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Net Neutrality Never Really Existed?
dido writes "In his most recent column, Robert X. Cringely observes that network neutrality may have never really existed at all. It appears that some, perhaps all, of the major broadband ISPs have been implementing tiered service levels for a long time. From the article: 'What turns out to be the case is that some ISPs have all along given priorities to different packet types. What AT&T, Comcast and the others were trying to do was to find a way to be paid for priority access — priority access that had long existed but hadn't yet been converted into a revenue stream.'" Cringely comes to this conclusion after being unable to get a fax line working. His assumption that the (Vonage) line's failure to support faxing is due to Comcast packet prioritizing is not really supported or proved. But his main point about the longstanding existence of service tiering will come as no surprise to this community.
I didn't RTFA, but the mans comes to the conclusion that the big companies are out to get him on the basis that his fax won't work? Astounding logic! We should have been able to figure this out by assuming the companies are trying to increase profits.
The last time I tried to setup something similar, I came to a dead end, find several sources via Google that indicated that the compression used by fax machines was incompatible with the compression used by VOIP. Has the stat of the improved, or is Bob on a goose chase here?
"You can't dissect him, predict him, which of course means he's not a lunatic at all."
I don't know anything about Vonage , but if its like other VOIP systems it'll used lossy compression. Which is death for most kinds of digital to analogue systems running over a phone like using systems such as QAM or PSK since important information will be stripped out. This is why you can't use dial up modems over most (all?) VOIP services (why you'd want to anyway is another matter).
There's a difference between giving priority to different kinds of packets (QoS), and giving priority to packets from different sources, which is what Net Neutrality is all about. QoS is ok, it's encouraged so long as every packet of the same type gets treated the same way. The problem comes when your VoIP packet gets preferential treatment over my VoIP packet.
P.S. Fax is obsolete. Scan and email.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Same here, I've never been able to get a fax to work on our VOIP lines here at work, and this is with a Cisco VOIP network, internal.
I feel more like I do right now than I did a while ago.
Most transport streams that deliver audio use UDP - it doesn't matter if you lose a few packets here and there because the human hear hears a reasonably good approximation of the original sound. There's no point trying to redeliver packets that get lost, because they will be late anyway by the time you get them there. This scheme will just plain not work with digital data, fax or whatever, if you're losing bits of it here and there. I suppose you could re-implement a reliable TCP-like protocol on top of the unreliable transport stream, but it would be so much easier to take a scan or a photo and email it.
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
I use Bellsouth (now ATT). I had some serious issues sending faxes as well. One of the key ways to resolving this problem was to set the error correction levels on my Fax to the highest and to set the fax machine rate to the slowest possible speed. Doing this I was able to send and receive faxes with no trouble. The same worked for Comcast as well. This was also with Vonage. I used it with Comcast and VoIP some time ago, though. Perhaps things have changed in the last year or so.
You see the problem is that we are just miss-informed ... we just need to be educated. This guy sounds like a spin doctor of the worst kind. I hate people that try to convince me that I am miss-informed when I disagree with them.
I don't know for sure, but I suspect the answer may well lie in an extension of last week's column about net neutrality.
Readers claim that some -- who knows, maybe ALL -- big broadband ISPs are ALREADY running tiered services.
Well, there are no Net Neutrality rules/laws in place (yet). Correct? So, they can do anything they want, right?
So instead of a true "best effort" network upon which some ISPs want to impose tiered services, what most of us probably have are already tiered services
What a waste of a real estate on the Slashdot front page.
I have only VOIP at home through my cable provider, and I use a normal, stand-alone fax machine all the time to send faxes.
Since VOIP uses data compression I suspect that it is lossy. Voice can have lossy compression and still sound good to the ear. Even music can work. Since FAX is data that is embedded in higher audio frequency, I would expect it to not work becuase of lossy compression. POTS is analog all the way and has very little loss (except for analog filtering).
Anyone else know about this?
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I don't really know anything about the subject, but it's Cringely, so I'm going to assume that the opposite of whatever he said was true.
VOIP uses lossy compression that is heavily tuned for voice. Of course it is going to be lousy for lossless data transmission. If you wound the baudrate down low enough (say 2400baud), you might have some success, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
What baudrate is your fax transmitting at, and what bitrate and compression algorithm are you using for the VOIP connection? G.711 could probably do it, because that is what the trunk lines of POTS will be using, and maybe some of the wideband encodings like AMR-WB/G.722, but most VOIP encodings will be too lossy to use for data.
Prioritization and QoS is good... and expected. It doesn't mean that net neutrality doesn't exist.
;)
Does this guy actually have any technical smarts at all? Does he not realize that in order to do business, there's a certain level of "oversubscription" that is inevitable? ISP's have limits... they can only afford so much backbone to the Internet. This means that in order to prevent multiple broadband users from taking down the entire ISP, they HAVE to QoS the traffic in order that grandma with her PC can get on and send emails to little Johnny in California while torrents flood the network.
Net Neutrality isn't really about prioritization... it's about money. ISPs QoS the traffic, they just don't (yet) charge for certain tiers. I hope they don't... it would be the death of the Internet as we know it... and probably the birth of another more neutral network.
And for reference, I've worked for several ISPs in my career... and the company I work for today is also an ISP... so yes, I can speak somewhat intelligently on this
other than G.711 (uncompressed PCM), voice codecs will not handle fax or modem calls. The standard method of handling fax calls over IP is T.38.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
If you get a VoIP adapter and provider that support T.38, you'll have much better luck with faxing over VoIP. As I understand it, T.38 allows your VoIP adapter to emulate G3 fax audio signals of the remote fax machine, and conversely, your service provider emulates your fax machine at the interface with the PSTN.
I use a Linksys SPA-2102 VoIP ATA with Gafachi as my service provider, both of which support T.38. I can report that I haven't had a single problem sending or receiving a fax.
I know for a fact Broadwing now Level 3 Communications does service tagging. Our corporation bought a DS3 and were only to get single session rates of like 300K. We could fill up the entire 45Mb but it took a ridiculous number of sessions to do so. After much troubleshooting with them we found out our traffic was getting tagged as Bronze. They removed the tags and now we're smooth sailing with rates up to 1Mb per session. Still not the best but it is better. So just goes to show yes they are already tagging traffic.
Neutrality will hold as long as competition is fair. Internet culture is too long steeped in egalitarianism. If net providers start acting as tollgates, people will move around them. I doubt that 'premium' services can work without some sort of collusion among providers otherwise tit-for-tat throttling will occur. I not so sure it can work in the US, at least, now that the Republicans are on the way out.
cringely's point is horribly inaccurate, and has nothing whatsoever to do with net neutrality. prioritizing packets based on their type is wholly different from prioritizing packets based on whether or not the server they originated from has paid what amounts to a blackmail fee. i don't know how this guy still has a job- incompetent boobs like this give geeks a bad name.
QoS(Quality of Service) has been around for a while. Cable Broadband companies, like Comcast give packet priority to their own products, such as Comcast Digital Voice or network access to their own sites. But they previously let competitor products like Vonage suffer by giving it a lower package priority.
My ISP, Shaw Cable, offers users the ability to pay $10 per month to give their third party VoIP services a higher priority on the network by bumping their SIP protocol to a different QoS. While this works, Vonage @ $19.99 + Shaw's QoS @ $10.00 is already more expensive then Shaw's base Digital Phone service.
As someone who works on this for a living, I can tell you that most VoIP vocoders are not compatible with most high speed voice band modems and Faxes.
Most vocoders, such as GSM AMR NB, G.729 AB, G.723.1, are ACELP based (Algebraic Code Excited Linear Prediction) which basically parameterizes speech at the encoder and resysnthesises it at the decoder. These are specifically made for speech processing (and don't usually do well with music) and provide great compression with good quality (depending on the bit rate chosen).
Other compression, such as G.726, uses ADPCM (Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation) which still works well for most modems and Faxes, but don't provide the best compression rates.
In the case where an ACELP vocoder is used on a line that is to support Fax or Modem connections, a Fax/Modem relay is used. In this case, your local VoIP box will have a Fax machine in it, as will the remote side of the link. You local Fax machine connects a fax session with the VoIP box, the decoded Fax data and signals are sent digitally using T.38 or other protocol to the remote VoIP, where it is connected to the remote Fax machine. These Fax relays often use specific network protocols (RTP instead of TCP) to reduce delay time (hence, lack of equal packet speeds (which is not the same lack of net neautrality that we are all resisting). Also, depending on the bit rate of the vocoder, this type of Fax/modem link may not support the highest standard connection rates.
Code Master
The Code Master
The basic problem with Fax over VoIP is that it's _V_oIP. Not FoIP. The codecs that are generally in use have been optimized for use in the frequency ranges of the human voice, not the ranges used by fax machines.
Of course, faxing over VoIP has always seemed a bit backwards to me anyway.
First of all, everybody should recognize that most Fax-over-IP use a different codec (typical T.38, if I recall) for encoding the fax signal. If you just plug your fax machine into a plain-old VoIP port, there's a good chance that your gateway will do some lossy audio compression that isn't noticable for speech, but destroys a fax signal. That's one of the reasons that Vonage sells fax as a separate type of line.
Second, IIRC, the initial part of a fax call does some measurement and negotiation -- this is where the two endpoints determine how fast they'll communicate, exactly which protocol they'll use, what capabilities each other have and (most importantly here) test their connection, including round-trip time. But, this negotiation assumes a circuit-switched network, not a packet-switched network.
One of the core things about IP is that the round-trip time can change. Normally, each side would put in a buffer to balance it out, but if the delay changes, the buffer may need to be increased. For people, that's not a big deal -- add an additional 10ms delay midway though a call, and we don't even notice. But, that increase will kill a fax machine.
Think about what you're doing with fax: you are scanning an image, converting into data, then encoding that data as analog, which then gets re-encoded as data for transmission over IP. On the other end, just the reverse happens. Why not skip the extra steps by getting a scanner and emailing it? Or, subscribe to efax, which does it for you.
But, since a lot of people still have fax machines, a better technological solution might be to have your gateway decode the fax signal to get to the underlying image data, and then just transmit THAT to the other end. This is approximately what the T.37 fax standard does (again, IIRC). Unfortunately, it's not particularly well supported anywhere yet.
I don't fax frequently, and when I do it is just through my iBook's modem. However, I have never had a problem faxing through my Vonage line. I have no idea what speed I'm getting... it just works :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Back in the 80's, the net was carried by the CLECs. They did not give a hoot. Heck, we had not real security. I was able to connect to the modem at the univeristy with NO password and later my work modem pool at US West had just simple shared password. After all, it was local and long distance that carried the money.
When Clinton commercialized it, at ISPs were created, the CLECs still did not mess with packets other than that ALL Internet packets had the lowest of low packets on the ATM.
By 2000, qwest (old uswest) had packet shaping but I understood that it was only being used it to make sure that their employee packets got through.
2 years ago, Now, I have heard from a friend of mine that is there and they do shape based on other criteria, including who the packet goes to. In particular, qwest had a battle with cogent and SLOWED down the dns to them until they agreed to pay them more connect money. Basically, it has been turned into a weapon of sorts to have the big clecs control the small upstarts. Obviously, it will by used against end customes as well.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think Cringely needs to shutup until he starts releasing the second season of NerdTV. I've been waiting for that for way too long.
Regardless of technical favoritism I think a lot of people here have probably worked at an ISP or other business where the change requesting and troubleshooting needs of larger customers was routinely given higher priority than the needs of smaller customers, regardless of the fact that the "priority levels" of both issues being the same...
All this stuff about compression and packet prioritixation is nice, but the fact is I've had Vonage for about 3 years now, along with Comcast -- and I've never had a problem sending or receiving dozens of faxes.
based on content. The problem comes when Verizon's VOIP packets are given a 1 priority because they pay $100,000 a month, and Vonage's VOIP packets get a 5 priority because they won't pay the extortion fees.
Spoken like a true Mac user!
Yes, the answer to many FoIP problems is a way to hack your VoIP gateway adapter in order to enable T.38. That will let you fax in/out with no problems and with lower QoS.
I had to login into my Telco gismo with admin account, which let you change all of those settings.
Vonage.. shag them in their back port... Sunrocket is the one you want.
salute
I have since switched to Verizon Voicewing (I figure they won't sue themselves...) and haven't tried to fax with it yet, but I don't expect any problems.
As a former Vonage tech support rep, I can assure you that it is possible to get a fax line to work over a VoIP line.
I've only done it once with a baud rating over 4800, a few dozen times at or below 4800. Unfortunately, most faxes can't drop that low, even using the hidden system menus most have.
A single dropped packet often ends up as an unrecoverable error. Very few ISPs provide a stable enough connection to lose no data.
Latency is also an issue. VoIP lines have a much higher latency than POTS. People notice this as an echo, fax machines don't replay the signal but could easily time out waiting.
Also, at the time that I worked there, some of the techs were working on compiling a list of affinities that different model faxes had for different codecs. Higher bandwidth did not always get a fax working, seemingly arbitrary mid-range settings worked as often as low- or high-bandwidth codecs.
Net neutrality aside, don't expect a fax to work over a VoIP line.
Truth is, nobody knows much about most things, until you try to demand money for it. Then the shazbot hits the air circulator.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I am using vonage right now , in the process of switching to broadvoice tho (hate indian tech support among other things....), and I have no problems using a second line as a fax only line.
Vonage sucks for a lot of reasons, but I fax over my Vonage line and it works just fine.
Vonage doesn't outsource to India (or didn't last time I worked there), although there are a fair number of Indian-Americans in the New Jersey call center.
please.... All I get is a 404 error. It has either been yanked due to /. effect or someone screwed the pooch on the link.
TIA
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
What you're describing is perfectly reasonable and what everyone has subscribed to all along. If your downstream clients are hogging more of your bandwidth, you charge them more. If you hog more of your upstream provider's bandwidth, they charge you more. What Net Neutrality is about, though, is when your clients hog more of your bandwidth because they're going to Google, or to YouTube (oh, wait, that's Google...), or to Amazon, or to eBay, or to Wikipedia you charge *those* people in addition to your clients, even though there are several networks between you and, say, Google.
When you start charging people to whom you are providing no direct service is greedy and twisted. The net works because it distributes the economic power and burden across all links in the chain. Why mess with that to give a few large corporations more revenue streams? They already have locality-based monopolies.
[Ego]out
Last weekend Verizon took my Boston suburb DSL line out of service several times (Friday night through Sunday). Its too much of coincidence that it started around 11:30 PM Friday night, came back early Saturday morning, then a similar situation Saturday night. Verizon support claimed cluelessness as to the cause (their support technicians admitted to running Windows XP and being able to ping a Verizon router a couple of hops upstream from my local town office -- though they didn't know how to run a TRACERT to the IP address that the Verizon DNS allocators handed out each time I rebooted the in-home Linksys & DSL modem). [I had to check and TRACERT is a standard XP command, presumably they don't educate support technicians how to do anything more than PING.]
/. start at least the opennetstats.org part of this?
At any rate after this outage, I notice that my Google search requrests seem to be taking significantly longer than they used to. Hmmmm.... Now Verizon is in the process of implementing FIOS in many surrounding communities so my suspicions are (a) priority routing may be going to the FIOS customers or (b) requests to google are being down prioritized (in the hopes of being able to extort $$$ for priority routing). I also notice that for several months digital channels on my Comcast Cable TV service it seems to be taking much longer for the TV signal to start after changing channels than it once did.
So my impression is that the local ISPs (Verizon & Comcast) are most likely moving in the direction of prioritization of routing so as to maximize revenue. (In contrast to models like TV where costs are advertiser supported or monopoly telephone companies where a minimal level of service was required.)
I think the only solution to this will be to revisit these issues at the political level (Congress) and/or develop public solutions that eliminate the monopolies. If people are familiar with high speed internet service in countries like Germany, Japan, Korea, etc. it appears that the U.S. is getting a lot less and paying a lot more due to the duopoly positions of companies like Verizon & Comcast.
Towards "taking back the internet", I would argue that we need 2 things.
First, an open source project to use P2P routing statistics to provide an online *free* analysis of where network congestion (or more importantly specific provider) problems may be occurring. I would love to have been able to say to the Verizon support tech, "Well I just used 10 minutes of my "free" AOL service to confirm using www.opennetstats.org that Verizon DSL services in the following communities north of Boston are all down! If the "public" at large can diagnose your network problems then why can't your own support staff do so [1]? I, and I suspect many Linux users, would be happy to run a server which contributed "peer" statistics to a cloud. This could also be used to determine whether services are being degraded to specific providers. If I consistently get high speed access to Stanford's FTP servers but low speed access to Google's servers (Boston to the Bay area) then something is going to be very suspicious in terms of the QoS the middle-cos are providing [2].
Second, communities need to seriously looking at WiMax based public "town" networks based on cheap Linux routers (the poles may belong to the companies but the airwaves belong to *us*). For people who aren't interested in TV on demand (e.g. people whose internet use is still largely base on *reading* and *writing*) there should be a standard high level quality of service which is dictated by the upstream provider (e.g. how many server farms Google wants to build) and not the money sucking, promise you the world and deliver nearly zippo at a decent cost, telcos and cablecos.
So why can't we at
Perhaps people familiar with small community open WiMax type projects can post URLs for those as well.
1. The primary problem here appears to be that the data side of the telephone companies rarely if
Doesn't your VOIP box have a separate plug for the fax machine?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
ISPs *have* been prioritizing traffic for years -- usually based on packet content-type. I helped install a "packet shaper" when I worked at a mom-and-pop dialup shop in the early 2000s. The thing is, TFA missed a key point about Net Neutrality: proponents aren't fighting QoS type prioritization, they're fighting prioritization based on origin and destination. QoS services organize packets based on their content type -- if you wanted to cut down on illegal downloading but still provide a decent web experience, you would throttle down P2P type packets, but let http packets through. What big ISPs are trying to do is go to major websites and say "hey, we'll give you priority for $x/month. Oh, your competitors? We'll just throttle their bandwidth to nothing. But if they pay the big bucks and you don't, you're screwed." What TFA is complaining about (ignoring the VoIP/Fax compression issue already pointed out) is old-skool QoS, something we've had for years. Net Neutrality is about unfairly shutting out the competition.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Why would you think that fax over voice over IP would even work? I mean, yeah it might be convenient, so give it a shot, but I cannot fathom the thought process that would lead to the expectation that it would work.
I suppose next someone will be complaining that, after hooking a modem up to their vonage phone, they can't get skype to work.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Yes, that's about the crux of it.
Fax machines were designed for POTS lines, and minimal amounts of digitization (basically a 64kbit/s DS0, 8kHz samples at 8 bits/sample), or compression that retains equivalent bandwidth.
The compression used by VOIP, in contrast, is usually psychoacoustic, similar to MP3 or other modern audio codecs. It's optimized specifically for pushing human speech through at a minimum bitrate. There's a lot more aggressive clipping and rolloff, and it's not uncommon to compress a voice channel down to 10-13 kbit/s, sometimes even lower.
When you try to use a digital device which expects the full POTS bandwidth on a VOIP circuit, it's going to either fail completely or work at a very, very reduced speed.
This isn't just a VOIP thing, either -- if you try to send an analog fax or make an analog modem connection over a modern digital cellphone, it won't work very well, either. I've tried using my GSM phone as an analog device and using it to dial in through, and it's very, very painful. 9600 baud, painful (and I remember when that was fast, too, but sadly the Internet has moved on and bloated up a lot since then).
It's not as if the people who designed cellphone and VOIP systems didn't realize this. It's a tradeoff. The bandwidth saved by using modern compression is more than enough of a savings to justify inconveniencing a few people who still want to use analog devices.
What the VOIP providers need to do, is create something for their systems that's similar to the CSD (Circuit Switched Data) connections available on cellphones. (It's almost never used anymore, but basically it's like ISDN for a cellphone; it gives you a direct digital connection into the POTS network that you can push data through, without ever converting down to analog.)
But then again, providing a special "digital mode" that would let you push data into a voice channel, that's running on top of a digital data network (the Internet) does seem like a lot of redundancy. Maybe it's just time for telephone-based fax systems to die. They were a pretty cool hack while they lasted, but there are better ways of moving data around then converting it into whistles and sending it over a voice communications network.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It must have improved (and Cringely must be right). I troubleshooted a client's Vonage problems a couple of years ago (turned out his router was the problem). Anyway, once I was done fixing and tweaking, he was faxing to his heart's content.
However, this was (at least at the time, don't know now) a "straight" ISP: "here's your bandwith, pay your bill on time, laters.", which leads me to conclude that Cringely is spot on.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
But I don't think it was a nefarious plot; I just thought the bandwidth from my house back to Comcast was so slow that it didn't support VOIP very well. When I switched to FIOS it worked very well, except when I'm downloading a lot of stuff and the bandwidth gets saturated very quickly.
Comcast may be a lot of things, but I don't think they're smoothly run enough to support a conspiracy like this. And even if you accept Comcast is lowering the priority of Vonage packets, Vonage should disguise their packets better so it's harder for Comcast to spot the app running.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
It works for him because its not really VoIP. It's PacketCable
What's really important to note is that PacketCable on Comcast (probably others) for "digital voice" is actually given a full 64K channel on a data network separate from normal Cable Modem service. Therefore, compression should not be necessary, I don't know if it's using G.711 or one of the wideband encodings though.
As long as we've had broadband ISPs we've had net non-neutrality, called "tiers of service". Cringely already knows this, since he pays for commercial grade service. You pay more money, you get (at least in theory) a better grade of service.
:-)
What we don't know is exactly *how* the ISPs implement it. Bandwidth speeds alone don't tell the story, since they're theoretical in any case.
For any given grade of service, the ISPs should disclose any and all filtering, prioritization, "shaping" etc -- any treatment of packets that is different from the norm. If your ISP gives priority to its VoIP service, commercial customers, etc, that needs to be disclosed. Any filters intended to slow down P2P or Vonage, that should be disclosed. If they give preferential treatment traffic originating from certain sites for a fee or for any reason (Yahoo gets better access than Google because Yahoo pays), that absolutely should be disclosed.
Somewhere on their websites, referenced from their terms of service and available to the public, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner et al need to fully disclose all their shaping. This should be achievable with much less regulatory effort than trying to define "net neutrality" which never really existed. Then consumers could make informed choices between providers.
And then Cringely can stop whining about his fax
Fizz
I'm the former NOC Director for a national ISP (who quit after saving enough money to get out of that environment). Anyway, we used several utilities (Arbor, homegrown, etc.) to see what kind of traffic was on the backbone. It is relatively simple to set what % of what type of traffic you want to filter. We were using nearly 100% Junipers for peering and that was a good choke point. Actually, we engineering guys wanted to filter things (like p2p) long before the marketing folks bought into it.
Cringley's getting screwed, as are we all. The technical aspects of how we're getting screwed are important and we need transparency in our ISPs to help resolve that. Then we could go to an ISP that shapes in the way we want.
But look at who we're talking about. We're talking about ILECs and Cable companies. To some small extent we're talking about mom and pop ISPs, but they'll follow the big leaders (or die).
The ILECs were asked about fiber to the home. They said "give us 200 billion dollars, and we'll take care of it." The US government gave them $200,000,000,000 in various forms. (Look at all those zeros.) And what did they deliver? Squat. What do they say they delivered? DSL! That's basically fiber! Did they deliver it everywhere? No. But they delivered it to everyone rich, so that basically everyone!
I feel like Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride:
Inigo Montoya: Offer me everything I ask for.
Count [ILEC]: Anything you want.
Inigo Montoya: I want my [$200,000,000,000] back you son of a bitch.
All that (and the legal shield it provides) goes away if the isp *does* look at what the packets are and asserts control over them.
-=DaveHowe=-
You, and the other posters seem to have missed the one essential hook for net neutrality, indeed the only one that counts; Common Carrier Status. In order for you, and the phone company, and UPS to not be charged with a crime when someone does something illegal via your service you have to be a Common Carrier. Lacking that status you would be charged as an accessory to the crime even if you ratted them out first.
The cost of being a common carrier is having no content-based selection in what you carry. You must be completely neutral and select customers based upon what they are willing to pay not what they want to send. Once you hook things to what they want to send (i.e. content) then you are no longer a common carrier and you are responsible for knowing what is being sent at all times and answering for it if it isn't.
The issue here is twofold. Firstly the status Cringley is looking at might be more aligned to paying extra so the package moves faster type service which doesn't (necessarily) violate common carrier status. However , the argument that many ISP's are making is that they should be able to have their cake and eat it too that is, filter based upon content in order to make more money and stifle competitors while at the same time not being responsible for the legality of any content sent (i.e. child porn). Such a position is basically a whiny monopolists cant that I have no time for.
And yes it is true that the lines are private, in large part, but the service itself is still an infrastructural service and one that, like phone lines, has costs too significant to allow for basic competition. Not anyone can setup their own phonelines. As such that is the legal hook for government regulation and guaranteed fairness. Without it the dominant position of extant carriers (who built their power under the open competition regime but now want to shut the door on other competitors) would become so dominant as to be a monopoly and kill any hope for an open internet market.
They make fax machines now that can lower their baud rate so they work on Voip lines. This guy is a retard, Packet shaping occurs on layer 7, which in this case would say "voip traffic gets X priority". Anything packeteer has cannot and will not tell the difference between voice VOIP or fax VOIP. VOIP IS VOIP!
...although this isn't why.
This is something that I think got missed in a lot of the hullabaloo about net neutrality: people weren't translating from Corporate Executive Speak to Engineer Speak. Instead of thinking about "tiers of service," think about "packet priority" -- giving some packets on the network higher priority and reliability than others. What does this sound like? That's right. We're talking about packet shaping, and the ability to do it has been out there for a long time.
And arguably, some packets on the same network could use higher priority and reliability than others. IP was never designed with the notion that consistent timing (not to mention packet ordering) was important, but as we increasingly start shoving real time data -- voice, streaming audio and video -- down the Great Tubes of the Internet, suddenly that timing does become important. And it makes sense to give those packets higher priority. Remember, lower priority doesn't mean the packets aren't delivered; it means they may be delivered with higher latency, but under all but the crappiest circumstances we're talking about extra milliseconds.
Whether or not it's fair to charge for making packets higher priority is another issue, and certainly worth debating. But this is not quite as nefarious as it's sometimes painted to be. (And remember, you're probably already using a tiered internet service based on how much you pay!)
AT&T CallVantage VoIP comes configured for voice by default, but if you want to support a fax machine you can tick a box on your Web-based control panel. Mind you: Nowhere have I seen any documentation that says why you wouldn't want to do this all the time, if it's possible. I've checked the box and voice quality sounds pretty much the same. And I haven't actually tried sending a fax, BTW.
Breakfast served all day!
and Vonage supports G.711 and, I think recently, T.38 Fax relay. Vonage allows the user to change the codec setting (I think they call it "Bandwidth Saver," and allow you to force G.711 by dialing *99 before the E.164 number).
T.38 will work in the presence of network issues (latency, jitter, packet loss) which will cause a G.711 fax call to croak. G.729 and G.721 codecs will very likely prevent any fax transmission - they use perceptual coding based on human speech to do compression. That does not work well for fax modulation (or music, or anything but human speech).
So yes, I believe that some Vonage users (who use G.711 PCM) can have fax "typically work fine," until it doesn't, because there's network conjestion somewhere along the path on the Internet, or someone on a different computer in the home starts browsing youtube, or any of a number of other reasons.
But, you get what you pay for, and Vonage is cheap.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I read Cram's column with quite a bit of amusement. What's interesting is I ran across exactly the same deal but over a different medium: telephone service over cable. A cable equipment company called me in when their customers reported they were unable to send faxes over the telephony-over-cable product. When I visted the test lab of this company (named withheld to protect the guilty) they demonstrated the failure. Interestingly, the faxing worked when they first started up the testbed, and then it got steadily worse. In order to measure the quality of the channel, I built a POTS tester that would measure line performance over a long timebase -- 24 hours, in fact. (To do a longer test, I would have needed more disk space.)
When I analyzed the data, I found that the cable system had a bad case of vibrato, which translated in modems terms to phase jitter. The oscillators the cable vendor used in it circuits weren't up to the task. In some cases, the 1-Khz phase jitter exceeded 360 degrees. No modem using phase modulation can stand that. Period.
Do the VoIP terminals, not to mention the implementations using PCs, have better oscillators? Can they do a better job of maintaining time coherence? That's even before you look at the effects of routing and propagation over the Internet.
Bob, I think you are asking too much of Vonage.
And reading way too much into what you are seeing. It isn't just the network. It's the end terminals, too. The oscillators in the cable system were supposed to be good to 20 parts per million. The cheap crystals used in the VoIP terminals and in PCs are more than an order of magnitude worse in stability. Did I mention that the cable-system oscillators used phase-locked loop technology to maintain even better accuracy with each other?
Oops.
I'm in. Can I also report for the open WAPs within range of my cantenna?
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Er, it rather depends on the codec you use. Of course you can do FAX over VoIP. Hell, the public telephone network has been almost entirely digital for over a decade now. The only real difference between PSTN and VoIP is that VoIP data travels over the Internet rather than a network explicitly built for voice communications. Since both are similar, much of the technology is also similar, including compression algorithms.
I used to live in an apartment building that had a service contract with Comcast. While I lived there, I had to use some special codes that I found on various forums in order to use my fax. I had a 5/1 consumer level contract.
Then I moved into one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the area (boston north shore), my only option for internet service was 3/376k. After my move, my Vonage voice service turned to crap. I even use a WRT54G with Tomato firmware for bandwidth shaping. Eventually I ended up connecting my Vonage box directly to my modem and the voice quality was worse than using sattelite internet. EVERY call I made had drops that lasted as long as 45 seconds. The only change to the setup was that I moved to a different, more lucrative Comcast neighborhood. The only logical conclusion that I could come up with was that Comcast was shaping my traffic. This was evidenced by the fact that my normal internet usage was _never_ interrupted, even when watching video, but especially when using uTorrent!
Every service that I used at my old apartment worked just the same (even though I had lower bandwidth), except for Vonage. I ended up dropping Vonage altogether because it was useless at my new home. I am now a member of the cell phone only family!
I now belong to the Comcast sucks club and am waiting urgently for FIOS to arrive where I live! Whenever it shows up, even if it costs more, I will be switching. Unfortunately, it will be a choice between two evils...Comcast or Verizon.
What he's talking about is QoS and ToS handling, and is not what is RELLY being discussed in the net neutrality debates at all.
Using QoS is not in itself a bad thing. It can actually improve most user's network performance a good bit. In the case of prioritizing routing tables (BGP) over other traffic, it's the only sensible thing to do. After all, if the BGP traffic doesn't get through, the route goes down.
The difference is a simple matter of who pays for what. When QoS is being used to optimize the customer's service all is well. When it is instead tuned based on who (besides the customer) paid them an extra fee (bribe), the customer suffers. Essentially, the ISP is/would be getting paid to degrade their customer's service to everyone else. Way too many networks already double dip, tuning QoS based on the destination paying extra is triple dipping. Talk about greedy.
It's seldom a good summary is posted on Slashdot. Typically the poster provides some nonsense or poses some arbitrary unrelated question at the same time. I hope more posters take after kdawson in actually reading the article, digesting its contents and add some value to the slashdot readers by exposing the gist of the article.
We've got too much crap-publishing going on and anything and anyone who helps reducing the need for readers to weed through crap is a good thing.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
When it comes down to it, we at Hands Off the Internet would rather have the internet functionality of the future without price controls. Net neutrality advocates are willing to sacrifice a robust internet for the political win.