China Telecom Blocking Skype Calls

Retrospeak writes "According to a Reuters report China is starting to block Skype service in Shenzhen, an affluent southern city of China. Local Chinese media report that China Telecom has plans to eventually block the service throughout its coverage area nationwide. Could this have something to do with the fact that China Telecom charges close to $1 per minute for calls to United States and Europe?" From the article: " A China Telecom spokesman had no comment on the reports about the Shenzhen blockage, but gave a broader view. 'Under the current relevant laws and regulations of China, PC-to-phone services are strictly regulated and only China Telecom and (the nation's other fixed-line carrier) China Netcom are permitted to carry out some trials on a very limited basis,' he said."

Comments

Sad Future of Broadband Access in other countries

[Nerd Systems]

China Telecom is pretty smart to be blocking the Skype service, even though ethically I think it is not right to be blocking a user's internet connection experience like this. User's pay for an internet connection, expecting to be able to use it for many various purposes, and not have certain "features" blocked, but then again, this is not America either.

Here in America, at least we have the FCC and other governing bodies telling big business what they are allowed to do and what they are forbidden to do, and the majority of time the rules are followed at least. I know a while back that some major ISPs tried to block Vonage on their systems but after a major outcry from their subscribers this was changed quickly.

China has always been known to be a government that censor's free speech and tries to limit what it's citizens have access to. I am sure that their email systems are all monitored with anti-government emails being filtered out or those sending/receiving these emails being placed on watch lists, and am sure that each citizen's web surfing habits are monitored as well.

This is just another example of why I am glad to live here in the United States of America. We may complain about things from time to time, but at least we do have more freedom of information and able to know more, then most other countries out there. If my Vonage was blocked by my ISP, I would be contacting Road Runner in a hurry, and getting things straight, something that as an American we can take care of. I'm glad to not be helpless like the majority of private citizens in China are.

I wonder if this is proven to be a successful triumph on China Telecom's part, if it will help spur other ISP's in various countries around the globe to take a part in this as well. Voice over IP has been a wonderful blessing to many around the world, being used by many to reach other's in distant countries, at a far cheaper cost then a normal voice call would cost... hope this doesn't catch on and cause VOIP as a whole to start being shut down outside of America.

Hopefully, Skype can just one-up the Chinese, and change the way their system works, to more easily get around the blockage, as well as having the system be more intelligent in finding connections, bypassing any blocking measures that China Telecom might try to implement.

I'm not a lawyer, and curious about the legal implications of this. I know that with China being a communist nation, that the people probably have no rights, but could Skype turn around and have a lawsuit against China Telecom, for "obstruction of service" or "tampering with service" which is essentially what they are doing?

Best of luck with that

[gunpowda]

It's a legitimate, functional technology. This is all too reminiscent of the media companies' fear of a threat to their established business models.

Regardless of any efforts to block its use, once people realise the advantages of VOIP, organisations, whether Governments or companies who want to enforce some kind of monopoly, will have to embrace this worthwhile development.

Re:Best of luck with that

[mrchaotica]

Do you think China Telecom is blocking it to maintain a high profit margin, or do you think that $1/minute reflects the cost of eavesdropping on every conversation? I would imagine China blocking VoIP not due to cost, but because they want to control the information.

Re:It may be a censorship issue

[Craptastic Weasel]

Well... I have a good friend who is starting to do business in China, (specifically in the IT business) and from what I have heard, you don't just walk into China and set up shop. Any company that wants to play in China's market has to do it through

1.) The Government,
2.) A Chinese Big Business, or
3.) some nefarious underground type deal, (mafia-ish).
Profit ???

Basically, he has told me that if you try to skip this crucial relational step, they'll pirate, steal and plunder your market share there into oblivion. (Sorry Bill!)

I imagine with such a model market, they're very protective of the ones who play accordingly.

Just my .02 worth

(sig withheld as evidence)

How is it identified for blocking?

[quadong]

Anyone have any idea how they are identifying SkypeOut traffic? Skype makes a pretty serious effort to be hard to identify. Do they just block the login server?

Re:How is it identified for blocking?

[Kadin2048]

Wow, 2/3rds of the way down the page and I finally get an interesting response. :)

Yeah I'm wondering the same thing too. My guess is that Skype was just caught unaware and was sitting there with its ass in its hands like the original Napster service was. Big centralized login server, easy to block. "Problem" for the Chinese, solved.

VoIP isn't just going to go away, although Skype as a corporation probably will, at least from the Chinese market. But there are lots of ways to disguise an internet phone call -- encrypt it and bury it in HTTP traffic, for instance. You'd have to decentralize the system and probably lose any opportunity to make profit at least in the way Skype does now, but it's not tough to do. I don't think the Chinese would be stupid enough to just block all encrypted data traffic, since it would shut down basically all electronic commerce and banking.

The peer-to-peer file networks basically do the same thing: they provide a directory which you then use to open a direct connection between two computers on the internet, to transfer information. In the U.S., where telephones are ubiquitous and service is cheap, they get used for (mainly contraband) data. But perhaps in China, where you can buy the latest pirated movies on every corner, it's the phone conversations that are the contraband that want to be moved over such a network. The same sort of distributed database which normally holds file names, hashes, and other metadata could contain people's names or aliases and IPs.

I find it interesting and a little ironic that the file sharing networks of the U.S. and Europe could potentially become a disruptive freedom-spreading tool for people living under an oppressive government. Or maybe it's not ironic at all, it's just the degree and type of oppression they're being used against.

Re:How is it identified for blocking?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Skype knew this was coming: they have enough people with clues who've worked in telephony and web content providing and dealing with the unconstitutional US government restrictions on the RSA encryption at the core of their technology that their lawyers and techas *must* have thought about it.

Avoiding the political censors is a laudable and reasonable goal, but getting clever this way makes it that much tougher to have a real phone policy in a secure environment where you are *not* supposed to have un-logged phone calls.

By the way, the US export encryption regulations were already ruled unconstutional once, but got transferred to another federal department and are wending their way back through the court challenges once again. Those are what blocked a similar quality encryption that was absolutely end-to-end secure almost 20 years with the PGPPhone published for Macintosh modem users.

Re:Sad Future of Broadband Access in other countri

[iminplaya]

I know that with China being a communist nation...

China is NOT a communist nation. It is an authoritarian nation. Big difference there. In other words, The authorities are asserting their authority. Tell me something new. It happens all over the planet. We don't need to single them out. We use IP law to do precisely the same thing. It all depends on the spin that's put upon it. You can use censorship to protect property or one's power over others. It makes no difference. It's still censorship. Your entire post sounds a little like a 1950s propaganda piece.

Re:It may be a censorship issue

[pv2b]

Hm, interesting that. Skype uses encryption that (supposedly) makes it impossible (or at least very hard) to listen in on Skype calls. Maybe that's why China wants to block it?

Although, this would be no reason for them to block standard SIP, which typically is unencrypted. Although SIP is a generic enough solution to support encryption at some layer, most existing VoIP solutions don't do this. I know that my IP telephony at home doesn't use any encryption, but I'm not that concerned about it, since neither would a standard POTS line if I were to have one of those.

But then again, when you're not raking in $x/minute for phone calls, but instead routing IP traffic at your own expense, your budget for sniffing IP telephone traffic gets that much smaller. Why invest in new technology to eavesdrop on VoIP calls when you can just maintain the status quo by adding some new rules to the Great Firewall of China?

Re:Can get much lower...

[Tony Hoyle]

They problably won't block anything else.. SIP and IAX2 aren't (usually) encrypted.

If Skype give the chinese government the encryption keys then I'm sure they'll be unblocked...

Party Line

[Doc Ruby]

What do you expect the telco to do, let people share the resources equally? Pay what they can afford, get what they need? What do you think they're running in China, communism? Er...