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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."
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
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
Call bullshit.
There is something to see here and you are averting your eyes. The throttling scam works like this:
Assume the total amount of VOIP traffic that wants to move across a telco's network is some number. Let's call that number 11 (think Spinal Tap). Now, of that 11, 3 is VOIP traffic from the telco's own service. The remaining 8 is Vonage, Skype and all the rest. Rather than fuck with the rest directly (illegal), the telco throttles total available VOIP bandwidth to 10 but assigns preferential QOS headers to the 3 that it profits from. Vonage and company now have to share the remaining 7 even though they need 8. Their quality suffers and they shed customers to the telco's VOIP service. As long as the telco tweaks the throttle correctly, they can bleed Vonage without breaking the law as currently written.
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."
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.
Well, hell, anybody using TCP for voice communications gets what they deserve. I seriously hope that Cringely meant UDP.
TCP is a poor choice for VoIP, because of the reliability factor (believe it or not). With something as free-flowing as a phone conversation, you would rather lose a packet here or there than wait for retransmission delays caused by TCP.
-- Joe
As for packet loss, for telephone conversations, most of the time, people will barely even notice a single packet being lost if you're doing things right. I mean, do you change phone companies every time your cell phone drops a packet? I didn't think so. It's par for the course, and you're used to it and probably don't even remember the last time it happened to you (which was probably some time today).
This seems like much ado about nothing. Even on hops clear across the country without any QoS, iChat AV can shove freaking video streams. Compared to that, audio is a tiny drop of bandwidth. I just don't see how we'll get anywhere close to the limits of the backbones unless they put the priority for VoIP traffic lower than standard data traffic.... The mere notion just doesn't make any sense.
QoS, like MS isn't the answer. It's the question. No is the answer.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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 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.
Since the ISP can send their VoIP traffic through dedicated virtual circuits (of whatever variety) and offload at preferential peering points (or to another subscriber on the same network) they can deliver a much better experience for their own VoIP apps. No more robot voice, random spots of dead air, or occasional electronic bursts, they can probably even do better e911 implementations - all those things will be very important for mainstream acceptance by people who expect VoIP to work exactly like their old land line.
That is all well within the bounds of legality. Add in the fact that the ISPs will play around the edges of legality in finding ways to actually degrade competing VoIP traffic and cover their asses at the same time and there is an actual problem.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
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.
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
Do the mods really not understand capitalism to the point that this troll actually got modded up? Capitalism in its unregulated form trends toward cartels and monopoly. It's hard for the consumer to make a choice when there isn't another one that's doing anything differently.
That's where the problem lies, and why your parent poster stated that capitalism needs some level of governmental regulation to be successful. Or would it be better if Standard Oil and AT&T hadn't been split up?
The biggest distinction between Laissez-faire capitalism and anarchy is that the former depends on a state and police to enforce property rights, along with myriad other laws like murder, rape, civil courts, prisons, etc. Who handles all that in a truly anarchic society? The concept of private property would be severly limited to only the things you can prevent other people from taking, and it would be a really nast free-for-all since there would be nothing to dissuade others from trying, except maybe lethal force from your gun. The closest thing to anarchy i can think of is extremely tribal societies with very little law enfocrement, like in rural pakistan and afghanistan (where guns are VERY abundant, along with bombs and RPGs), and the chaos of Ethiopia.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
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