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VoIP Backlash From Phone Companies

Posted by Zonk on from the free-calls-can-cost dept.

denis-The-menace writes "An article from the online edition of IEEE Spectrum says phone companies in France, Germany, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have announced they will block VoIP calls on their networks. Using new software from Narus Inc., the carriers can detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications and block the calls. Gotta love Ma Bell." From the article: "Narus's software does far more than just frustrate Skype users. It can also diagnose, and react to, denial-of-service attacks and dangerous viruses and worms as they wiggle through a network. It makes possible digital wiretaps, a capability that carriers are required by law to have. However, these positive applications for Narus's software may not be enough to make Internet users warm to its use. 'Protecting its network is a legitimate thing for a carrier to do ... But it's another thing for a Comcast to charge more if I use my own TiVo instead of the personal video recorder they provide, or for Time Warner, which owns CNN, to charge a premium if I want to watch Fox News on my computer.'"

7 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. In a related story...... by 8127972 · · Score: 4, Informative

    .... Some phone companies in Canada are tying to brand their services so that they don't sound like they're VoIP because of the negativity associated with these services.

    http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews /TPStory/LAC/20051020/TWVOIP20/TPTechnology/?query =voip

    --
    This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
  2. Re:slashdotted out of the gate by Pentavirate · · Score: 3, Informative

    I took out the nyud.net:8090 and it worked fine. FYI.

    --
    www.joshferguson.org
  3. Similar article in the WSJ by Strudelkugel · · Score: 4, Informative

    Today's Wall Street Journal Online also has an article. It discusses the attempts US domestic carriers are making to block third party services, as well as limiting file sharing and other "hi bandwidth" uses. Fortunately the FCC has prevented the major carriers from blocking independent VOIP providers, but Europeans evidently have a different view, which is weird since our consumer internet connectivity sucks compared to theirs, let alone Asia.

    Just shows what an overpriced cash cow voice is now.

    --
    Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
  4. China's National Networks... by theCSapprentice · · Score: 3, Informative
    Check out Narus's homepage...http://www.narus.com/

    Now tell me that a company certified for China's National Networks is who we want to secure the general internet. Its almost as if they are saying YES to censorship and control. I'm not saying security is a bad thing, but pick how you do it with care...

  5. Clarify by dslauson · · Score: 3, Informative

    Something TFA didn't make as clear as they could have-

    The article is referring to phone companies that also have an ISP service trying to block voip data from travelling over their internet service.

    That's as opposed to not allowing their land-line phone customers to recieve voip calls.

    It just seemed like some people were confused.

  6. Re:This will spur encrypted VoIP... by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 2, Informative

    Jitter is defined as random variances, typically in the 10's or 100's of milliseconds, in the delays between successive packets in stream. It is related to latency, which is the minimum delay between the transmission and reception of any given packet. Given that, how, exactly, would adding jitter impede e-mail, web pages, instant messages, or any primary Internet services besides live voice conversations and possibly online real-time games? The technique was mentioned in that article as an effective method for discreetly discouraging the use of VoIP.

    --
    "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  7. Re:This will spur encrypted VoIP... by pyrrhonist · · Score: 2, Informative
    An aside is that a phone link is usually an RTP connection, not TCP. Look it up. It's a 15-year-old protocol

    Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) was accepted as an IETF standards track protocol in January 1996. The research goes back as far as the 1970's.

    that is essentially TCP

    RTP is not specific to any particular transport layer, but in IP networks is layered upon UDP.

    That being said, it most assuredly cannot be used over TCP.

    Furthermore, it is most unlike TCP in that it is an unreliable transport protocol.

    augmented by a "QOS" (guaranteed minimal throughput) feature.

    From the RFC:

    Note that RTP itself does not provide any mechanism to ensure timely delivery or provide other quality-of-service guarantees, but relies on lower-layer services to do so. It does not guarantee delivery or prevent out-of-order delivery, nor does it assume that the underlying network is reliable and delivers packets in sequence. The sequence numbers included in RTP allow the receiver to reconstruct the sender's packet sequence, but sequence numbers might also be used to determine the proper location of a packet, for example in video decoding, without necessarily decoding packets in sequence.
    RTP gives you the ability to monitor the transfer through RTCP, but offers you no QoS guarantees. In other words, your application needs to do its own QoS by monitoring the RTCP. Depending upon your application and the underlying transport, you may also need to retrieve QoS information from other sources.

    --
    Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.