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."

Comments

Not fair

[turtled]

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)

Fortunatly there is a choice.

[bluGill]

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.

Congress won't interfere unless it means taxation.

[Alpha_Traveller]

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.

Re:It's going to be bad, in theory

[Mammothrept]

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.

Also

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Gets Worse

[The Vulture]

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

Re:It's going to be bad, in theory

[dgatwood]

Latency? A typical cell phone call can have more than a half second round trip. Try it some time. Have the person on the other end listen and start counting along with you. You're not going to even -approach- 250ms latency on the public internet unless you're doing transcontinental satellite hops.

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.

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[UranusReallyHertz]

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.