Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Well... VoIP technology is inherently extremely sensitive to both latency and jitter; this is why Cisco is trying to work with ISPs (their 'V3PN program', which always sounds like a Star Wars driod every time I talk about it) to get them to listen to QoS/DSCP values as set by the customer in their network. (Or to route DSCP tagged traffic into the appropriate MPLS TE 'VPN', or whatever you choose as a methodology)
This, of course, raises huge issues for the general consumer, since those willing to pay what's probably a premium to NOT have their DSCP values stripped off at the edge of the network get further stomped, even without any form of 'anti-competitive' prioritisation -- the end users get squished first as they don't have a 'business class' service and the only real way for a backbone provider to make money is to over-subscribe their backbone and rely on the bursty nature of IP traffic to handle it. (At least, that was the plan when I was working with VERIO engineering a few years back; now I'm just a conslutant on the Cisco side... )
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.
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!
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.
"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.