their rates and (alleged) bandwidth, they can restrict customers' traffic. Until then, they are obligated to carry traffic in the reasonable and customary way... which means at least not blocking traffic to competitors, and arguably treating every packet exactly the same with no filtering, QoS, transparent proxies, restrictions on servers (how many customers understand the definition of a "server") or anything of the kind.
The mail ISP in my country, a former monopolist (and almost sole ISP) is tring this stunt. However, there are alot of unaware people falling for their 'great service'. But basically they are giving private IPs, and NATiing all their traffic on that service to one public IP, so VOIP cannot work on that service. And of course the package they offer with VOIP capabilties are much higer priced than the other service. And yes, they are also the main telephone company. They have very little compeition in land lines.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
New port numbers or IP addresses may be simpler, but can also more easily be blocked.
New port numbers aren't necessarily a solution, because someone calling you has to have a way to find you.
Fortunately, while there are default port numbers, they're not hardwired into the protocol. SIP registrars (directories), redirect servers ("i've moved"), proxies (firewall traversers, PBXes), and user agent servers (sip phones doing call forwarding, etc.) can all redirect your sip negotiation to any port they like, not just the default port.
An ISP trying to block someone using an external registrar would pretty much have to identify the SIP session by its content, which means examining the start of every TCP connection or UDP packet (SIP can use either) to figure out if it's a SIP session.
Unfortunately, the upcoming generation of edge routers can DO that. B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
- First!
- First Post!
- In Soviet Russia...
- And the server is toast...
- Well it didn't take long for that to happen...
- Nothing for you to see here, please move along huh huh huh
If a real first post arrives within a certain time limit, it should be preceded by one of these. And modding one down shouldn't cost you a mod point.Even if nobody but the first posters themselves know the difference, just spoiling the experience for them would make it worth it.
I have three types of cable coming in to my house:
1. Powerlines
2. Non-Twisted Copper
3. Coaxial cable
The first two types are connected to networks that were built with taxpayer assistance. Thanks to that, the services (and associated charges) comming over those wires are REGULATED by federal, state, and local laws.
The last type is connected to a network that was built by private companies with private sector dollars. That network is "slightly" regulated in that the cable company is given a monopoly on the township for a limited time span.
The way I see it, if a private company owns the network - they should decide what services will be provided on that network.
If consumers and federal/state/local governments do not like the options given to them by those private networks, they should make it a priority to fund (via tax dollars) a public network that can be run according to need.
Take the city of brotherly love - Philadelphia, PA for example. The city is tired of waiting for private cellular phone companies to provide wireless internet service, so the city is looking at building their own. Why shouldn't the government compete with the private sector? Especially in situations where the private sector is falling GROSSLY short on services, but collecting a king's ransom?
Capitalists claim competition is a key driver of efficiency in markets (they are right) - but why can't the government be a player in that market?
-ted
You are assuming that The port is blocked. This is the most stupid neandertal approach, though when cablecos and telcos are concerned such approaches are what is to be expected.
The correct assumption is that the traffic is not blocked, but assigned to a low priority class and throttled. Even if this is not being done now, it will be the situation in a year or two. I have been following RFPs run by several major telcos and the ability to both define and apply such policies is a must. If you do not have it your equipment does not get past the initial phase. And they are not talking per interface classes and diffserv here. They want it on the scale of a whole counry network with an idiot friendly GUI to put in front of the droid in business development who will be defining the policy assigned to each product.
Basically Vonage and Co are zombies and they will rot away in a the next 2-3 years. As Don Corleone used to say "Nothing personal, just business".
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Skype's peer-to-peer randomly distributed connectivity is impossible to detect, impossible to lock down, and therefore impossible to block.
The skype program can even automatically detect whether a connection is BEING blocked, and can decide to set up a new connection to another intermediate machine.
Remember - skype's program makes at least 50 random connections to other computers in the distributed network, and any one of these could be used to route voice traffic.
Carriers stand absolutely zero chance of blocking skype.
Which is why I've been advocating the creation of a public distributed "VPN" along the same lines - to carry more than just VoIP traffic.
There is a federal regulation that mandates that you must be able to take your telephone # with you to another service. The problem with the law is that I don't think there is any section that says how long the bells can drag their feet in this process. There are many cases where the POTS providers stall for MONTHS fufilling LNP (Local number portability) requests for VoIP telcos. Can anyone point me the actual section of the regulation that governs LNP?
I didn't find the answer to this question in the Telecom Act of 1996
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
If a broadband ISP can't handle all their users utilizing 160Kbit/sec of bandwith they are far too oversold to be of any value to any consumer.
I work for such a provider, and we're also a Old School Long Distance(tm) company. If we were to block or limit wanted traffic (VoIP service), we would be breaking the statutes that allow us to remain common carriers of IP traffic.
Even to deal with virus outbreaks, we don't stop the packets (that would be filtering, which is bad), we just redirect them to a device I have built that can identify the customer from radius logs and network maps, then spits out a report for us to contact them.
Common carrier is important, and there is court prescidence to justify the fact that 'rate limiting' is the same as 'filtering' in the eyes of common carrier status. Let someone take it to court against the provider, then there will be hell to pay. Would you want to be "responsible" for the data passing over your internet connection?
Thought not.
Why don't they use encrypted packets and random or pseudo-random port numbers?
That's pretty much the solution any time some idiot tries to filter your network traffic. At that point they either have to let it though or they have to start blocking any traffic they can't identify. And the latter option results in a substantially unusable internet connection and they'd lose all their customers.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.