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VoIP Backlash From Phone Companies
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.'"
So less return on television advertising, thanks to the evolution of technology, and what future does this have for television entertainment, if the place to advertise isn't the tube? Product placement, I suppose. Let's have a surreptitious party on the show with people having what is undeniably a very good time and feature Heineken cans/bottles, perhaps have an actor say, "this Heineken beer is excellent, much more flavourful then other leading brands."
Harlo Wilcox, Don Wilson and Bill Goodwin, your kind we shall meet again.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I thought all of the phone companies qualify as common carriers and are not responsible for whats on their networks because they can't and shouldn't control it. Now that they have filtering ability for somethings they should be charged for every copied song and every piece of child porn moving on their wires.
They could then just add some jitter to any unrecognized (i.e. encrypted) traffic, thus making the connection useless for any two-way voice streams. They don't have to block the connection entirely, and most services are not interactive and wouldn't notice the difference.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Skype is encrypted and P2P. Yet they can still block it.
Also, if your VoIP service ever uses real phone lines, the telco can easily block it.
If this happened in the US, though, it would be an illegal abuse of their monopoly powers. When they start censoring certain data, they lose their common carrier status as well, so they become liable for all the child porn, viruses, illegal movie downloads, etc. that they transfer. Probably not a road they want to go down.
However, I guess cable companies in the US aren't common carriers, so they can (and do) block other VoIP. Someone needs to sue them for this -- it's absolutely ridiculous. When you break part of the Internet, you aren't an ISP anymore. You're a Content That We Cram Up Your Ass Service Provider... just like cable companies are already.
Personally, I use Speakeasy DSL which does nothing but route bits to and from my machine. That's the way the Internet should be!
My other car is first.
Skype doesn't use random ports and protocols does it? It needs to handshake the two programs before the encrypted data transfer starts, which probably makes it relatively easy to block at the router level.
That said, it shouldn't be impossible to masquerade VOIP data as something like a first-person shooter data stream (many of which have voice-chat already integrated), or by some other means that would result in the ISP/Telco blocking legitimate users as well and raising their angst level.
Fighting technology is a losing proposition for conventional telcos, so they better find a way to work with users rather than against them...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I work in one of these oldfashioned phone companies. Due to our location international charges is a large part of our intake. Therefore we dont like Skype much. In fact we'd like this whole VoIP thing to be un-invented.
We tried looking into blocking and it's bad karma all the way. Trust me, the old guys loved the idea but the publicity would kill us. In the end we have to do VoIP ourself. Better to loose business to yourself than to somebody else. This of course provides me with interesting work so I'm not complaining ;-)
TCAP-Abort
By way of latency. little more than 300milliseconds, and you can kiss VoIP goodbye. This is a problem I'm having using VoIP thru cable. I'm going to switch to DSL and see if it fixes the problem and delivers quality such that I don't get complaints.
If the cable companies introduce latency on purpose to disrupt VoIP I could see that it could result in a litigation, but what if it just happens to be inherent in the network? Or could be made inherent? With high latency, you don't break the internet, you just cripple time dependant communications.
As you say a number of FPS's have voice built in. So if they shut down VOIP what's to stop people from just using games ONLY as chatting mechanisms?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We need a free ad-hoc P2P VPN application. As the call is made, you make a temporary VPN to the remote end with some throwaway key that is agreed upon programmatically and encrypt all packets, when the call ends, it gets torn down. For VOIP calls the encryption wouldn't have to be great, but if we could run the call through even a single DES end-to-end VPN, that would take care of the phone companies terminating the calls.
Call quality can suffer over a VPN, but with a high-bandwidth connection, one call won't make a bit of difference, 20 or 30 calls might be a problem.
I'm not saying the encryption SHOULDN'T be great, but compared to a regular phone, I mean, I can stand outside your house and clip two alligator clips to the box and hear your regular phone calls...
I like music
He might be trying to make the point that the telco's think that VOIP isn't legitimate, ...
Actually, this isn't credible. They are using it heavily themselves, internally. For some years now, it's been widely reported within the comms and computer industry that, except for the link to your home, most of the "phone" traffic in the US and other countries has been converted to VoIP. The phone companies have found that running IP and VoIP over their private lines is a cheap and very effective way to multiplex everything. They don't even have to write the software, and IP is far easier to manage than most of the voice-only schemes that they had been developing.
An aside is that a phone link is usually an RTP connection, not TCP. Look it up. It's a 15-year-old protocol that is essentially TCP augmented by a "QOS" (guaranteed minimal throughput) feature.
What they're really trying to do is make sure that they control that "last mile" to your phone outlet, and that they can continue to charge you the old monopoly prices even after they've radically lowered their operating costs by using VoIP internally.
So the telcos think that VoIP is entirely legitimate and use it heavily. But only they should be allowed to sell it. Even if you own your own private network, you shouldn't be permitted to run VoIP internally; you must buy it from your local phone company in a non-competitive market.
It's all about the money. They're just protecting their century-old business plan and its profits.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Check http://www.narus.com/press/index.html , don't buy any service from company who is their client.
Its much more than Skype, SIP blocking people. If a company is using their products, they are watching everything. Check their products page.
http://www.narus.com/solutions/IPanalysis.html
They brag about Telecom Egypt using their software/platform, they have rather interesting banner "bragging" about "Certified for China's national networks".
I would switch my cell phone, ISP immediately if they are using any of this companies products.
Its not Skype only.
nightmares are dreams too. It just makes the internet(s?) more exciting. I'm sure there are already "undergound" networks that are linked to the "internet". It will be like the BBS days, only better. One man's fractured net is another's opportunity. Psst, want a gateway connection to europe? Believe me, the cat is out of the bag. Long live the internet. But I'm sure it might go through a huge pile of steaming crap phase before it mutates. You just can't stop free porn.
My suspicion is the reason they're getting away with this has more to do with the fact that POTS is a cash cow for governments as well as phone companies. Here in the US state governments are terrified of VOIP because they count on POTS for a not-insignificant portion of revenues.
The thing is, if you decide to ban encrypted traffic, you may as well say goodbye to internet commerce. All on-line purchases are done trough secure connections.
Why not? They could drop all encrypted traffic to non-authorized sites at the internet backbone level, and e-commerce survives. Then the question is, who controls the white list of approved web sites?
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
"The only phone service in my house is Vonage. If my ISP were to try to block or restrict that, you'd better believe I wouldn't be switching over to their phone service. I'd be getting a new ISP."
If they blocked your VoIP, couldn't you just report them for preventing your access to 911 on that connection?
Quite the oposite from France... Here in Québec, The two major Telcos wich are Bell Canada and Telus and the two major Cablecos wich are Videotron and Cogéco are all offering VOIP as we speak.
Since they are offering the service, I guess they would be very stupid to block it... Talk. about shooting yourself in the foot.
Today, companies are fighting any way they can to remain relevant in today's world. They can do that in two ways; Making the right moves at the right time to stay relevant like for example Koday did in the face of digital photography nearly 10 years ago OR forcing their clients to consider them relevant by screwing them when they don't have a choice (FOR NOW) like the RIAA and the CellCos do.
Sufice to say that this can only last for a given time and people remeber who screwed them...
Ironically France telecom is one of the main players in the commercial VOIP field in Italy offering unlimited calls within Europe for a flat rate of 25 euro per month through it parla.it subsidiary. This whilst using your your POTS phones connected to their router.
Whilst this is a good thing in a country still plagued by outragious international rates (from 18ct/min within EU!) I find it ridiculous that they want to block it on their home-turf. It could be a case of a (too) large company not knowing what the other leg is doing but this smells bad. I would not be surprised about Telecom Italia blocking all VOIP over the backbones other then their own flavour. I am allready suspiciuous by the common Skype disconnections in a conversation (something that did not happen in Holland) - but then again nobody is surprised as it happens with the POTS lines too!