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How ISPs May Quietly Kill VoIP
ravenII writes "PBS's i'Cringley's informative piece gives an eye-opening look at the anticompetitive behavior of some ISPs who are showing up late to the VoIP game. This is not something that could be easily mandated, and the beauty of this approach is that they're not explicitly doing anything to the 3rd party service applications. They're just identifying and tagging their own services, which is within their rights."
didn't the FCC lay the smack down on some ISP for doing this? Verizon maybe?
If bad puns were like deli meat, this would be the wurst
That's not fair. A new innovation comes and is sucessful, and people have to squash it wrather than create compition, which would in turn create better products and lower prices for consumers, yet possible revenue for the best player. I have vonage. I love it. $25 a month, it kills the same bill from SBC ($73/month, everything the same) and Verizon($93/month, everything the same)
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
This is a good example of where letter of the law and spirit of the law collide. The FCC lacks the expertise too adequetly monitor their charge. There needs to be another solution. Perhaps, more openness?
So the main point seems to be that there will be a preferential class of packets that will be guaranteed to have some level of service such that the packets arrive quickly and in order. The bad part is that all other traffic will remain at the same old unguaranteed service level.
Well, that's what we have now.
Face it, the reason people use VoIP is because it is cheap/free, not because it has superior QoS than POTS. Throw in compression and encryption and you're talking about some pretty serious degradation of service.
So, in summary, nothing to see here.
When our call service can't reach me in order to help the world's largest retailer (you figure it out), then we'll see what ISP gets what heated phone call from whom. Hint: it won't be me, rather someone at bit less friendly with a much bigger bat.
...and just as you can tunnel just about any traffic you want through port 443 assuming you know what you're doing, you can encrypt traffic between networks. Granted, that will make things more difficult at first, but it will allow people to get around things like this.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
They would not DARE do this.
But we do not have control of our politicians, our public servants. Why not?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
send it encrypted either over port 80, or some randomization across ports, an have a large rolling bank if IP #'s through which traffic is routed.
Telecoms can counter, but it won't be as easy unless they want to slow down their subscriber's other services.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
I for one welcome our VOIP packet shaping telco overlords.
But seriously, this has been a known threat for a while, at least it is a threat to every other P2P service on the Web. Universities routinely packet shape their networks, filtering out P2P filesharing programs, or giving them such a low priority it's as if you're using dial-up when using Kazaa lite.
www.theswitchboard.ca looks like the gold nugget in that article.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
You know it's bad when the feature link in the "new" story is already colored dark from being followed.
I get my Internet from wifi. There is also cable and DSL at my house. The electric company is talking about the IP over powerline stuff. I can go to someone else if they mess with my connection. Even if it isn't intentional, if the service isn't up to the level I want, I will go to someone else.
Remember people, vote with your feet.
how is it that it was ok for ISP to create AUPs that specified that we couldn't run servers from our connections but now that they want to block voip everyone is up in arms about it?
I'm a bit tired of these stories and frankly I'm a bit tired of faceless corporations using their established position to hurt consumers.
It's time for militancy. I'm not talking about assassination, although some may suggest that. I'm talking about good old fashioned corporate terrorism.. Lets knock down their cell towers, burn their corporate headquarters, intimidation of executives.. etc
We've gotta grab this situation by the arms and control it. I'm not getting any younger, neither are you. Lets join forces and do something real about this because the lawyers and politicians aren't there to save us, just the opposite.
R.A.S.1974.
Thinking they could profit off someone elses infrastructure...
Oh well, silly upitty VOIP providers get to die a slow and cash flow draining death.
And on taxation alone with Congress enter the fray. Basically you'll be looking at a situation where Congress will step in, if only to provide a "regulating influence to ensure competition". And to make sure they finally get their hands permanently into the net and "free enterprise".
You can bet they'll weigh in on this issue shortly, if the proceedings and back room deals haven't begun already.
Companies like Vonage will be fine, but it won't be long before things like "Federal Subscriber Line Charge" and garbage like that begin sweeping in to cut profits and make it much harder for Vonage to conduct business.
Be prepared to be taxed if the business is within the US, or is conducted in any way within US territory. It's coming regardless of your desire to see it or not. It's too big a honey pot to ignore.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Couldnt vonage, skype, or even the local router tag all the packets the same way the phone company tags theirs?
Adapt or die
VoIP is going to take over eventually. These attempts at preventing it will only slow it down a little bit. In the face of progress, businesses have to figure out when to begin adopting the new standards or they don't stand a chance.
People have mentioned encryption, tunneling, etc in the past...my question is: why wasn't this implemented from the start? Nothing to do with beating ISPs being meanie heads...but simple security for a private phone conversation?
This looks like a MAJOR oversight here...a key-based/challenge scheme on negotiation and then compress the encrypted stream. Oh wait. I just described GSM (cell phone).
Grant it, the ISP can tag packets destined for the VoIP servers...that'll take something else. Perhaps off topic, but this encryption oversight makes me wonder.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
I think governments should control them and regulate phone costs to something reasonable. As it is all the phone companies as they are split up are just baby Bells, with their own small monopolies for local phone work, just as the old Bell had it's own big monopoly.
Mind, I also think that water, power, heating and basic television and radio services should also be under the domain of a government controled company. So my opinion is a little more left on this matter than most people's.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
The way I see it, if ISP are proactively working to classify and treat VOIP packets differently than other packets, VOIP software makers should move to mitigate these efforts. There are clear cut ways in which companies like Vonage could engineer their software which would make VOIP services virtually indistinguishable from other packets. Why can't VOIP companies play the ISP's own game?
The argument he makes is that big providers will offer their own VoIP offerings, and will give their VoIP traffic precedence on their networks, in turn degrading service for all other traffic (and thus, competitor's VoIP traffic).
However, without realizing it, he also explains why it won't happen. He argues that currently, all traffic is routed using "best effort". His argument then sxtends that these large organizations will effectively restrict other VoIP traffic as they give priority to ther own. I don't see how this necesarilly holds, though.
Imagine a high bandwitch connection. A certain percentage of that bandwidth is the used to service the "preferred" VoIP traffic. This leaves the remainder of the bandwidth to be divided amoung the other traffic. For this to actually affect the competitor's VoIP traffic, the amount of preferred traffic must be large enough to use enough of the available bandwidth that the remainder is unable to service the remaining traffic effectively.
Thus, this practice would not have a significant effect until a large amount of the VoIP traffic is "preferred" traffic - which supposedly would be the goal of starting to do so in the first place.
The only effect that creating "preferred" traffic will have is to provide better service for that traffic. I think that the actual effect on other traffic (even competitor's VoIP), will remain small.
Would this (hypothetical) 250ms latency also affect all OTHER traffic including games?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
For some reason Cringely gets paid to say stuff like "I predict Microsoft will become the world's biggest Linux vendor", things that you'd otherwise expect to hear from a 22-year old desktop support technician getting stoned during his lunch break.
where there's fish, there's cats
Speaking of harnessing distributed vortals: it is highest time that one-to-one ISPs started to monetize out-of-the-box paradigms by facilitating bleeding-edge interfaces to interactive VoIP-schemas.
Their failure to enhance agile paradigms was leading them to reinvent best-of-breed mindshare and extended the loss-loss metrics of their collaborative e-services.
Just my 2 bilions of Google-shares (0.2c).
Why can't new ISP's crop up that don't do this? Wouldn't that be a big advantage? Or are barriers to entry too big in broadband?
The propaganda that capitalism is the most powerful medium for innovation, falls on its face here.
Capitalism with sensible government regulation is indeed the best path to rapid innovation.
Uh oh... did I just say that?!!
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Actually, adding on another layer of encryption makes the problem worse. From the article summary:
"...the beauty of this approach is that they're not explicitly doing anything to the 3rd party service applications. They're just identifying and tagging their own services, which is within their rights."
The service providers are prioritizing THEIR VoIP traffic; so unless you can encrypt and then mask your VoIP service provider's packets to look like the ISP's, all encryption will do is increase the latency for voice - remember encryption/decryption requires time. The ISP doesn't explicitily delay Vonage's packets, for example, it simply upgrades the QoS priority of their own packets; this conveniently screws over 3rd-party providers like Vonage while not getting the ISP's in legal hot water.
Encryption can protect your 3rd party call from evesdropping, but can only increase latency under this new sneaky scheme.
And it wouldn't even be hard. All that'd be needed is an even-handed rule: an ISP can tag any kind of traffic they want any way they want, but they have to tag all of any particular kind of traffic the same way. If they want to give VoIP traffic priority over other traffic, they have to give all VoIP traffic on their network the same priority. Giving some (theirs) priority and others (the competition's) not would be a regulatory violation.
We really ARE out to fuck ourselves up.
Seriously: Look at all the crap we do to ourselves, just in the technology arena alone. It's only a matter of time before we are sitting here, argueing with each other, trying to screw everybody else to get the sweet deal for ourselves, when some small previously third world country blows by us and takes the lead.
Quite frankly, I'm disgusted by all the crap I have seen, and it's no wonder why other countries dislike us. I mean, if we are willing to do this to ourselves, what would we do to other countries?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
This isn't an issue that requires direct oversight.
It requires clear labeling of products so people know what they are buying.
One set of ISPs offers "Internet Service", by which they mean access to the web, and then a collection of other services that they will offer.
And there is nothing wrong with them offering that service. It is what many, perhaps most, customers want.
The problem is that it is not the "Internet Service" that others want, including most slashdot readers presumably. Which is basically unrestricted access to the Internet with at most a total bandwidth constraint (and protect-the-net restrictions like no forged packets).
If an ISP is clearly labeled as providing "Internet Access" then they could not violate their service guarantees to you to favor their own traffic. If you want to use Vonage, host a server, select your own email provider, or any of a number of things that "power users" find desirable you would look for an "Access Provider".
If you only have a vague idea of what the difference between VoIP and email is, then you probably want a "Service Provider" who will provide you with services and take responsibility for integrating them.
The key problem right now is the ISPs are bluffing at providing open access to the Internet. There is probably a strong case that stealing from the common pool of "best effort" capacity without explicit disclosure.
But the solution is not to restrict what business Service Providers go into, it's to make sure they clearly label what business they are in.
These are heady days for Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone services. The other big broadband Internet provider is typically your local cable TV company. The trick for phone companies and cable companies alike is to hurt the VoIP upstarts without
incurring the wrath of Congress, the FCC, or any other regulator. As the phone and cable companies begin offering their own VoIP services in real volume, they plan to "tag" their own VoIP packets so that at least within their own networks, their VoIP service will have COS (Class of Service) assignments with their routers, switches, etc. They also plan on implementing distinct Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) for the tagged packets.
VoIP providers have been claiming that some ISPs (specifically rural telcos) have been keeping out their competing phone service. Doing something to make your own VoIP service better isn't illegal, even if it effectively makes every other VoIP service worse over the same network.
This is the beginning of a web services war where the advantage lies almost entirely with the broadband service provider. The telcos and cable companies will offer generic VoIP service and only change it if some startup comes along offering better features.
The service not only offers free VoIP phone service, it has free voicemail as well.
Vonage presently offers fixed VoIP services through the use of analog terminal adapters and semi-mobile service through the use of softphone applications, but theswitchboard.ca offers the additional metaphor of a pay or public phone. Broadband Internet service has popularized the idea of continuous operation, as in continuous communication.
"And there are other dirty tricks available to broadband ISPs. Telecom New Zealand, for example, is reportedly planning to alter TCP packet interleaving to discourage VoIP. By bunching all voice packets in the first half of each second, half a second of dead air would be added to every conversation, changing latency in a way that would drive grandmothers everywhere back to their old phone companies."
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
...which is, if the monopolistic telecoms can shaft Internet companies, they will. If 3rd-party VoIP goes away, that just leaves the ISPs themselves to scramble a deal with a telecom before they too get battered. And if NZ Telecom is already doing this, then our dear old monster Telstra here in Oz will shortly be doing an end-run of the Australian industry post-privatisation. I'd love to see their list of targets, it will be impressive.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Technology and Free Market Competion
1) Free Market forces:
As you all know the ISP business is a very competitive business. If I am a paying customer and I am paying for high speed internet access, I will get this from my provider. This suggests that my packets will get these preferential tags for my internet (http, port 80 access).
2) Technology
Now if I use a VOIP software program that happens to:
(a) encrypt traffic (err like Skype for example)
(b) happens to run its traffic over an http proxy like mechanism through port 80 (which automatically separates the VOIP traffic from browser traffic), how can the ISP distinguish my VOIP packets from my internet packets?
The answer is as far as I know they cant (I'm not a VOIP expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong). I'm guesing they cannot distinguish a long high bandwidth legitimate transaction (which I am paying for) from a VOIP conversation.
It sounds like to me that innovation has changed the business model in the telecomunications industry, and players that missed the boat are now trying to compete by blocking these innovations...
However since they're not innovators they don't understand that theses bumps in the road will be simply be innovated around.
We heard this same argument in a different flavor about people being able stopping P2P filesharing before.
But hey what do I know.
----- "Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand."
A follow up to the March 3 column appears at the end of his March 17 column.
Cable providers in North America use the DOCSIS standard to transport IP over a HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) network aka cable modems.
DOCSIS 1.0 doesn't offer any QoS, everything is best effort, however DOCSIS 1.1 for wich deploying has started allows for QoS. Combined with cable-modems with RJ-11 phone jacks, you simply tag the voice packets and priorize them on *your* network --> no more echo/delay problems.
When other VoIP providers piggy back to do their VoIP, you don't need to interfere with them, you just don't help them, and "of course" don't try calling tech support for third-party VoIP problems.
The thing tough is when the VoIP packets enter the internet, they're not priorized anymore. The only way it would work is for ISP to make deals between them to priorize each other's VoIP packets and THAT would probably be considered abusive (illegal). One way to avoid this is by plugging your VoIP systems with 'old school" hardware phone switches and enter the regular phone network, but that's expensive.
DOCSIS 2.0 wich is coming soon will probably allow seamless video-conference.
Maybe I misunderstand something, but...
It seems that this scheme will work ONLY IF the internet carried only VOIP packets. Then you can tag your own VOIP packets as precious, and the others' get lost. But the net carries many other packets - http, ftp, mail for instance. Won't the scheme that he describes make the net worse for all these other packets? I don't think that that will be implemented. Suddenly the whole net slows down.
Well, maybe this will kill the net as a whole.
Or if all traffic but the others' VOIP is tagged precious, VOIP will just disguise itself as mail. Or maybe all your traffic is tagged precious and everything that belongs to competitors as not - they already would have done that. This has nothing to do with VOIP.
Am I misunderstanding?
If the amount of prefered VoIP traffic was enough to screw over non-preferd traffic as low bandwidth as VoIP (80kbps in the heftiest implementations I've seen), it would also screw over all other non-prefered traffic including normal web traffic, FTP, etc. Well I don't know about the rest of you, but I get pissy if my transfer rate drops below 300KiB/sec, if it was less than 10Kib/sec, I'd be looking for a new ISP the next day.
I'm not saying I particularly agree with the practise, but I hardly see it as being able to kill VoIP. If I have a fast broadband connection, I'll have more than enough bandwidth for VoIP. If that gets cut back, well then no reason to pay for it right? I'll jump ship for someone else.
Would be great when someone reverse engineers their tagging and sets tags themselves. Or would they use standard QOS tagging? It'd be hard to imagine a telco deploying a new router OS in their network to support some propreitary QOS scheme...
NEW CAUSE OF DEATH: LAG!!!
......LP... .........me. my address i...(10 minutes later)lane. HEL...P ME.....pleas.....eeeeeeeeeee"
operator:"hello, 911 emergency."
random person being killed my a madman: "HE......
operator: "miss can you please repeat that."
R.P.B.K.B.M.M.: I SA.......
hours later police arive on the scene to find a psycho wearing our poor victams skin as a trendy new blazer. The coroner arrives shorlty there after and rules that the cause of death was none other then...LAG!!!
wow i guess gamers had it right all along. lag really does kill
The "best effort" service is far from being a "bad effort". The users want to download files fast, so the ISP has to oblige and provide bandwidth. They want to play video games, so the ISP has to oblige and provide good latency. Guess what, voice over IP requires less bandwidth that downloading a file, and is more tolerant to latency than playing a video game.
In practice, we have been observing over the years a "raising tide of quality". The speed of the average connection over the Internet is more or less proportional to the speed of the user connection, because it is what the users expects. 20 years ago, 9600 bps was considered great. 10 years ago, 64 kbps. Today, users expect to use the 256 kbps of their broadband connection. Tomorrow, users will probably get connected through 100baseT Ethernet, or 50 Mbps WIFI. Yet, voice barely needs more than 20 kbps.
There is no doubt that some ISP somewhere is concocting some evil plot, but the chances are that the evil plot will fall on its face. Probably not much to worry about.
You folks been sleeping?? This if from March 3rd! First we post Steroids BS and now 3 week old Cringley articles. I guess getting slashdotted is not what it used to be..
Why is it that as soon as Bob learns about something it is automatically new and automatically the deathnell of some industry? It's like the technology didn't exist until he spoke of it.
Welcome to 1998 Bob, your 802.1p has been waiting for you.
I guess I shouldn't mention the fact that QOS will wet the bed when you approach the upperbound of the line....it really doesn't like to be choked out... unlike Bob.
--"It's Bradford Company, slash your last name, dot your first name"
You don't need special QOS guaratees or priorities for VoIP: regular TCP/IP service is more than enough for VoIP; if they degrade regular TCP/IP service to the point that VoIP doesn't work anymore, games and all sorts of other applications won't work anymore either. The thought that voice needs special networks or service classes is why telephone companies missed the boat on VoIP in the first place--they just didn't get it.
The only way to kill VoIP is through explicit, service-specific filtering, and that's technically hard to do in general, and quite anticompetitive.
All of this power comes from an ISP's ability to block packets based on content and/or port. Whether it be for "security" reasons, as many university network admins claiming, or outright preventing competition as these service providers are clearly begining to do, the restriction of network data is certainly an issue.
By restricting access to various services we will begin to break down key features of many systems and applications. For example, many gentoo users at universities are unable to utilize rsync mirrors due to port restrictions, thus creating more stress on the servers they get portage updates from. Other examples include blocking the CVS port (and other concurrent versioning systems), effectively cutting people from actively participating in software development.
What's the solution to this? Many people have begun trying to reroute traffic through other ports such as HTTP (80), FTP (21), AIM-OSCAR (5190), and other ports that their isps leave open. While this serves as a temporary method (and quite difficult in many circumstances), it ruins the entire concept of standardizing services for different ports. Furthermore, it creates many problems as the people who run servers for these commonly restricted servers now have to compromise their listening port selection (if you can only trust 2-3 ports to be available to everyone, then you can only theoretically host 2-3 services).
Due to these attrocities, it would seem to be quite important for network service providers to have some sort of regulation in regards to blocking data. Otherwise we will continue to be under the control of a dangerous oligopoly.
After all, just about every other utility has had anti-trust issues with it, it is too much to ask to work out this problem before it gets unruly?
can qos packet tagging be used to our advantage? can you "fake out" the switch into tagging non-voip traffic to give it a higher priority as it moves through the network?
Just wait until the power companies start offering broadband. Since they're not already in the phone market VoIP won't be hurting them, it'd be helping more than anything else.
Sure some of the big telco's could strike deals with the utilities that would intentionally result in restricted VoIP usage on the power lines, but the power companies should get smart to the fact that they can put the telcos out of business. I strongly believe that the power companies can roll out universal U.S. broadband a lot more efficiently and decades sooner than our telephone companies.
Direct away from face when opening.
you sir are a moron
When our call service can't reach me in order to help the world's largest retailer (you figure it out), then we'll see what ISP gets what heated phone call from whom. Hint: it won't be me, rather someone at bit less friendly with a much bigger bat.
If you're using a home Cable or DSL Modem for a mission critical application like this then I think you have bigger issues to deal with (such as your ISPs TOS). Otherwise this probably isn't going to affect you a whole lot. I don't foresee this causing too much trouble on people with T1 and larger pipes supplying their connections...
1. Write about the coming doom of VoIP
2. Bash VoIP providers
3. Glorify theswitchboard.ca
4. Hint that VoIP software can allow "bad guys" to "steal your machine"
5. Profit?
The amount of bandwidth for VoIP is practically negligable at roughtly ~12Kbps. I've used Skype on dial-up while surfing the net with no noticable side-effects. Even if the ISP's want to prioritize their packets for their own VoIP protocol, unless Internet bandwidth starts shrinking, I can't really see how ISPs could effect the 'Quality of Service' of VoIP. But thanks for FUD Cringley.
Film at 11
On cell phones: that can be unacceptable. In a VoIP environment, from the testing I've done, above 250ms things start getting seriously strange thanks to the packet switched stuff.
/can/ interleave; many of the frame QoS techniques do similar things to their layer 2 transport frames).
And I think QoS is an answer (not the answer) even when there is sufficient bandwidth -- for the reason above. Latency and avoiding inappropriate delays. I want to shove my (usually small) voice packets on the wire in a reasonable time frame. I want to interleave them with larger packets; I may even want to deliberately fragment those larger packets to make for a more efficient interleaving model (ATM QoS on a Cisco relies on multilink PPPoA just so I
In an IP Telephony network we, as an organisation, do QoS on gig links. And no, those gig links aren't heavily utilised. But we'd like to ensure that even at a bad time the phone works; people REALLY REALLY like the phone to work.
Packet loss? Video is less sensitive than voice to packet loss. I can lose a packet, yes. But I'd like to avoid it since people know what a phone sounds like and people know what voice is, and since I want to use UDP to avoid overhead on my traffic (small data per packet; don't oversubscribe. In fact, it's common to use compressed headers to further reduce the VoIP overhead).
And on bandwdith; that's all codec and header compression dependent, now, isn't it?
Um- did we put capitalism on hold here? If an ISP starts quashing VoIP traffic (or not handling it properly), consumers will, if it matters to them, move to someone who does things right. If it really matters to consumers, someone will charge a little bit more if they develop a reputation and guarantee(s), otherwise it'll be used as a tool of differentiation.
Want an example of this? Speakeasy. They don't care what you run on your line. They don't care if you share it. As a result, they can charge a little more than others.
If consumers don't care, well...guess what, it doesn't really matter, does it? No sense crying over it; it's still pretty useable technology for businesses and saavy techies at home...and if it gets a serious foothold there, that creates a bigger market for reliable long distance VoIP, and all it will take is one ISP doing VoIP for others to follow or struggle to compete retaining customers not interested in VoIP.
Please help metamoderate.
VoIP is going to take over eventually. These attempts at preventing it will only slow it down a little bit. In the face of progress, businesses have to figure out when to begin adopting the new standards or they don't stand a chance.
RTFA. They aren't trying to prevent VOIP. They're trying to ensure that the only decent VOIP comes from in house so they can continue to sell phone and internet access on the same bill, only this time it'll be VOIP phone.
If ISPs use QoS to give preferential treatment to their on VoIP services, they can only do so within their own network, as mentioned in the article. If best effort carriage under such conditions results in degrading all other VoIP traffic, then the whole scheme seems doomed to failure.
/jab
The special, high-quality calls promised you by ISPs engaging in this practice would revert to standard best effort calls the moment you reach out to touch someone who is using a different ISP. This scheme only supports high quality on something analogous to a local phone call.
The way out of this, is to either forbid monopolies(as in, allow competition in), or minimize the monopoly. Personally, I think that by minimizing the monopoly (fiber/cable to the home from the CO; NOTHING ELSE), society will be furthered as the interesting piece is in the service.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
- clueless types who should have bought service
- a few odd nerds
- spammers
Even the nerds won't buy it, because normal service is way less expensive.Regulation is required because competition has been blocked, both legally by the government and economically by the prohibitive capital costs. You can't just get a business loan and start stringing fiber all over town. Probably you'd go to jail. If this were possible, the sky would be blacked out by overhead cable.
That's part of the point here - if ISPs do it quietly enough, most consumers might not realize it. And for many that do, there's always that service contract - $99 if you stop the service before a year is up, for Verizon, IIRC. $99, I doubt that many will incur this cost in order to switch to a different ISP just for VOIP reasons only.
pull your head
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Big deal... it has a tag... some network DEVICE has to inject the tag into the data stream right?
...sure Comcast could then make it so the tags can only hit their VOIP "head end" or whatever, but once they do that, it's going to be pretty evident that they're fucking around and the Congress critters might get irked...
Who's to say that I ummm, don't have some sort of flaw in my system that just happens to inject the same tag into the datastream, which just happens to make my Vonage VOIP travel seamlessly along with the crap from Comcast VOIP?
An interesting thought - people are starting to get their 911 service through VoIP.
What if, god forbid, because of providers tinkering with QoS, someone needs to make an emergency 911 call and can't or results in a call thats utterly unable to be understood?
Wouldn't that make the ISP in question doing the tinkering liable for interfering with a life or death situation?
Brielle
Not as worried as the anticompetitive behavior of the phone and cable companies against municipal broadband/muni wifi.
To me, VOIP is just a temporary stepping stone to free voice, period. On the extreme left we have old analog phones that anyone and everyone can use. On the extreme right we have pure internet communications whereby there's no artificial segregation of long distance.
We're on our way moving from the left to the right. This takes some time due to mass adoption of broadband, technology, and some sort of universal standard. However, long distance charges and area codes bound by geographic locations are on the way out.
However, someone still has to pay for the infrastructure, the lines under the ground/ocean, to move traffic. My guess is that these telco dinosaurs will end up being compensated by charging for better quality of service to paying VOIP providers.
eTrade SUCKS
On the same topic this week, Cringely speculates...
r ch/thread.html/
"there are other dirty tricks available to broadband ISPs. Telecom New Zealand, for example, is reportedly planning to alter TCP packet interleaving to discourage VoIP. By bunching all voice packets in the first half of each second, half a second of dead air would be added to every conversation, changing latency in a way that would drive grandmothers everywhere back to their old phone companies. This is because phone conversations happen effectively in real time and so are very sensitive to problems of latency. Where one-way video and audio can use buffering to overcome almost any interleaving issue, it is a deal-breaker for voice."
This has certainly pissed off a few Kiwis, as seen on the NZNOG list: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/pipermail/nznog/2005-Ma
Voice and video: CEO says No. 1 cable provider will offer new range of phone services.
By ROBERT LUKE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/18/05
Comcast, aiming to grow at BellSouth's expense, says it plans to be a "quality phone company" with services unlike its competitors.
Philadelphia-based Comcast, the nation's No. 1 cable provider, will roll out its phone service in metro Atlanta this year.
But the service, based on a technology called Voice over Internet Protocol, won't be a copycat of BellSouth's, Brian Roberts, Comcast's chief executive, said in an interview.
"Our main goal is to quickly evolve the product to not just be voice, but to be [an integrated] communications product," said Roberts. He was in Atlanta to speak to Comcast employees and to the board of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce.
That not only means offering features such as unified messaging -- where all messages, be it voice, e-mail or whatever, go into one in-box -- but video phone service as well.
"I was looking this week in our labs at the video phone product that we are going to offer over the Comcast digital voice platform, over the Comcast high-speed [Internet] platform, all within a year to 18 months," Roberts said.
Comcast, which has 700,000 customers in 12 metro Atlanta counties and Rome, will take its time to roll out the service, initially targeting those who subscribe to its high-speed Internet service.
Phone calls will be routed over Comcast's facilities, not over the public Internet. That will help to ensure quality of service, Roberts said. Emergency 911 service will be included, as well as directory assistance and backup power to enable phones to work in a power outage.
"All of that is needed to really try to take significant market share and to be a quality phone company," Roberts said. "We're going to take our time. We're not in a race. We think this is a good business for the next 50 years."
Roberts reckons that Comcast can achieve a 20 percent market penetration in phone service in five years. Its service will cost $39.95 a month for unlimited local and domestic long-distance calls.
Metro Atlanta is one of Comcast's top four markets, Roberts said. The others are Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.
"This is clearly the fastest-growing large market we have in terms of population and housing growth," Roberts said.
Comcast wants to extend its reach here.
"It's a high priority to grow in this area," said Roberts, without elaborating.
Comcast and Time Warner have bid for Adelphia Communications, which owns clusters of cable systems in some of North Georgia's fastest-growing counties, such as Cherokee and Bartow.
http://www.ajc.com/news/content/business/0305/18bi zcomcast.html
Tell me who you are going to switch to if they all do that. You are so full of hot air, but devoid of any facts.
Why is it with all you right-wing nuts that anytime someone suggests a rule to limit corporations (who ARE NOT people by the way) from engaging in unfair practices, you all scream bloody murder like the sky is falling? Yet, you have no problem using every facility at your disposal to dictate to a private individual what medical choices they make (ala Terri Schiavo)? Fuckin' assholes is what you are. You are what is wrong with America.
at least you had the bulls not to post that AC
We just want a net pipe. We don't want you to rape us. Much like we just want unencumbered roads, we don't want a toll booth out of our driveway.
Yet they fight municipal broadband.
Profit maximization can only go so far.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
I am a little confused here.
Correct me if I am wrong but in order to implement QoS enabled VoIP on the Internet all internet routers need to be aware of the QoS policy. Otherwise a router which is not aware of the policy essentially strips any indication that it is a voice packet.
It is not good enough to use QoS in certain parts of a network, it has to be end to end. The large ISP you subscirbe to cannot deliver end to end QoS to anywhere in the world.
Tagging packets meaningfully implies the use of MPLS. However, using MPLS usually means you are using a private IP network and not the Internet.
The way I see it is there will always be an enterprise class VoIP service offered through a global MPLS network provided by ISP's for business and a best effort Internet VoIP offering for residential customers.
The residential service won't be perfect but the public will tolerate quality issues like we have with cell phones if the price is right.
if ISP X has an agreement with ISP Y to pass the traffic through itself ('transit AS'), without any special considerations, it will do just that, as a best effort. Tagging? Of course, X will ignore any tags created by Y. X would be crazy to do otherwise. I used to work for ISP (which had AS 1. makes a good trivia question, eh?) so that's pretty much the rules of the game. This is incidently the main reason why QoS on the Internet (with a capital 'I') is practically non-existant. Since the backbone is privatized and fragmented, there is no real cooperation, only competition. I do what's optimal for my AS, and to hell with the global perspective (a 'hot potato' routing would make a good example). In such an environment I'm surprised VoIP works at all. In principle it ought to be less reliable than two tin cans connected with a wire. At least that wire is a point-to-point conneciton, not going through the hostile AS.
Sure, an ISP can block the ports used by SIP, or the IP addresses used by Vonage and other third-party VoIP servers. That would certainly do the job. But then the FCC would quickly come down on them like a ton of bricks for such a blatantly anticompetitive action, just as they hit Madison River Communications a few weeks ago.
I'll assume that the third party VoIP provider is clueful, so they have fast, redundant paths to all the Tier 1 backbones. This means it would be up to the ISP to somehow delay third-party VoIP packets between his own customers and the backbones.
Simply giving priority to an ISP's own VoIP packets is not such a bad thing. In many cases this involves diverting them to dedicated links or backbones, leaving the normal backbone routes unaffected. But even if they rely on the general purpose backbones for connectivity to their own VoIP gateways, then giving priority to their own VoIP traffic delays other traffic only when there's too much total traffic in the first place. Routers don't gratuitously delay a packet just because it has a low priority level. They'll delay a packet only when link demand exceeds supply and other packets have a higher priority.
So unless the ISP's router deliberately discriminates between third-party VoIP traffic and "ordinary" data traffic -- and that could be detected fairly easily -- I think it would be difficult to make their network unusable for third-party VoIP without doing the same thing to ordinary data traffic. The delay variance for all traffic would have to be quite high. Then all of their customers, not just those using third-party VoIP, would complain and/or switch to their competitors.
It's clear that the best way to protect against this sort of thing is true competition in the access market. But lacking that, I think even a bare minimum of regulation, combined with eternal vigilance on the part of the end users, should keep the ISPs from getting away with too many shenanigans.
When the power utilities finish making internet over power lines feasable and fast for mass consumption. Then we'll see the telco's and cable companies running to the government for help, hopefully to be ignored by the government like regular people are.
My internet connection dies every month or so. Often, just resetting the cable modem fixes it. Sometimes it's an area-wide problem that lasts a few hours or more.
I've purchased a new cable modem, but it still requires resetting now and again.
With this kind of reliability, I'm not ready to go to VOIP. When's the last time your landline was down?
...why does it take so long for these things to get on slashdot? The article is over two weeks old. There have been two other "I, Cringely" columns since this one, as you can see here.
It's even more annoying when I think of all the great submissions that won't make it to the front page, because of all the dupes and old news that get on there.
Hell, as a telecoms person, this is how I always thought they'd do it! And why not? It's their private network, not some hippy "public good" service. (There's a whole 'nother arguement right there...)
It ties in with the growth in non-internet "internet" services - NAT'd subnets using "transparent" proxies, and blocking everything except ports 80/443 & 119 (saves them running a news server for all the warez & pr0n leeches). Not to mention the walled garden that the phone companines are calling "mobile internet".
Mind you, from a purely technical telecoms POV, I always thought VoIP was a badly kludged-together disaster waiting to happen - the hacks involved in adding QoS & priority in order to emulate the workings of a switched network are non-trivial and flaky at best, unless lots of bandwidth is thrown at them.
The only real advantages IP networks have over circuit-switched networks are (a) cheapness - near-commodity hardware helps there - and (b) reconfigurability to suit demand. That second point is the kicker - given the choice of over-dimensioning a network to provide good QoS to everybody all of the time, or minimally-dimensioning a network to provide average QoS to most people most of the time (while saving a lot of money) and reconfiguring to follow demand, which do you think a telco is going to do?
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
These large ISPs have spent billions of dollars developing and/or acquiring their networks.
They deserve the right to treat traffic however they please as long as it travels through their routers.
Remember, just in case you forgot, without these large ISPs there would no internet.
All this QoS stuff they require to do the "dirt" as such - will it provide some oomph to IPv6?
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Well put, good sir. I concur with your views and wish to subscribe to your newsletter and/or digest.
Here's how it works technically:
- Upstream bandwidth from customer to the ISP is often limited due to asymmetric technologies, and it's up to the customer's hardware to put the time-critical packets on the wire first and keep their upstream MTU sizes small enough (e.g. 1500 byte packets take too long at 128kbps.)
- Some ISPs have DSL concentrator networks that are oversubscribed upstream, but not many - the technology's symmetric, and consumer bandwidth is mostly downstream. VOIP takes up very low bandwidth - typically about 30kbps (8kbps G.729a plus RTP/UDP/IP headers). If you're not getting enough upstream bandwidth, you may need to buy a bigger pipe.
- Once you're past the feeder networks onto open backbone, there's plenty of room, at least on any telco-sized ISP (mom&pop ISPs may have congestion problems, but they're not the ones Cringely is accusing of being Evil.) Most of the Tier 1 providers use a lot of OC48s, especially telcos who own their own fiber plants - it's cheaper to waste bandwidth than to use lots of mux equipment to limit it, at least in the network core.
- Downstream feeder networks can be congested, but they're not usually that bad, and again, VOIP uses very little bandwidth.
- The big problem is dumping the traffic onto the recipient's egress line. If the recipient is trying to run BitTorrent and VOIP at the same time, without any QoS markings, their quality will suffer - but most people have fatter pipes downstream than upstream, and they'll just have to pause BitTorrent/ftp/etc. while talking unless their CPE is smart enough to throttle outbound requests.
- QoS markings can help prioritize that egress traffic, so the VOIP packets get to exit before data packets do. As ISPs add QoS to their available services, they'll obviously include it with any of their VOIP offers, and they might or might not charge extra for it as a separate offer.
Basically, if you're satisfied with VOIP quality now, it's not going to get worse as new technology gets deployed, except technology that encourages you to consume more bandwidth at home without buying a bigger pipe, and it might get better.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The main inventions that were required for television were made in Germany before 1900: Paul Nipkow invented the world's first electromechanical television system, the "Nipkow Disc". Karl Braun invented the cathode ray tube, which to this day is the basis of most televisions.
Bell patented the telephone after working with Antonio Meucci, an Italian who had invented the telephone 15 years earlier.
A light bulb very similar to that built by Edison was created by Joseph Wilson Swan in England one year before Edison made his "invention". Edison bought Swan's patent.
The first electronic computer was designed and built by German mathematician Konrad Zuse, in Germany.
The transistor was invented by three American physicists, John Bardeen, William B. Shockley, and Walter Brattain.
The pacemaker was invented by electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch in America.
George de Mestral, the inventor of Velcro, is from Switzerland.
The (unpowered) airplane was invented by Sir George Cayley in England, or the German engineer Otto Lilienthal, depending on the achievement which you want to count as first flight. The first powered flight was performed by the Wright brothers in America.
Rockets were invented by the Chinese. The foundation of modern rocket science is attributed to Robert Hutchings Goddard in America.
The first working jet engine was constructed by Hans von Ohain in Germany.
RADAR was invented by Robert Watson-Watt in England.
One important reason why capitalism wins over communism is that it has less obvious failure modes. Capitalism's failures are generally attributed to "natural disasters" like wars while the failures of Communism are generally attributed to Communism.
When you can't switch to a competing ISP you may realize that capitalism isn't the same as free market economy and monopolies do leave you no choice.
from an ISP point of view you just have internet traffic which can be used for web, ftp, filesharing, voip, ... ... will break at the same time. i dont think any isp will do this.
so if you tried to give your own voip service QoS upto a point that hurts lets say skype, all other traffic like web, email, videostreams
Jane, you ignorant slut....
If they do that and it can cause quality problems with VoIP providers, what is it going to do to surfing, etc. If it degrades those services, it's going to degrade my download speeds, etc.
The whole premise is good, in and of itself, but it falls apart because people won't really appreciate their other services being screwed with in this manner- and they can't be 100% certain that they're dinking with the right or wrong ones as at least a few of the VoIP services use port 80 to tunnel through firewalls.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It won't be long before people switch to TCP/IP over VoIP.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Why do people assume that there's latency with encryption? Yes, it takes cycles, but with modern machines, it's not the latency hit everyone keeps thinking it is- especially with voice operations.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Anonymous CCIE
I think that this only proves that pure capitalism only wins over mixed models with the help of a little reinvention of history.
A broadly free market is vital, but really, the grandparent post reveals patriotism sufficient to defeat reality, which is then quoted as evidence!
Wikileaks, no DNS
In most ISP networks today, the big causes of latency are distance, packet insertion time in the skinny parts of the network (1500 byte packets take ~100ms at 128kbps, so you don't want to wait behind them, and that's also the biggest cause of jitter), and queuing in the skinny parts of the network again, that's the customer's upstream and sometimes downstream connections.
If you've got a business with a T1 line, shared by lots of users then using QoS to manage queuing priorities is important, but your MTU size isn't a big worry because 1500 bytes takes ~8ms at 1.5 Mbps, which is good, because there are too many boxes to set everybody's MTU small, and too many applications that can't do PMTU discovery correctly to just set it small in the router. QoS helps by letting VOIP cut ahead of big data packets in the egress queue, so you only get hit with one set of 10ms jitter instead of multiples of that, but even if an ISP's router only does some variant on fair queuing, that's usually good enough.
If you've got an ADSL line or cable modem with only 128kbps upstream, then QoS in the network isn't your big problem - it's keeping packet sizes small enough that they don't cause too much jitter. (It's still an issue at 384kbps upstream, but not as bad.) If you're a typical couch-potato consumer, you luck out, because you probably don't transmit very many big packets (e.g. HTTP requests are 100-150 bytes, and the 1500-byte responses are on your fast downstream network.) If you're running a file sharing application, which does transmit non-trivial numbers of upstream fat packets, so you may need to pause BitTorrent while you're talking, but as a home user you can do that. In theory, most DSL is really running ATM, so if you separated the voice and data onto two different PVCs, instead of combining it on one PVC, you could interleave cells and avoid the MTU jitter, but in practice, not only are most DSL carriers not able to manage multiple PVCs, but most DSL routers (or low-end Cisco boxes) aren't bright enough to interleave streams, as opposed to sending all 32 cells from a 1500-byte packet in one burst.
QoS can help home users with outbound queuing, but the ISP doesn't need to actually pay attention to it - the big bottleneck is usually getting to their POP.
Bram Cohen is adding some QoS marking to BitTorrent, though I don't know which marking scheme he's using (alas, I don't read python yet.) Typical home firewall/routers don't usually know what to do with QoS unless they've got built-in VOIP cards, but at least applications running on the same PC as BitTorrent can benefit from it.
Businesses also like to bitch about keeping latency under 150ms, because that's what "Beating Up ISPs So You Can Run VOIP For Dummies" says, which is no problem within the US middle-48 states or within Europe, where big ISPs typically get 30-50ms max, but India and Singapore are far enough away from New York City that you won't get that unless you change the speed of light in fiber or dig a tunnel through the earth's core. And most big ISPs typically have backbone jitter less than 10ms, compared to customer-driven MTU-size jitter of at least 17ms (for 1500 byte packets from one T1 to another T1), so a lot of the bitching about jitter SLAs is misdirected energy as well. It gets worse as businesses start planning for VOIP support for home workers on DSL, but fortunately cheap VOIP hardware is getting better.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I still say utilities should be government run and regulated. Let's see what's happened with deregulation:
Savings and Loan: Ugh, I don't even need to recap this one.
Phone Service; Payphone prices have doubled, my phone bills are now ridiculous and often miscalculated, and the bill has tripled.
Power: I live in California. 'Nuff said.
Things that every home needs I feel really should be government run, because companies are stupid. Yes, when you just give someone a company that they didn't build from the ground up and say "okay be creative" they screw it up 9 times outta 10. Especially when it's something that there is no negative recourse for. If I build a software company and own 50% of the stock, I'm not gonna try a hair-brained idea that might make billions, because I could lose everything. If someone gives me a company that say, provides people with phone service and I'm the ONLY company providing that to those people, I don't care if I bankrupt my company trying to make billions, because I know the government will just bail me out because people need phone service.
Deregulation sucks. The solution is that things which are critical to the nation's success with high upkeep costs and needed by 90%+ of the population should be government run.
What is government run:
DMV (travel/commerce)
DoT (Road building & maintaining)
USPS (communication/commerce)
Water/Gas (not sure about this one, correct me if I'm wrong)
What should be:
Basic local phone service
Fibre-Optic Internet/Cable
Cellular Phone Service/reception (why have 6 different towers beaming stuff through my body when we only need one? wasteful and pointless)
Capitalism shot itself in the foot with deregulation and (as above posters have pointed out) allowing monopolies to run unchecked.
Well... noone (except the end users) are earning or saving any money... in fact everyone is loosing money on VoIP...
This is funny, but brazilian ISPs have beaten everyone to it: voip is just illegal in brazil. You're not allowed to use your connection to carry any kind of voice data -- it's on their EULA. When I play UT2k4 and use Teamspeak to talk to my teammates, I'm violating the agreement. That's because the ISPs aren't allowed to 'compete' with the phone companies.
Pretty funny. But it's just one of the *many* idiosyncrasies present on the ISPs business in Brazil.. they make Microsoft (or any other company with an ironf ist) look like Miss Simpathy.
But fundamentally, the things Cringely's complaining about aren't accurate, because he doesn't understand the technology or the resulting economics. Yes, telcos are dealing with the threat of VOIP, and it's making their heads explode, and VOIP is much *much* harder to integrate with an old-fashioned telephone infrastructure than to run as a pure-VOIP business. (The technology's difficult, making it scale is difficult, different parts are centralized or decentralized, all the assumptions about who hands money to whom are different, the regulatory infrastructure doesn't match well at all, etc.) And the telcos are making sure that their data networks will support any VOIP services they develop with as close as they can get to traditional telco voice quality, and they're not sure how to deal with the fact that cellphones have convinced the public to accept lower-quality calls and newer codecs with much higher frequencies can support speakerphones much better.
Some big ISPs happen to be owned by telcos, or by telco-wannabees like the cable TV companies. Most of them are working on adding CoS capabilities to their backbones, but that's the least critical part of the network because most of them own their own fiber plants, and it's cheaper for them to burn more wavelengths on their fibers than to add fancy engineering capabilities to their routers or to hire fancy engineers to run them. It's the friendly mom&pop ISPs (that Cringely's not worried about) who are most likely to have backbone congestion issues that need CoS support to prioritize VOIP over best-effort data applications, because they're running at a different scale and don't generally own their own fiber networks.
The places that CoS matters most are the skinny parts of the network - the ingress from the customer's premises to the ISP's POP, and the egress from the ISP's POP to the customer's premises. The ingress direction is really a customer hardware and management problem, making sure that VOIP packets get on the wire before data packets, but service providers (including Vonage) typically handle that by forcing the customer's data through the same box that converts traditional-phone signals to VOIP, and software-based providers like Skype handle that inside the user's PC. This doesn't require the ISP to do anything, though it's sometimes cheaper to build those capabilities into the DSL/cable modem.
The egress direction can benefit from CoS marking, or from other fair-queuing systems that share bandwidth between remote sites or protocol types, or even from dumber systems that prioritize UDP over TCP. In a symmetric environment, like most business T1 connections, this is the most critical part of the system, because data applications can drown out voice unless there's some QoS approach. But most consumer connections are asymmetric, with much faster downstream connections than upstream, so there's less of a problem. Also, in most home applications, if downstream bandwidth is the bottleneck, it's usually because of some application like downloading music that can be turned off or slowed down during phone calls, which isn't a practical approach in most multi-person offices.
Cringely's arguments are especially bogus because the impact of backbone QoS / CoS features on network performance is much smaller than the impact of slow upstream connections in ADSL and Cable Modems. A 12
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
revenue through fee based QOS adjustments.
"You want 5mbps service, it's only $19.95/month."
"Oh, you want 'low latency' 5mbps service? that's an additional $29.95/128kbps of gauranteed 100ms RT packets."
yep, no problemo
hell the cell phone companies are doing this to customers on 'plans' that are no longer attractive to the company...
First, during the recent case against a southern ISP brought by Vonage, the FCC decided to fine that company as part of a consent decree where the company stopped the practice of blocking VoIP traffic. It happens that this ISP was a telco and as such a common carrier and the FCC was about to charge with a violation of the law because as a common carrier it has certain obligations. It's quite possible that intentional degradation of a competitor's VoIP service could also be a violation of a common carrier's legal responsability to provide "fair access", but that hasn't been tested and indeed a new law may be required. Second, for those ISPs that are not common carriers, they might be free to do whatever the market bears. This includes the cable companies who do have the edge on providing broadband access. Third, there is a Supreme Court case that should be relevant to this issue. This case could be decided in June and until then the FCC has their hands tied (in a sense) regarding what to do about regulating "fair access" for most of the broadband providers. Read what this important case is about at: http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/001404.html
Your points about increasing bandwidth are right on, but there are a couple of technical nitpicks - bandwidth is important, but jitter from competing data packets can be a bigger issue. Naive encapsulation techniques mean that an 8kbps codec typically expands to 25-30kbps of IP traffic (because you're taking a lots of very small Voice data samples and wrapping them in RTP, UDP, and IP headers, so it's mostly overhead.) However, one big annoyance is that conventional data usually wants to ship 1500-byte packets, and sometimes your VOIP packet gets stuck waiting for a data packet to finish transmitting. (Prioritization reduces how many of them you have to wait for, but they do get their turn occasionally.) At 128kbps, this is about 100ms; at 384kbps it's only ~33ms, which is less annoying. In theory, you could fix this by reducing your MTU size to something smaller like 576 - it's less efficient for data transfer, and too many applications don't know how to do PMTU discovery properly so they fail. In practice, most upstream data is smaller packets anyway (e.g. small http requests that get big response packets on your faster downstream connections, but only occasional outbound email/ftp/http-POST), so you get a lot of Extra Slack that you don't deserve.
However, file-sharing applications like BitTorrent blast out lots of big outbound packets, causing jitter on the way out, and can also fill up your inbound connection, which most other applications can't (or at least, not for very long, because the far end is a server sending traffic to a lot of people or else it's a home user or at most a T1 so it's no faster than your DSL/cable downstream.) So you probably still need to turn it off when you're trying to talk on the phone, just like you used to have to turn off the radio when you wanted to talk on the phone.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That you recently moved to the US from Bulgeria?
It's time to sue all these companies that interfere with ligitimate technologies like blocking VOIP and Microsoft making OS's that are garbage and locking up XML and trying to destroy linux by patents etc. It's time people revolted, after all, the french revolution and the communist revolutions did not happen for no good reason, people were really pissed off with being jerked around by the then powers the be....who can say how close we are to where people will really not take this bullshit anymore...once that happens, people will want some sort of revenge, and if that happens, you better not be on the wrong side, because, it may be fair and it probablly will hurt a lot (just ask the people who lost their heads during the french revolution, in those days, they cut off your head, or during the communist revolutions, they shot you or threw you into a labour camp, nowadays, they probablly will just take all your money, MS, however, they should also break up).
The Bells aren't going to lose too much money to residential VOIP, because most of the people who are using it are using DSL, so they're getting to rent the old telco copper wire and sometimes to provide ISP service on top of it. They'll lose some business, because some of the VOIP users get their broadband from cable modems instead, but they're getting to charge more for what they keep.
The long distance companies are in some trouble from residential VOIP, because they don't get to rent fully-depreciated wire to consumers at high prices. But they were in trouble anyway, because cheap fiber made the costs of transmission go down, and Moore's Law made the cost of switching equipment go down, and VOIP and similar technologies deployed as telco infrastructure by newer competitors means that the prices of voice minutes have been diving rapidly for 2-3 decades, and you could pack a lot more margin in a 40 cent call than a 4 cent call or a 1 cent call, and residential VOIP is just kicking them while they're down.
The real disruption is the effects on business telephony. Most VOIP applications these days are internal, with IP PBXs replacing old-fashioned PBXs, and VOIP calling between different offices of a single enterprise, but there's not a lot of VOIP calling between companies yet - H.323 wasn't really designed for that problem, and SIP hasn't fully emerged yet. If it weren't for the need to preserve connectivity to POTS, especially to cellphones, and the security problems associated with networking different companies' VOIP systems together, we'd be just about to hit the tipping point where huge chunks of the business voice market disappear in a puff of greasy orange smoke.
The highest-value business calling service in the US has been toll-free call centers, and it's an odd market. It really provides two different services - letting customers avoid paying for calls (which mattered a lot more at 25 cents/minute than at 1c/min or 0 c/min), but less obviously, it provides extremely flexible mechanisms for managing traffic load between call center agents, who cost more per minute than the phone calls (even a $6/hour telemarketer grunt is 10 cents/minute.) That part's harder to replace with other telephone technology - but the Web replaced a lot of former toll-free calling by making it possible for companies to get their information out to the public without having to have operators send people snail-mail, and online travel reservations are taking away more of that business. Travel reservations were already having trouble, because the 9/11/2001 tragedy cut way down on travel for a couple of years, so that meant a lot fewer calls to reservation agents.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The real issue is whether your employer will pay for your cell phone if they're using too many of your minutes. With pagers, it was pretty obvious that it was the employer's expense, because almost nobody really *wanted* a pager, and the monthly cost was usually fixed. On the other hand, these days, you're going to have a cellphone anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Cable modem doesn't have the same built-in competitiveness, because the right technology is routed IP service all the way down to the head end. When the dial ISPs started to be threatened by cable modems and raised a big "open the technology" PR campaign, the cable companies did the stupid monopolistic thing and claimed that they'd invested all this money and should be allowed to make a profit and lobbied lots of politicians; the right choice would have been for them to explain that their technology really *was* open (because it was! It was IP routing), and come up with an attractive reseller price and a wholesale billing option. But no, they treated it like it was Pay-Per-View, which they knew something about.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The bottlenecks are the skinny edges - mostly individual user's lines, but to some extent DSL feeder networks if the providers aren't careful about how much to oversubscribe, or concentrator networks to small cities not near the backbones.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
But as you say, Cringely's not talking about them - he's talking about telcos failing to give high priority to competitor's VOIP packets, and encryption doesn't help that at all.
Encryption doesn't have to add to the delay - IPSEC certainly does, and some SSL-based approaches might, but if you're using encryption built into the voice protocol, the delays are trivial, because encryption calculations are much faster than voice compression if done well, and much much faster if done sloppily (e.g. RC4.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Tagged packets get both less restrictive rules for passage and a private highway lane to drive on.
IMO if telcos/cables do that, they're in trouble becuase it means they have to erect some restrictions first. :)
(either direct: like shaping bellow physical capacity; or indirect: by physicaly using say 2mbps pipe to "transport" 3mbps of traffic requested by customers)
The net effect is that any packet that isn't tagged will only get "best effort" service, which means whatever is left.
...
The beauty of this approach is that they're NOT explicitly doing anything to the 3rd party service applications. They're just identifying and tagging their own services, which is within their rights.
If such tagging and prioritization should have the effect desired by telcos/cables, they have to fill the network with a lot of prioritized traffic (or vice versa, lower the amount of other traffic). This will make "best effort" worser to the desired point.
But such "desired point" would also mean than streaming from net radio stations will also be bad, that instant mesaging gets less "instant", ..., even web browsing gets less responsive.
Customers will notice that. And it can make them go to other ISPs. Or to push regulators so they push telcos/cables.
Telcos/cables can avoid that by prioritizing (almost) everything *but* 3rd party VoIP. But that's dangerously close to "excluding 3rd party VoIP" and that's what regulators are (or should be) watching and trying to prevent.
hany
Most ISPs don't support prioritization right now, at least for low-end services - they're starting to add it for business services, but it's much easier to make it work on a T1 line than on a DSL line where different people are providing different parts of the infrastructure and so nobody has enough control to make a good Service Level Agreement - and without a good SLA, it's hard to get customers to pay extra. Also, most ISPs that do support QoS only support it within their own networks - figuring out how to interconnect with other ISPs is difficult, as is figuring out who to charge how much for it. (For instance, what if one ISP uses two priority levels, one uses four, one uses a different four, one uses five, some use TOS markings while others use DSCP, etc.)
Interconnections between ISPs turn out to be a big problem for the sort of ham-handed regulation you're suggesting. A single ISP is going to deploy one set of policies across their network for how to mark a high-priority packet, so if one of their customers wants to talk VOIP to another, it'll work - but if I've got DSL from one ISP, and you've got a cable modem from another, and our ISPs aren't using compatible QoS settings or ToS markings, we may not be able to send high-priority packets to each other, or maybe I can send high-priority packets on my half of the network, but your ISP doesn't recognize my ISP's markings so it resets everything to vanilla, etc. This means that a nationwide or global ISP has some advantages over a local or regional ISP.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Manufactors of hardware ATA's and phones are going to have to hurry up and start adapting some of the open technologies. On laggy connections GSM and iLBC seem to be the only thing that keep the call smooth during peek hours.
.
Sipura seem to have no plans..
Snom looks like they are implementing it soon, maybe waiting to implement it properly (LINUX inside)
I have not hear anythng from the cisco world?!
We are a business that have a few providers and we have outtages where calls do not come in for 15-30 mins in the day. and its some ware inbetween where the problem is arrising. Only thing we can do is send as detailed info as we can to our providers. We hear our providers are trying to use there weight to solve this problem cause the DID providers don't care.
On dialing out we get moment whre a call does not go through and we learned the only way to prove it to the providers that provider for the VOIP providers we buy our mins from is to send proper info.
here is what I am told
If you can not dial out you have to make clear to your support that you where dialing the number at exactly this time so they can go trace it in there switch. You have to do this as soon as you knotice the problem. It will give your VOIP provider support team more gusto when they call up places like Global Telecom when they are raving mad.
I hear through the great vine that peoples who work for places like global telecom are plain ignorent to the fact there is a problem and that there is plenty of bandwidth they are just restricting it just because.
Why are they restricting the bandwidth.!!!
My 2 cents..
Cringely's speculations about providers tinkering with QoS are bogus - I've heard other clueless people ranting about how awful it is that some ISPs might start offering higher quality service for more money (the bastards!) At most, his arguments are really that some ISPs might fail to provide higher-quality service for people who don't pay extra for it, and that this might not be good enough quality in spite of the fact that many people like it today. And if that's the case, and their basic service isn't good enough, then either you're going to get a different ISP, or you're going to pay more for better service, or you're going to keep your old-fashioned phone, and of course, if you can afford broadband and VOIP service, you can also afford a cellphone (at least a pre-paid 7-11 phone for emergencies), which will even work when bad weather makes your cable modem go down.
Furthermore, Cringely focuses on QoS in the backbone, but the real impact isn't there, where the network's fat enough, but at the skinny edges. The ISPs have no control over your outbound traffic - what if you're trying to call 911 and somebody is downloading that music video file you're sharing? That has a much bigger impact on VOIP performance than anything a backbone provider is going to do. Or what happens if that music you're downloading starts getting better performance because the server is less busy - QoS could help that direction a bit, but if your ISP uses one standard for QoS markings and the 911 Center's ISP uses a different standard (there are lots), then the QoS isn't going to work the way they expected anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
While there are ISPs that are far worse about it - Telstra, for instance, or some of the US cable companies who think that they need to catch up with Telstra's unwillingness to let people actually use data for anything - a 2GB/day cap is still annoying. Basically, it means that you can't do file-sharing without being very selective in what you leave running for how long - so you can download that latest Knoppix release and share out a couple of copies, but you can't leave your entire set of Linux and *BSD distros open all month.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Telephone companies should not be permitted to own/operate any Internet services.
When a company that has regulations are allowed to provide services that are unregulated it always leads to unfair business practices.
Cable modems work differently - the right architecture handles routing from fairly close to the customer, and the easiest way to "open up" the business is strictly non-technical a wholesale billing arrangement and discounted prices, with the newbie ISP buying service at a couple of peering points, but pretty much the whole infrastructure run by the cable TV company or a partner of theirs. There are technical kluges like PPPoE that provide a bit more control, but they're ugly hacks.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They're normally tagged with all-0, which is Vanilla priority, because that's what everybody's Windows and Linux and Mac and Cisco and Linksys and Netgear box puts on the packets unless you tell your box to mark it differently (which some boxes know how to do and some don't.) Some ISPs will let you mark the packets with other priorities and ignore them; other ISPs will mark the packets back to 0 if they don't support QoS features, or drop them, or they'll remark/drop them if you're not paying extra for higher-grade service, or if you've marked them with a format that's not the one their equipment users.
Unfortunately, the standard IP priority markings provide a number of options for specifying that a packet should be treated as a higher priority the default, but don't really provide a way to say that it should be treated as a lower priority (except by increasing the probability of discarding the packet.) There are applications like file sharing and ftp which don't mind extra delay, and will soak up any available bandwidth, so marking them lower-priority would be a good thing - leave them in the queue if there's more important work to do, but don't just drop them. Since about 30-35% of the packets on the internet today are BitTorrent, this could make a real difference to some people.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If your ISP offers this, it can be very useful for some applications - VOIP and video-conferencing obviously benefit from it, while FTP, email, and streaming video don't need to be high-priority, because it's ok if they arrive 100ms later. Applications in between are typically database applications (some SAP and Oracle things don't like long delays, and perform much better if they get a higher priority than ftp.) It would be really nice if you could designate some applications as lower-than-normal priority, such as File Sharing - other applications get priority, but you'd like BitTorrent to be able to use up any leftovers - but the standard IP protocol markings aren't really good for that, so usually somebody needs to specially configure a router to make that happen, and that often costs money.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If they start messing with the quality of packets that are not part of a service provided by the ISP, online gamers will be the first to notice. And they are the ones willing to switch ISP's to get quality even if it cost a few dollars more.
And what do you think of Cuba's offer to provide major operations to 3000 American citizens who are unable to afford it in their own country, in an effort to save one life for every life lost in 9/11? Yeah, communism doesn't work at all, ever, I'll agree... this is clear evidence of that.
Would it be fair to say:
"A Free Market is necessary but not sufficient."
all the best,
drew
http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php? collection=opensource_audio&collectionid=drnippers
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
.. now, any of you that are lying I will beat up later.. you're worse than computer salesmen, you actually believe yourselves.
The fact is I know almost nothing about VoIP. Which is a LOT more than almost every consultant in Australia and New Zealand, including Cisco tech support.
JITTER is the main concern, not round-trip delay. Pfftt call Germany sometime from Australia, there is a round trip delay of over 3 seconds sometimes. End-to-end delay DOES affect echo and sidetone quality. But put in a decent echo suppressor and we can tolerate delays much bigger than that.
But jitter.. can really mess with a codec. And an ISP that decides to introduce jitter of anything greater than tens of milliseconds puts a great deal of VoIP equipment (hardware and software) at risk.
But *shrugs* why do I even bother talking about it. Dumb (as in unintelligent yet arrogant) *quote* consultants *unquote* will try and sell a tale of 200ms end-to-end delay being all that is necessary.
Honestly if we could just chop the fingers off those who preach lies, pure and simple, we could get back to the business of trying to solve real-world problems in the most efficient manner.
Are going to stop this posiblity straight away. We are already of sufficient numbers that if our UDP packets start going all funky we'd be off.
Also while probably being of a small(ish) number. We are probably the people who are paying for bigger pipes, and also generally technical enough to not think twice about switching.
Just because they're priortizing their traffic doesn't mean that the best efforts is going to be crappy or largly suffer from anything Cringely's talking about. In order to priortize their traffic so as to make the other VoIP services look bad, they're going to have to impact all other services such as HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, etc. in such a way as to be highly noticeable and they'll get caught with the tampering. As such, they'll get told to quit becuase it's anticompetitive or people will move to other services as they become available.
You can believe whatever you want, the fact is, Cringely doesn't seem to understand how all of this stuff actually works in this case and is being just another gasbag pundit.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The below is very much over-simplified, but I just want to point to what I see as bigger implications of this.
Cringely is basically saying that the phone and cable companies are soon going to start putting their own VoIP services at higher QOS than competing VoIP. i.e. I'm afraid that the major broadband ISPs will give preference to their own protocols over whatever innovation is coming from elsewhere on the 'net. There is no reason to think that the cable companies, etc. won't apply this same technique to areas beyond voip. Their own video services, for example. By giving their own services bandwidth priority over "everything else," they are effectively blocking new and innovative services, and subverting the end-to-end principle that made the Internet such a place for innovation. In other words, the reason there is so much innovation on the Internet is that the network itself is "stupid." It does not discriminate between protocols. So anyone can design something and get it out there without having to get permission from some gatekeeper, like a cable ISP. If the cable ISPs start giving their own services priority, this means that the network itself is no longer content neutral. Thus "unofficial" / "unapproved" services (those to which Comcast doesn't give higher QOS) are at a disadvantage. This is REALLY bad not just for competition / innovation, but also because it gives control over what people can do over the Internet to some bodies in the middle, rather than on the ends. To take it to the logical extreme, imagine an Internet where you can quickly and easily access Comcast TV (tm), Comcast Radio (tm) and Comcast Phone (tm), as well as services from approved partners Microsoft EntertainMe (tm) and Disney MakeMeStupid (tm).. but other bandwidth-intensive applications run very slowly because Comcast gives priority to itself and its approved partners. So if some random company comes up with a more innovative voip or video service than Comcast, or perhaps some great service that allows political activists to work together, they will not be able to effectively get it out there because their packets will be given lower priority than those for Comcast's own services. This is one of the reasons that I am really worried about the increasing dominance of the cable companies in the world of broadband ISPs.
My ISP, Rogers Cable, in Canada has come up with a devious way of controlling VoIP.
Several competing firms offer VoIP in Canada. Rogers will introduce its VoIP service in the near future. In the interim, it has just introduced a bandwidth cap: [b]combined[/b] 60 GIG Up and Down. I think they timed it purposefully for this.
When its own VoIP service starts it will be on a different frequency then internet traffic. This doesn't 'eat up' your bandwidth. If you use a competing service, it will.
The CRTC in Canada (regulatory bureau) controls telephone service and is regulating Bell for VoIP. They can't see what Rogers is doing and won't stomp their foot on it.
You should WANT everyone else to not vote. It makes your vote more valuable.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
As someone who has worked on archetecting this, let me clue you folks in.
Giving quality of service guarantees means you treat some packets better than others. There IS no alternaitve.
You do this because some packets are more VALUABLE than others. Voice packets, for example, are FAR more valuable the file transfer packets - but only if they receive preferential handling. Delays and drops just slightly slow down a file transfer, but play HELL with a phone call.
Voice packets are also a drop in the ocean. A two-way phone call, with no compression whatsoever, is less than a megabyte of payload per HOUR. So giving its packets preference over, say, file transfers, won't even be noticed. Even giving it priority over best-effort VOICE traffic won't be noticed - except maybe in the very narrow pipe from the edge to the customer - because it won't interfere when there are no fat transfers going on, and when there ARE fat transfers the best-effort voice connection will still be broken.
If some packets are to be treated better than others because they're more valuable, it's fair to charge more for them. (Why should people pay as much for a packet that gets second-class treatment?) This also lets them subsidize the plumbing for the second-class packets.
ISPs only get a little for supplying fat dumb connectivity. They're looking for ways to sell "value-added services" to enhance their revenue. Providing a phone-network quality connection at far less than phone-company costs and prices is a good deal both for them and their customers - they can split the savings with their customers and both come out ahead.
If they're providing an extra-cost VoIP service, they are involved, not just in the payload traffic, but in the connection signaling. This makes it easy to identify the payload flows that need special handling. To do the same for other people's traffic they'd have to spy on the traffic to identify it - and then give it preference equivalent to their own extra-cost packets, for free? Why should they do extra work for free to help their competition? (Especially when it involves spying on the traffic and its routing, which some people might not want?)
What CAN be done, at a profit all around, is one of the following:
- The VoIP providers and ISPs can engage in agreements to handle each other's voice traffic at higher quality of service, and split the extra fee.
- Protocols can be arranged for a client application - VoIP or otherwise - to negotiate higher quality of service (at a higher fee) for its flows, and the ISPs can again engage in suitable contracts to handle the traffic prefferentially and split the extra fee. (This generalizes the service, uncoupling it from strictly VoIP applications.)
You wouldn't have to have a single tier of extra-price service, either. There are different levels, at different price points, that would be useful. (Even within VoIP: POTS emulation at a level that can handle appliances like FAX machines and 56k modems {without reencoding bridges} requires very tight guarantees - essentially every packet must go through with a tight limit on delay variability. Something suitable for compressed voice can accept more drops and jitter.)
And anybody - peer-to-peer or budget service - who doesn't want to pay extra to get their packets special treatment can still take best-effort delivery, and get service about like they get now. VoIP traffic is a very small drop in a very large bucket. Except at the very edge (like a narrow-band drop from the edge router to the customer site), giving company VoIP packets preference over non-company VoIP packets won't appreciably affect the latter: They'll still get through if there's no fat application competing with them, and still get creamed when you're downloading a file or browsing the web.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
By the way, Speakeasy also sells VOIP and they already ADVERTISE that their packets get priority over their network...
This is from the Speakeasy web site VOIP page: Voice quality & unmatched security -- Unlike other providers, our voice service is carried exclusively over our private broadband network and the networks of our partners, which enables voice call prioritization that ensures crystal-clear call qualitySplitting hairs is exactly how lawsuits are argued.
You also forget that it takes around 3 years for a big lawsuit to run; it's worth an ISP's effort to kill the competition by a legally gray method - meanwhile the money flows in.
El Cringle may be pompous at times, but the article is interesting and reflects well on the general anti-innovation policy of big business.
I'm a free market kind of guy, so I don't normally like regulation. In areas where a free market does not exist (like Broadband monopolies) then regulation is a MUST.
Government regulation can fix this without difficulty. It's called, in the corporate world, an SLA. A Service Level Agreement defines exactly how much bandwidth you are guaranteed to get, how it will be provisioned, and how often the service will go down. Any deviation from the SLA results in monetary penalties against the ISP.
The government already provides something similar with dial-tone service. The only way to ensure that ISPs don't pull any funny business is to legislate an SLA.
-ted
The last time I checked, I PAID my ISP EVERY MONTH for service!! THAT payment guarantees a certain level of service. If the cable company or other ISP deliberately degrades this service with malice, then I can SUE. I forsee BIG TIME class action suits over this... Unless of course, the FCC steps in (as they already did once for Vonage).
signed between the customer of the ISP and the ISP to provide always on internet. There is nothing in MY contract that says they can limit my bandwidth or limit where I can go or what data I can push or pull down. If the courts won't help the voip providers then they should be working with the users because this is (along with bandwidth throttling) is a violation of the agreement between isp and customer.
Um- did we put capitalism on hold here? If an ISP starts quashing VoIP traffic (or not handling it properly), consumers will, if it matters to them, move to someone who does things right. If it really matters to consumers, someone will charge a little bit more if they develop a reputation and guarantee(s), otherwise it'll be used as a tool of differentiation.
It is illegal for me to run wires on telephone poles without government approval. It is a state guaranteed monopoly for your local cable and phone providers. The people I've known who tried Speakeasy always had horrible problems due to SBC "accidentally" breaking the line quite often. Since the government has already regulated that the public should subsidize telephone and cable companies by giving them free poles to run wires on devoid of competition, I have NO problems regulating them.
Sure, on a network without oversubscription, you don't need to prioritize traffic.And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this.
This is an adversarial situation in which VoIP users and operators can adapt. People just end up using the same ports and encryption as an essential non-VoIP service, like secure RDP, gaming, etc. Or they just run a VPN.
You have the same blinders on as telcos. You think of the Internet as a hugely unreliable, slow network running a bunch of transparent protocols. What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.
ISPs only get a little for supplying fat dumb connectivity. They're looking for ways to sell "value-added services" to enhance their revenue.
No they aren't. They're doing what most companies do in their life cycle. As a given market matures, instead of offering any real additional services that truly add value, they figure out ways to extract more cash from what they already have by adding extra fees, differentiating "services" that technically entail no additional cost to them, etc. All the priority routing means is that a router pays attention to a single flag in the packet header.
If we follow your logic to the extreme, it wouln't be entirely unfair that an ISP could start to sell services based on protocol - http/https/ftp is standard, and anything beyond that costs extra. Is that where we want to see ISPs headed?
Sure, on a network without oversubscription, you don't need to prioritize traffic.
Were you just not listening? ISP's can't afford to degrade non-voice traffic to that point, not by oversubscription and not by fiddling with the routers. That's because whole classes of essential applications other than VoIP demand better service than VoIP itself. Gaming is a major application (in fact, voice in gaming is a major application) that requires stricter real-time guarantees than VoIP and more bandwidth. In fact, any use of VPN is.
And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this.
This is an adversarial situation in which VoIP users and operators can adapt. People just end up using the same ports and encryption as an essential non-VoIP service, like secure RDP, gaming, etc. Or they just run a VPN.
You have the same blinders on as telcos. You think of the Internet as a hugely unreliable, slow network running a bunch of transparent protocols. What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.
What TFA is saying is that the network operators will prioritize their own voice so that it always gets delivered. Each line requires only 80kbps
And what I am saying is that any broadband ISP that doesn't achieve >80kbps and <100ms latency almost all the time for non-prioritized traffic might as well close shop, because lots of applications demand that, not just VoIP (of course, VoIP needs much less bandwidth than that anyway).
Absolutely -- in fact not everyone's Internet usage is the same -- some clients prize OUTBOUND bandwidth while most prefer INBOUND. We have clients that have us prioritize their VPN protocols in a balanced approach, and dial down FTP.
The days of the "all you can eat" bandwidth are numbered. Internet service will be priced like electricity. This is good for the consumer, in that they will not be penalized for paying for higher "last mile bandwidth potential" like they are now.
There has to be an equitable transfer of value for value.
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
As someone who's on a career path to becoming a systems/enterprise architect, I find it encouraging that the competition cannot even spell architect....
Try getting DSL service (I like DSL for the options, cable seems to be you can pay more for a mod to the AUP but the service you are getting is basically the same) and killing the phone line. Not going to happen I am afraid, you cant have DSL without a regular phone line, so go ahead and get VoIP but you're paying for the same service twice. There is a law in Canada issued by the CRTC that ILECs have to put in place the infrastructure to offer ADSL services both on their own as well as through third-party wholesalers without a phone line, within a reasonable timeframe. That was issued over 2 years ago and I have yet to see a solid way to kill the phone line without DSL. And my provider isnt even the ILEC, its a third party provider leasing the line from the ILEC. They dont even need to do it at the ISP level; they do it at the service level, bastards!
Consultant Computerology Consulting http://www.computerologyconsulting.com
This all depends on whether that "value" is artificially created by virtue of the fact that someone has merely decided to call something a "service" and charge extra for it. It's all in the marketing and packaging.
I already believe that my cable costs too much. I get a good DL bandwidth, but that only comes in useful once in a while. In addition, the upload bandwidth sucks, and if I want to increase that I'd have probably have to pay for a "business class" subscription. In reality, they could just say, "increase your upload bandwidth, but in order to that, we'll cut your download bandwidth by a certain amount." But they're just playing with numbers - it eventually ALL comes from the same backbone connection, so what's the difference? Simple...if they can call it a "service", they can then justify an increased rate, even when there are no additional resource requirements on their end.
I guess there are people running uncompressed VOIP wide-area, but G.729a is really quite reasonable. It gets a higher MOS score than the cell phone codecs, plus you usually have a decent microphone and no road noise in the background which make a big difference.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
than VoIP itself. Gaming is a major application (in fact, voice in gaming is a major application) that requires stricter real-time guarantees than VoIP and more bandwidth. In fact, any use of VPN is
What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.
And what I am saying is that any broadband ISP that doesn't achieve >80kbps and
Surely your kidding - VPNs don't have more strict real-time requirements than voice. It doesn't matter. The issue of degredation is two fold. Premise bandwidth delivered and backbone bandwidth available. You are confusing the ability of an ISP to reliably deliver 80kbps to the premise and the ability of the ISP to deliver 80kbps of real-time voice traffic when the user is performing other tasks. If I'm a gamer, I'm not pulling an ISO at the same time that I'm playing - why? - because it affects my latency/lag. If I'm a voice user expecting to make a call, I'm not worried about my ISP download - why? - because "I can be on the Internet and the phone at the same time".
Lets say the user is downloading at 3mbps (his promised speed). He starts a voip call. His ATA/Router (w/ traffic shaper set to a download of 2800kbps to protect his call) properly protects his download from causing voice issues. But, the node he sits on gets slammed with traffic usage. Suddenly, the ISP is delivering 2500mbps to the user. Now his download can affect his voice call. So the ISP is delivering 20X the requirements for a basic call and yet the end user can experience a call degredation.
Yes, your ATA/Router could begin to detect the jitter/latency changes in real-time and try to compensate. However this will be after the initial issue occurs and the complexity will raise the price of the CPE.
You have the same blinders on as telcos. You think of the Internet as a hugely unreliable, slow network running a bunch of transparent protocols. What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque
Nope, I see the Internet as an interconnected group of reliable, flexible networks. But the last mile provider has an advantage as shown above. It doesn't matter how opaque the traffic is if the network is oversubscribed - the last mile provider can compensate for the oversubscription while the other providers can't.
I find it encouraging that the competition cannot even spell architect....
I usually can but not on a Saturday morning. 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
No worries, i just figured i should make my first slashdot post a flame, to keep with tradition or something... Good post btw, very informative :)
As a given market matures, instead of offering any real additional services that truly add value, they figure out ways to extract more cash from what they already have by adding extra fees, differentiating "services" that technically entail no additional cost to them, etc.
There may be a few that try to cut off something that is clearly part of full-blown service and/or used to be standard, then charge you extra to get it back. (Consider throttling of cable internet, for example.) Consumer fraud statutes apply if they get caught. And others apply, too, if they do something blatantly anti-competitive.
But ISPs usually try to give you extra services that DO add value beyond the basic service. (Otherwise you wouldn't pay the extra dollars, would you?)
Of course they try to design them to require minimal costs on their end and use equipment they already have. If the value of the service is high it can command a hefty price. If the cost to provide it also nearly non-existent, that hefty price is mostly profit - at least until some kind of competition drives it down.
Classic example is the "enhanced features" of the PSTN: Call waiting, call forwarding, three-way calling, etc. These were virtually impossible when phone switches were special-purpose hardware made of relays or logic circuits. Once the control plane was replaced by general-purpose computers they became a matter of a little extra software and a few extra table entries. Nearly no cost, and a few dollars per month from millions of subscribers adds up fast. These days your regular bill just pays to keep the infrastructure alive, while the "value-added features" may be responsible for ALL your phone company's profit.
And for its demise, as these features become standard on cellphone subscriptions, and client-side functions on VoIP (where they can be provided without the carrier's help, knowlege, consent, or bill).
Of course, with the cutthroat competition driving the price of raw bandwidth down near its cost, ISPs want to find a way to enhance their revenue. The phone company's model was wildly successful and very visible. So they all want to emulate it.
All the priority routing means is that a router pays attention to a single flag in the packet header.
True in the core. NOT true on the edge.
The network can not trust the customer's agent to mark the packets honestly and MUST rewrite the QoS at the border. Otherwise the customer could just flag his traffic for priority handling and get it for free - and create a tragedy of the commons as everybody marked everything as special to avoid congestion, rendering the QoS markings meaningless.
This already happened. The internet protocol has quality of service bits specifically intended to give traffic special handling that it needs. (For example, you could mark VoIP traffic to be routed quickly - and dropped if it was delayed too much to make room for more timely following packets.) But before such applicaions were widely deployed, a well-known Ma$sive software vendor "Improved" their IP stack by marking everything for special handling. This polluted the IP QoS (type of service) bits, which are now ignored by the network.
With a cheater widely deployed, enterprises wishing to deploy VoIP internally have to resort to tricks like putting the VoIP phones on a special subnet that is given higher priority in their routers. Meanwhile, the workstations (some of which are still cheating) can't get the high QoS and thus can't run VoIP softphone applications as well as the special-purpose desk phones beside them. (The cheater would now love to play in this market - but he's hoist by his own petard.)
In the routers at the edge, identifying flows to validate and rewrite QoS to authenticate those that get special handling to the core, is a big job. It creates a table explosion (tracking every flow - if only to remember that it DOESN'T get special treatment), requiring extra RAM. And it requires a signifi
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Finaly "all the land" is occupied by one or very few businesses and that's when "the shit hits the fans". And that's what have to be solved somehow.
.. the only known solution to check bureaucratic power is through representative democracy ... where at least the rulers are freely chosen, even if they aren't always going to be the best rulers.
This is the general argument that Joseph Schumpeter, among others, held about capitalism -- it would be brought down by its own success. And it generally looks to be a valid point, given the corporate welfare, corruption, and the culture of economics-uber-alles.
Once serving customers no longer is necessary, there is no purpose to business other than to perpetuate its own power. Dysfunctional, politicized bureaucracy takes over, and it becomes purely an interests game. This problem appears universal - no known economic or political system (save theoretical anarchism) really seems to be able to fully control the power of a collective reinforcing its own interests.
Perhaps the solution is to understand when the market has failed and to substitute market power for political power. Unfortunately this seems to bring back the problem of why we privitize things in the first place -- they're so bloody wasteful under government control!
Yet
So yeah, it's a dilemma.
-Stu
It doesn't take an MBA to figure out what it actually costs to supply a single continuous 1Mbit slice of bandwidth delivered via DSL, EXCLUDING factoring replacement of the routers, the power that feeds it, the air conditioning it takes to cool it, the rent or mortgage it takes to house it, the fractional percentage of the salaries it takes to administer it, support it, support you, bill you, collect your money (assuming you pay on time), the taxes, the Universal Service Fund fees or any of the other overheads that goes along with just operating a business, is about $168/month.
So please, convince me that your $30-50/month Internet Service bill is too high.
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
seems like you have very little experience and understanding of TCP/IP. Just look at it: I quote: if VoIP doesn't work anymore, 'games and all sort of other applications won't work anymore either'. Absolutely idiotic piece of crap. 'games and all sortr of other applications'. WHAT other applications? HTTP won't work? SMTP won't work? FTP, telnet won't work? Holy Moses, seems like games is the only other application besides VoIP you are aware of.
some dalmatian. (which he mistakes for bulgarian).
(or 1000 dalmatians)
Surely your kidding - VPNs don't have more strict real-time requirements than voice.
VPNs have the real-time requirements of the traffic that runs through them.
Lets say the user is downloading at 3mbps (his promised speed)
You sound like a nerd living at home by himself. In fact, ISPs better offer reasonably good simultaneous connections, because otherwise, in a normal family, junior (playing games), dad (on RDP to the office), mom (listening to MP3s), and sister (downloading an ISO) are going to be pissed. Or, for that matter, are multiple small office users.
So the ISP is delivering 20X the requirements for a basic call and yet the end user can experience a call degredation.
Sorry, even your far fetched scenario isn't realistic. Besides, you are an order of magnitude off on the requirements of voice.
VPNs have the real-time requirements of the traffic that runs through them.
Agreed. At the base, maintaining a VPN connection does not require anywhere near the real-time capabilities of voice. We are both guilty of making blanket statements about VPN traffic patterns.
You sound like a nerd living at home by himself. In fact, ISPs better offer reasonably good simultaneous connections, because otherwise, in a normal family, junior (playing games), dad (on RDP to the office), mom (listening to MP3s), and sister (downloading an ISO) are going to be pissed. Or, for that matter, are multiple small office users.
I tried to make my example simpistic so you would understand. Adding all those simultaneous uses increases the likely hood of it occuring. I would probably keep your personal attacks to yourself, especially if you haven't thought through your argument.
Sorry, even your far fetched scenario isn't realistic. Besides, you are an order of magnitude off on the requirements of voice.
Far fetched. Let me see. Simultaneous use of internet, plus real-time voice traffic, plus network traffic node usage fluctuations. Sounds like the last mile network of most major residential ISP. Order of magnitude off - go back and read up on voip. G.711 - 80kbps for 20ms frames when you add UDP/IP packet overhead. So 80*20 = 1600kps. Oh, I'm sorry, the ISP is delivering 30X the requirements for a single call and still has possibility that the call quality could be affected by node traffic fluctuations.
When you've deployed voip on an ISPs network, managed the traffic utilization at aggregation points, and witnessed what happens when end-user traffic rapidly exceeds the node capacity you'll realize that the ISP is not what you imagine it to be - massive amounts of bandwidth dedicated to each end user. Again, the game is oversubscription, and in that game, the last mile provider has the extra knowledge the other providers don't have. I'm not saying broadband agnostic voice won't work, I'm saying that the last mile providers will provide a solution that exceeds PSTN at some point and the other providers will struggle to match it.
Oh, I'm sorry, the ISP is delivering 30X the requirements for a single call and still has possibility that the call quality could be affected by node traffic fluctuations.
And then, for the nth time, RDP, gaming, security cameras, and lots of other services won't work correctly either, because they require more bandwidth and latency that is at least as low as VoIP.
Order of magnitude off - go back and read up on voip. G.711 - 80kbps for 20ms frames when you add UDP/IP packet overhead. So 80*20 = 1600kps.
With a decent codec, VoIP requires less than 8kbps, and it pretty much doesn't matter whether you use TCP, UDP, or some other network protocol. Using G.711 for VoIP is just plain stupid.
Agreed. At the base, maintaining a VPN connection does not require anywhere near the real-time capabilities of voice. We are both guilty of making blanket statements about VPN traffic patterns.
I pointed out the possibility that real-time traffic flows through a VPN, you point out the possibility that a VPN might not carry real-time traffic. My point is relevant to the discussion, yours is not: if ISPs support VPNs (and they have to), they have to support them well enough so that the real-time traffic that may flow through those VPNs arrives in time at the other end.
And then, for the nth time, RDP, gaming, security cameras, and lots of other services won't work correctly either, because they require more bandwidth and latency that is at least as low as VoIP.
And for the nth time, you haven't addressed the issue - residential bandwidth is not committed. If its not committed, how do you guarantee the priority traffic over non-priority traffic when the available traffic fluctuates?
RDP, gaming and security cameras may or may not have higher real-time requirements, but I would argue that the user of these applications is more willing to accept issues caused by network fluctuations. RDP and security cameras especially. see my earlier arguments why gaming and voip aren't comparable from a usage perspective.
With a decent codec, VoIP requires less than 8kbps, and it pretty much doesn't matter whether you use TCP, UDP, or some other network protocol. Using G.711 for VoIP is just plain stupid
G.729 @ 20ms frames is 24kbps with UDP/IP overhead. G.711 runs a majority of all Voip today. I agree that other codecs will take over, however, I think they'll be closer to 40kbps with overhead to deliver MOS scores closer to 4.0. In the end, it doesn't matter. Its not an issue of bandwidth or latency, but an issue of guaranteed delivery.
I pointed out the possibility that real-time traffic flows through a VPN, you point out the possibility that a VPN might not carry real-time traffic. My point is relevant to the discussion, yours is not: if ISPs support VPNs (and they have to), they have to support them well enough so that the real-time traffic that may flow through those VPNs arrives in time at the other end.
In fact, any use of VPN is
No, you didn't point that out. You made the claim that any use of VPN is.
Although I've enjoyed this conversation, let's call it quits. You haven't addressed my argument other than to call it far-fetched with no argument as to why it is. Your argument centers around claiming that the requirements of other traffic flows are higher than voip, which I don't dispute. I've spent several years deploying voip on networks, from the largest carriers to a residential ISP. I'm basing my argument on true network evidence and experience. VOIP works and is definately going to change the market. But for residential usage, the nature of an oversubscribed network gives the advantage to the entity that owns the oversubscribed network.
Let's call it quits and let the market prove out who is correct. If your in the denver area, we could wager a beer on how it shakes out if you like. I'm always interested in meeting fellow passionate tech junkies.
"The network can not trust the customer's agent to mark the packets honestly and MUST rewrite the QoS at the border."
Is this true, in general, that networks are now (potentially) un-prioritize incoming traffic, by resetting TOS/Precedence settings in the IP headers? Is this typical at the customer-to-ISP edge, or ISP-to-Backbone Network also?
my first slashdot post a flame was said by Cruithne (658153).
/. for over three years without ever making a post?!?
Jesus Christ, what have you been doing being signed up to
The main anticompetitive abuses are from Tier 1 and 2 ISPs (backbones) who carry lots of competitors' traffic. All VoIP traffic travelling over Time Warner Cable backbones would suffer, except TWC VoIP customers. The migration is predictable.
--
make install -not war