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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
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.
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... )
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)
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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!
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.
now I'm just a conslutant on the Cisco side...
;)
is that the female form of consultant?
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.
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
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.
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.
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But fundamentally, the things Cringely's complaining about aren't accurate, because he doesn't understand the technology or the resulting economics. Yes, telcos are dealing with the threat of VOIP, and it's making their heads explode, and VOIP is much *much* harder to integrate with an old-fashioned telephone infrastructure than to run as a pure-VOIP business. (The technology's difficult, making it scale is difficult, different parts are centralized or decentralized, all the assumptions about who hands money to whom are different, the regulatory infrastructure doesn't match well at all, etc.) And the telcos are making sure that their data networks will support any VOIP services they develop with as close as they can get to traditional telco voice quality, and they're not sure how to deal with the fact that cellphones have convinced the public to accept lower-quality calls and newer codecs with much higher frequencies can support speakerphones much better.
Some big ISPs happen to be owned by telcos, or by telco-wannabees like the cable TV companies. Most of them are working on adding CoS capabilities to their backbones, but that's the least critical part of the network because most of them own their own fiber plants, and it's cheaper for them to burn more wavelengths on their fibers than to add fancy engineering capabilities to their routers or to hire fancy engineers to run them. It's the friendly mom&pop ISPs (that Cringely's not worried about) who are most likely to have backbone congestion issues that need CoS support to prioritize VOIP over best-effort data applications, because they're running at a different scale and don't generally own their own fiber networks.
The places that CoS matters most are the skinny parts of the network - the ingress from the customer's premises to the ISP's POP, and the egress from the ISP's POP to the customer's premises. The ingress direction is really a customer hardware and management problem, making sure that VOIP packets get on the wire before data packets, but service providers (including Vonage) typically handle that by forcing the customer's data through the same box that converts traditional-phone signals to VOIP, and software-based providers like Skype handle that inside the user's PC. This doesn't require the ISP to do anything, though it's sometimes cheaper to build those capabilities into the DSL/cable modem.
The egress direction can benefit from CoS marking, or from other fair-queuing systems that share bandwidth between remote sites or protocol types, or even from dumber systems that prioritize UDP over TCP. In a symmetric environment, like most business T1 connections, this is the most critical part of the system, because data applications can drown out voice unless there's some QoS approach. But most consumer connections are asymmetric, with much faster downstream connections than upstream, so there's less of a problem. Also, in most home applications, if downstream bandwidth is the bottleneck, it's usually because of some application like downloading music that can be turned off or slowed down during phone calls, which isn't a practical approach in most multi-person offices.
Cringely's arguments are especially bogus because the impact of backbone QoS / CoS features on network performance is much smaller than the impact of slow upstream connections in ADSL and Cable Modems. A 12
Bill Stewart
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