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)

Re:Not fair

[matth]

The thing is... Take this scenario:

I'm with Vonage... it starts breaking up and has issues.... leaves a bad taste in my mouth for voip... why am I suddenly going to go to the cable companie's voip service????

Begs for direct oversight

[DavisNet]

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?

Re:Verizon

[Paska]

Read the damn article, this is different to the case you mention. They are not blocking access to other VoIP providers. However they are tagging (or will?) be tagging their own VoIP traffic which will force all other VoIP provider's traffic to run as non-guaranteed traffic and thus, could lead to dropouts or all round crap service.

It's going to be bad, in theory

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

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

[m0rningstar]

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... )

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.

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

[Barnoid]

now I'm just a conslutant on the Cisco side...

is that the female form of consultant? ;)

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

[Anonymous Coward]

No, slut applies to both genders of consultant.

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:It's going to be bad, in theory

[SpaceLifeForm]

And the solution to that is eliminating monopolies on the pipes to the end-user.

This is damage. It will get routed around.

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

[Pollardito]

there's two points that he made that are useful here :

1. they're not rate limiting VOIP traffic in particular. he should have said that all internet traffic is 11 and that all internet traffic would be limited to 10, so that it'd be clear that there is no discrimination. VOIP is one of the more latency sensitive applications, so it will suffer first and most if all non-preferred traffic is limited
2. they don't have to reduce anything to throttle, they can do it via inaction. ever increasing subscription to VOIP (and internet services in general) means that they only have to freeze bandwidth to effectively throttle future traffic

I use VoIP for business.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

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.

Re:I use VoIP for business.

[MBCook]

Yep. A friend's boss (who controlled one of the largest cell accounts in town) had his signal get dropped on the way to work every day, which caused him problems. So he called them up and said "fix it or we change providers." They put up a cell tower, "just for him." If you control money, they'll fix it for you.

The problem is, you have to control money. They won't screw with "world's largest retailer", or if they are dumb enough to do it, they'll learn the lesson and from then on make sure their computers are nice to "world's largest retailer's" traffic. The problem is that when it's just grandma, they'll say "Hmm. That's too bad." or "We'll look into it" and nothing will ever happen.

PS: As a side note, I've heard of the new boom business for VoIP: telemarketers. No long distance to anywhere, and you could call from your call center in India to Seattle for the same price you'd pay if your call center was in Wala Wala. At least the national Do Not Call list works (for the most part).

Encryption is the simple answer...

[datastalker]

...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.

Re:Encryption is the simple answer...

[m0rningstar]

No, it won't. You just de-prioritise ANY traffic other than your VoIP traffic.

And without some form of prioritisation across a public network, VoIP becomes a flaky proposition at best. You have a 250ms round trip latency budget, and encryption adds to the serialisation delay on both ends and impacts this. Plus any out of order packet delivery or jitter will further impact voice quality, along with compression.

And people expect their phone to work. All the time. Early adopters will tolerate the impact, but the money is in the commoditisation of the service and deploying it to everyone -- and everyone will not be willing to deal with a flakey phone.

If we had control of our politicians....

[Cryofan]

They would not DARE do this.
But we do not have control of our politicians, our public servants. Why not?

Re:If we had control of our politicians....

[LearnToSpell]

Because you don't have any money. And if you don't have any money, you don't have any control. Your only other recourse is to vote, but with the Iraqi election turnout higher than the American, that's a longshot at best.

Packet shaping

[saskboy]

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.

Another dupe?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know it's bad when the feature link in the "new" story is already colored dark from being followed.

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.

Re:Fortunatly there is a choice.

[Mike Rubits]

I get my internet from cable. That's the only way I can get high-speed internet.

Unfortunately, very rarely do people have 3-4 options for their connection.

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.

Darwin Says...

[iamlucky13]

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.

Encryption for VoIP traffic

[SamMichaels]

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.

Re:Encryption for VoIP traffic

[pavera]

I actually engineer and sell Asterisk boxes to small businesses, providing VoIP inside the office, connecting to the pstn. Our device encrypts all voice traffic on the public internet (between offices, and from remote clients/road warriors).

This article is of course mostly just stupid. Creating a vlan or QoS policy for VoIP will not cause the rest of the traffic to be crappy, not unless at least 50% of their actual traffic is voice traffic and that would require a whole lot of phone calls. VoIP is not really a broadband service per se.. it only takes 64kbps, my dsl service gives me 1.5mbps down and 1mbps up... I'd have to have 10 simultaneous calls up to use 50% of my bandwidth on voice...

Even if this was the case, the ISPs can't let "all other traffic" suffer at the expense of voip, if their voip policies are being so generous to their voip traffic that other voip providers service suffers, guess what, internet traffic in general will be suffering, and people will certainly notice that and complain (Hey, my bittorrent is only downloading at 50Kpbs, it used to get at least 150Kbps... )

Anyway, the article is idiocy, and people who know VoIP know how to secure it, and yes, I would never make a VoIP call over the public net without encryption.

Re:Encryption for VoIP traffic

[stephandahl]

and then compress the encrypted stream.

Um, an encrypted stream should not be compressible unless there's something wrong with your crypto.

Compress the stream, then encrypt it...

Robert X. Cringely is a sick, sick man

[pyrrhonist]

First he says:

establishes a virtual voice circuit to your girlfriend in Bulgaria so you can listen to each other's heavy breathing.

Then he says:

Your grandmother wouldn't understand. Or she might if she's Bulgarian.

Just what the hell is he suggesting here?

Re:Robert X. Cringely is a sick, sick man

[JudeanPeople'sFront]

He-he, actually "vulgar" comes from Bulgar and used to mean "common people", "citizen". The Vulgate Bible was written in the commonly spoken language, the vulgar language. Germanic languages have probably gotten "volk" and "folk" from this word, also.

There were mass settlements of Bulgars in the Apennines at various times trough the Middle Ages. There are a lot of Bulgarian toponyms in Italy, for example Monte Bulgheria. Bulgarian derived family names are common in some places - Bulgari and Borgii are famous examples. The Latin language itself was "vulgarized" due to a large number of non-native speakers (mostly Germanic people, like the Langobards).

"Vulgar" acquired a negative meaning later: plain, plebeian, unrefined, coarse and rude. It is quite a common linguistic phenomenon. Actually, in "Genealogy of Morals" Nietzsche claims that the words for "bad" in all languages have evolved likewise.

Way off-topic, I know. Whatever.

Here Come the Commies...

[Nimrangul]

Ok, I know you folk out there in will strongly dislike this idea, but I think that the phonelines should be taken from the phone companies.

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.

Re:Here Come the Commies...

[Nimrangul]

Yeah, you're right, I'm from Ontario. You prarie folk, especially Saskatchewan, are traditionally ahead of the rest of Canada on the political scale of things; though you often end up the butt of jokes for it (for being "way out there").

Hmmm, this reference to commies made me think of something that made me chuckle... In the past in America the Reds were the evil outsiders, now they are the good ol' boys back home.

Bah, strange things enter a man's mind at 11:30.

I don't quite buy his argument

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I don't quite buy his argument

[miu]

It doesn't hurt other VoIP providers by making them worse, even if they maintain their current service levels they will look bad in comparison to the lower latency, higher quality offering of the ISP.

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.

Won't this also harm online gaming?

[Travoltus]

Would this (hypothetical) 250ms latency also affect all OTHER traffic including games?

New ISPs?

[patdabiker]

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?

This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[Travoltus]

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?!!

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[shadowbearer]

Duh.

Obviously anarchy is the most powerful medium for innovation ;~0

SB

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[BobPaul]

Running Linux is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."

And it cauterizes as it cuts off your arm...

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[Anonymous Coward]

you're thinking of "chaos" not "anarchy"... do some reading.

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[Slack3r78]

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?

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[FleaPlus]

Anarcho-capitalists would argue that the combination of anarchism and capitalism is the most powerful possible medium for innovation. ;)

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.

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[hany]

Well, IMO capitalism is good but has one quirk which nobody solved yet:

Capitalism stops working well when "the thing" stops growing because there is no space to grow left anymore.

There are stages (but beware, I'm not economist, that's just my observation or my opinion, whatever):

1. While "the market" is in development and there is a lot of "land not taken", there are lots of businesses wich are growing and "taking the land". And there is competion and all the "fruits of competiton" which are good for customers.

2. Once "all the land" is occupied, bigger businesses start to either eat or kill smaler ones. At this stage there is still competition but it's dissapiering as the number of businesses is dropping.

3. 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.

One obvious and "easy looking" solution is to make "the land" bigger. But that (at the end) effectively means to make more people for which we need to expand into space. With that approach we can solve, mitigate or avoid "stage 3" till we reach another limit (like we fill all the glalaxy).

Another ideas?

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[Acy James Stapp]

That limit is called light speed. Our population grows exponentially but the volume we will be able to populate is a light-sphere whose area grows cubically.

Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism

[PsiPsiStar]

Everyone talks about "regulation."
Nobody ever mentions the specific regulations.

What regulations are we talking about here, standards that limit the amount of lead in gasoline or the amount of H2S that you can release into the air?
Train schedules? Limits on monopoly? Enforcement of Patents? Traffic laws? What?

That makes it worse...

[katharsis83]

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.

Regulation could stop the ISPs from doing this

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Re:Verizon

[Anonymous Coward]

there is nothing to fear. you can always make voip traffic look like gamer traffic on any port. small, bursty packets send for long periods of time. what are they going to do? block gamers? yeah, that's smart marketing.

Begs for clear labeling

[cait56]

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.

Gets Worse

[MBCook]

In his newest article, he talks about the Burst.com settlement, but in the last 3 or 4 paragraphs he gets back to the topic of this story... including this little titdbit:

"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."

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

It boils down to ye olde story

[ewe2]

...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.

Re:Tag your own packets?

[The Vulture]

Well, you've got the idea correct, but it has nothing to do with how DSL can run aside POTS. DSL can run along POTS because one uses the low frequencies, and the other uses the high frequencies. If you have DSL on your phone line, and don't have the filter, you'll likely hear a hissing, that's the DSL signal.

However, should you get a combination cable modem/MTA (the VoIP box) from you cable operator (i.e. Comcast), it works like this:
* The DOCSIS 1.1 specification calls for a nifty little feature called "service flows". Service flows have their own QoS, and can be triggered by a variety of criteria, including TCP/UDP port numbers, Ethernet frame type, etc.
* From there, the cable operators will provision two (or more) service flows for the cable modem. One would be for the voice, which would receive the highest priority possible (but with a lower bandwidth), and the other one(s) would be best-effort, with a higher bandwidth allowed.

Cable operators can also use this to throttle any arbitrary connection (i.e. P2P), and in fact, have done so in the past, I would imagine.

A "side effect" of this would be that Vonage boxes would considered as best-effort, simply because they don't get classified into the voice flow by the software of the modem. This is because they won't meet the characteristics of the voice flow.

-- Joe

Two reasons: open VOIP will survive

[aqui]

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. ;)

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.

i can see the headlins now....

[teksno]

NEW CAUSE OF DEATH: LAG!!!

operator:"hello, 911 emergency."

random person being killed my a madman: "HE...... ......LP... .........me. my address i...(10 minutes later)lane. HEL...P ME.....pleas.....eeeeeeeeeee"

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

But will it be bad in practice?

[louarnkoz]

Much is said about "quality of service", but in practice the Internet as been working quite well without any of that. In practice, Skype does work, sounds better than the average telephone, and does not use any particular priority labelling.

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.

same mistake all over again

[idlake]

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.

Re:same mistake all over again

[junelson]

How does this get modded insightful? Sure, on a network without oversubscription, you don't need to prioritize traffic. However, the entire premise of ISPs is oversubscription, especially for residential service. Sure ISPs like Speakeasy promise speed guarantees - that's easy, they just deliver full speed a majority of the time. So, if some of the data gets delayed during a small window, who's to know better? With voice that degradation causes packet drops as the jitter buffers are exceeded.

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 for G.711 (I know, G.729 uses less bandwidth, still the same issue holds). Guaranteeing 80kbps to every household is doable as opposed to 4mbps ( if you think the cable company is committed to delivering you 4mpbs, you are smoking crack). So their voice traffic gets a guarantee and the alternative products are left susceptible to node/dslam usage fluctuations.

As the market continues to move from early adopters to early majority, the quality expectation is going to continue to rise (no more outages and toll-quality voice). Will an end user pay $5-10 more per month for their ISPs own service if the quality is better?

What do the Vonages of the world do? Ask for the FCC to force QOS regulation? Please, they asked for an unregulated industry and even if they were able to get some sort of regulation, the cable/ILEC guys will butcher them with regulation gamesmanship (just ask the CLECs today). Nope, I would guess that they will seek to work with the biggest providers to pay for QOS guarantees or try to figure out their exit plan.

And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this. I've used them to prioritize voice (tracks the sip signalling and matches up the RTP associated with the call) . Application based filtering is a given. Check out netintact.com for of just one solution already deployed.

Uh-huh...

[BobPaul]

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...

Re:time for action

[aixou]

Problem is that those actions don't do jack shit, except make a few innocent people have a shitty week because they have to fix the mess you made.

That type of stuff is ignorance at its best. Before you jump to the conclusion of "let's destroy shit", why don't you try something constructive? Find out what's really going on, and if it's really that bad, try to start some sort of protest.

But just knocking shit down simply because it's related to a company that is vaguely associated to actions you disagree with is pure and utter bullshit. That's the exact same type of shit as when people in the middle east protest America by destroying McDonalds restaurants (regardless of whether the owners are native there or not). Or when ecoterrorists do their sabotages harm the environment more than helps.

Think before you do shit. Don't be such an idiot, and you may actually be able to do something constructive.

Re:And kill the net as a whole?

[The Vulture]

The best way to think of it is really like a FIFO queue, or standing in line at the Post Office.

All packets that the ISP favors (their own VoIP packets) go first in line. All other packets have to fight for a spot in line. (Non-VoIP packets are treated the same as every other packet*).

Now, assuming that there's enough spots in the line for all of the packets, nothing is dropped. The ISPs VoIP packets go out first, giving them a slight advantage, but everything goes out. If there aren't enough spots, then some of the packets get dropped.

*In practice, this isn't quite true. There are also packet priorities built into the IP specification, and it is likely that VoIP packets are using these as well. Therefore, the line would really look like this:
1. ISP approved packets
2. Non-ISP approved packets with high priorities
3. Every other packet.

Once these packets leave the ISPs network, it's "catch as catch can" again, however, it is likely that the ISP voIP packets have IP priorities as high as, if not higher than the non-ISP VoIP packets, causing them to still have a slight edge.

-- Joe

capitalism isn't dead

[SuperBanana]

That's not fair. A new innovation comes and is sucessful, and people have to squash it wrather than create compition

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.

Re:capitalism isn't dead

[Seumas]

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.

Um. Did we put our brain on hold here?

If the only highspeed provider in your area squashes competing VoIP traffic to force you to use their own VoIP service (which, interestingly, may not have even been available when you originally signed up with the other VoIP service), then exactly who will you move to?

For example, most areas only have one cable internet provider. Unless you are close enough to the CO for very high-speed DSL, cable is going to be your only bet (not to mention, high-speed DSL will still be enormously expensive in comparison).

See, capitalism works best when you have competition. In most regions, there's only one cable provider and one DSL provider (yes, more than one DSL ISP - but they all have to share the same DSL lines, usually provided by your telco).

Re:capitalism isn't dead

[Tim Doran]

Hold on... while I agree with your point, Cringely didn't talk about ISP's quashing traffic - he talked about them enabling class-of-service for their OWN voice traffic and leaving foreign voip traffic in the best-efforts network layer.

Engineering and maintaining a voice-quality COS on a network is expensive and difficult. Does anyone really believe that telcos or cablecos (having invested billions in building their networks) should hand this value over to Vonage etc for free? The reason Vonage can charge low prices is that it doesn't bear these costs - is it the ISP's job to bear these costs on their behalf?

If Vonage wants COS on these networks, it should approach them and offer to pay the engineering, hardware and operational costs. If not, they should continue to enjoy the service they've received for free to date.

My Internet connection is 5Mbps down, 800kbps up and capable of sustaining close to that for long periods of time. My Vonage phone works beautifully as long as I'm not hammering the network with Bittorrent. There's nothing to complain about here.

Maybe the dumbest Cringley column ever.

Re:Easy solution for VOIP's

[BobPaul]

end 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.

You obviously don't understand what's going on...

They aren't determining what type of packet is a Vonage packet based on source or destination ports, or even singling out Vonage or other VOIP providers at all.

What they're probably going to do is setting the packet priority of their in house to it's highest setting. Their internal routers will then see this priority flag and route the packets down a special high-speed shunt where they'll reach the home faster. 3rd part VOIP packets (Vonage, et al) will remain lumped in with all of the other data packets that exist on the interweb.

How does this differ from the current situation? Well, right now all of the packets on the interweb are lumped into the same pile both on your ISPs network and off, so the fact that their giving themselves priority isn't a big deal and won't directly effect the 3rd party VOIPs. But what will effect them is if they start purposly slowing down that lump of "everything else" just enough to cause Quality of Service issues for users of the 3rd party services. Sure, they'll be slowing down all web traffic that enters their building on purpose, but most traffic isn't as time sensitive as VOIP traffic and it won't really matter at all.

Also, since the Cringley article was just supposition anyway, I'll add my own opinion: The major ISPs will probably also ONLY do this to their home subscribers. The way I see it working is give most priority (with a seperate highspeed network) to the house brand VOIP. Then on the everything else network, us QOS to give business grade lines the next level of priority. This leaves the home users with the lowest priority and also allows them to throttle a little more to put pressure on home users's VOIP packets attempting to fight through without affecting the business subscribers where the profit margins are higher.

Only Works Within Same Network

[JAB2611]

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.

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. /jab

Re:Only Works Within Same Network

[DeepRedux]

An ISP can better control voice quality by avoiding using the public internet.

Time Warner Cable's VoIP service only uses IP only over their own network. Their network delivers calls to Sprint or MCI. From then on the calls are handled just like "regular" phone calls.

Re:QoS and prioritisation

[m0rningstar]

You know. I just read what I posted. The above poster is totally correct; voice can stand limited packet loss, absolutely, thanks to the small payload per packet.

What it cannot take is the latency or jitter.

It's obviously time to shut up and stop posting when I'm making that blatant of an error.

WRONG

[WindBourne]

we are where we are at, because of gov. regulation. Gov. allowed monopolies to be held and consolidated At first it was ATT. Then, they allowed a small number of cable companies who are quickly becoming just one company.

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.

Nobody wants to supply residential access

[r00t]

There just isn't any money in selling pure access to:

• 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.

capitalism isn't dead, but ...

[bezuwork's friend]

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.

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.

Re:capitalism isn't dead, but ...

[jacksonj04]

I doubt many users would know VoIP if it came up, slapped them in the face, hijacked their phone line, and cut their phone bill in half.

An interesting throught

[bruns]

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?

From Cringely's 17 March Column

[jonbrewer]

On the same topic this week, Cringely speculates...

"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-Mar ch/thread.html/

It's time for municipal broadband

[Serveert]

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.

Re:Verizon

[Cramer]

One thing Cringy (and you) don't seem to realize... all these 3rd party VoIP providers are already a "best effort" service. So is everything crossing the internet -- web, email, instant messages, etc. RSVP, Diffserv, et. al. are not guaranteed to work across even one hop, much less the entire internet. (and people would just abuse it if it did.)

Telco ISPs cannot partition and prioritize traffic sufficiently to screw up 3rd party VoIP without screwing up everything else in the process.

but of course ...

[porky_pig_jr]

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.

Re:Verizon

[Corydon76]

Actually, I don't think it matters. While the courts are notoriously difficult to predict, if past actions hold, I think we'll find that once the courts hear that prioritizing the ISP's VOIP traffic effectively de-prioritizes other VOIP packets from competing providers, the courts will at some point strike that prioritization as anticompetitive and illegal.

It doesn't really matter what the technique is; if the effect is that the ISP's VOIP works better than third-party VOIP due to an action taken by the ISP, it's going to be seen as anticompetitive.

As usual, Cringely is splitting hairs to get traffic on his column.

This is new?

[NoMaster]

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?

That's not how it works.

[billstewart]

Sure, a few ISPs may try to play games, but that's not the game they'll play - some third-world monopoly or recently-ex-monopoly telcos will block VOIP entirely, and some cable modem companies will do stupid things because they're incapable of not doing any stupid thing they can think of, but it's really few.

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.

If VoIP packets get priority

[Andy_R]

It won't be long before people switch to TCP/IP over VoIP.

*Cringely's* not being fair - or accurate

[billstewart]

Yes, there are some ISPs that want to kill every application that generates upstream traffic, so that any consumer in their right mind would buy services from somebody else. And there are third-world telecom monopolies or ex-monopolies that use their position to strangle new competition. (In the US, the worst offenders are mostly cable TV companies, but even in the bad old days of Excite@Home banning anything server-like, they understood that the main reason people bought their service was to file-share pirated music. And in the Pacific Rim, unfortunately Australia's telecom industry has a third-world attitude toward data users.)

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

911 is a mess anyway

[billstewart]

The current 911 and E911 systems in the US (for you non-US folks, that's Emergency calling or 999 or whatever) are designed with heavy dependence on a bunch of technical assumptions that weren't always valid for the traditional telco infrastructure and are less valid now. They didn't really like PBXs, and in some sense VOIP is like PBXs for everybody, and they certainly don't like mobile phones, though the control-freak FBI types have managed to bully the wireless companies into building location-tracking capabilities without making them actually useable to the owner of the phone. For instance, you can stick your Vonage or AT&T CallVantage phone in your suitcase and take it on a business trip with you - but if you call 911, you really want the fire engine to show up at your hotel or the Starbucks you're in, not back at your house when you're not there.

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.

Rogers Cap doesn't affect VOIP

[billstewart]

VOIP uses trivial amounts of bandwidth. I assume that's 60GB per month? So that's 2GB per day. Compressed voice uses 8kbps, so 1KB/sec; when you turn it into VOIP it's about 3KB/sec. 86400 seconds/day means you can leave your phone on for 24 hours a day using about 250MB/day - a mere eighth of your bandwidth.

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.

Re:Verizon

[jrmetc]

It looks like this started happening in parts of Mexico about two weeks ago. In Mazatlan, Vonage, Skype, Mediaring, etc no longer function. Tests to www.testyourvoip.com fail badly on the upload(well over 50% loss). Calls to tech support at Telmex Prodigy DSL have not been useful. Some users have even reported that tech support admits they're degrading voip upload traffic. Oddly, Telmex Prodigy DSL does not offer their own voip option at this time. Cable internet is still working fine....for now.

As someone who's worked on archetecting this ...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

They are NOT handing it over for FREE!

[Newer Guy]

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).

Re:same mistake all over again [corrected]

[junelson]

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.