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Swedish Teleco Firms Looking Into Block VoIP Claiming Losses In Earnings
An anonymous reader writes "Telia, a Swedish telecommunications company, is now looking into possible solutions to block free VoIP services like Skype and Vibr, claiming the losses are beginning to take its toll on the total earnings. Critics are saying the companies have wrongly implemented outdated pricing models, and the act could threaten net transparency and Independence. A new report from regulators of the European phone market shows that more and more telecommunications companies will block their subscribers from using free services. The European Commission is investigating whether it is possible to prohibit the blocking of legal services online."
Why is it that when companies managed to reach a nice cushioned position they complain when the rules of the game change? this does not make sense to me.
You had all this time to profit and INNOVATE. Why not start your own VOIP service? instead, like some retarded dictator you want to block progress.
Innovate or die.
In the Netherlands, the largest telco (KPN) was also going to do this... then parliament rushed through a net neutrality law that forbids deep packet inspection and blocking specific traffic and the telcos backed off quickly. Now they can only charge by amount of data and speed. Maybe the Swedish will get lucky too now.
This sounds just like the music and movie business when they were trying to resist the changes in technology instead of embracing it.
We know how that worked out.
Maybe the telecom people should start reading the news?
These telecommunications companies are little more than parasites. They don't ENABLE anything on their own. First, they leverage all kinds of free subsidies (your tax dollars) to build their networks. Then, they wrangle out of taxes by taking business deductions, usually paying their worthless CEO's and other senior executives obscene amount of money for doing exactly what? Taking credit for the INternet and its associated benefits to technology, even as they choke off the benefits of those technologies.
What's even more breathtaking is that its tax money (made from our tax dollars, earned by the sweat of our ever-longer work days) that actually *paid* for their infrastructure.
Last, the thing that really amps me up about stuff like this is that telecommunications companies and ISPs, etc. are essentially using technology that they didn't invent, to leverage YOUR and my communicative assets!
Communication was "free" until we began to find ways to increase it's speed, depth, and breadth. From the stone tablet, to the scribes, to the early offset printers (and print distributors), to the Internet and its multifarious ways of data and information transmission, certain folks have found a way to horde either the means to information production, or its transmission.
Guess what? That model isn't going to work anymore, not if we want a sustainable information ecology that is as diverse as possible.
Sorry, but these ISPs and telcos are little more than traitors to human advancement, masquerading as enablers. They want to suck us dry; they want all the benefits. They want tax breaks made by the policy makers that they buy every few years to build their infrastructures, and then they want us to pay them more, as if the tax breaks (which we ultimately pay for) and the infrastructure (which we also pay for), and the very source of communications that they leverage (you and me), isn't enough.
We need to start finding ways (I don't have the answers, just posing the possibility) to once and for all RID this world of these gatekeepers, because they are interested in keeping only one thing sustainable - their bank accounts. They could give a damn about whether the world is better serves by more transparent and facile communications technology. The Telco and ISP sector are, again, traitors to human growth and development. We need to find another way.
FUN FACT: Sweden has the 30th highest suicide rate, below both New Zealand and Switzerland. The worst country in the world (for which we have statistics) is Lithuania, apparently.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
TeliaSonera is a telco that actually operates both in Finland and in Sweden, and they're planning to block people from using Skype for free on the Finnish side of things, too. Their plan is to allow you to buy Skype talk-time that then allows the service through until the time is up. Do notice that this is in *addition* to what one already has to pay for Skype credits, so this has understandably created quite some negative commentary here and there.
The funny thing is that it's only TeliaSonera contemplating on doing this, all the others are more than fine with the situation as it is, and are even actively promoting unrestricted mobile broadbands.
Write it properly:
"The European Commission is deciding whether it is going to let them prohibit the blocking of legal services online."
The final decision will depend on.... well teleco companies have more lobbyist than teleco users... Have a guess!!
...while the parliament voted on this (in favor) already, the Senate ("Eerste Kamer") can still vote it down. Although chances are slim, the (indirectly elected) Senate in the Netherlands proved in the past that their view of the country is sometimes substantially different from that of the directly elected representatives. Officially the Senate can only regard the law against the constitution, but recent developments made the senate a more political institute. Because currently there are critical negotiations going on to keep the government in office, there is no saying what will be decided in that meeting room that affects ongoing legislation, including any Senate decisions. ( https://www.bof.nl/2012/03/05/stemming-eerste-kamer-telecommunicatiewet-uitgesteld/ in Dutch and https://www.bof.nl/2011/06/22/press-release-%E2%80%93-the-netherlands-first-country-in-europe-to-launch-net-neutrality/ on the original law in English)
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
If you are a subscriber and you pay a monthly fee to a communication company for Internet access and telecommunication services (phone, short messages) then the subscriber should be the one to decide what he wants to do on the internet, even if it's VoIP communication. He/She pays for that specific service, the usage of the Internet and those companies should deliever what they offer.
What's next? Are they going to block instant messenger apps because people use their Short Message Services less?
Deem too much effort
In favor of SMS.
\,,,/_[o . o]_\,,,/
I guess telecom guys are the same around the world. The same situation is here in Ukraine. VoIP with SIP is just tabooed by law. Government officials publicly speak about taxing Skype and ICQ.
Why don't we just choose the provider that gives us the best offer - for example the one that let's us use audio-over-the-internet, maybe at a higher prize?
Let providers be free to make whatever offers they want and let others be free to accept or decline.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
he gave comments (i think during mwc) that they'll want a cut of skype/voip done on their networks. how they planned to do it he didn't mention, maybe he believes in some uber packet inspection. if they'll start doing that they'll be thoroughly fucked as their customers can just pick up and leave - which is why they're desperately trying to tie them in with device partial payment plans & other shit they've copied from at&t, for some reason they think that's the company to copy. you would think they'd have learnt from losing a shitload of customers back in the day when they were the only operator around these parts which didn't offer unlimited data(along with stupid stupid comments from an exec they had then who had previously been burnt by offering all-your-patrons-can-drink soda deals at another company). lucky for us finns our networks all work on the same tech!
Doesn't surprise at all, since T-S has been majorly fucking up their pr since they were formed and they're totally out of touch of the concept of selling data and what that means. they're also a dinosaur that got used to well paying clients just being given to them because they're telia-sonera(gov&etc).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You just redefined meaning of the word 'Fun' for me!
I would drop Telia and go to another provider. Nothing beats shit like this than burying them by not giving them your money.
Will the operators find a solution, or can the creators of VoIP apps easily find ways around the operators efforts to block them? How would the operators block an encrypted voice call on a random port?
Not really angry, more like depressed. The winters are long, cold, and dark.
It is not helped by the fact that Swedes are notoriously uncommitted in their relationships, resulting in one of the highest, if not the highest percentage of 1-person households and single-parent families on the planet. Stockholm is littered with foreigners who married Swedes, moved here, then got dumped a few years later ("Ah well, this is our third argument this year, it's too much trouble to work out, I'm just divorcing you instead"--I shit you not, this actually happened to a friend of mine) and they wind up staying on so they can see their kids. And many of these ex-pats seem to spend most of their time, when not at work or visiting the kids, getting drunk and/or drug-fucked.
Don't get me wrong, I've lived here for nearly 5 years. As a resident and as a worker, I've been treated extremely well, and I'm very grateful for this. But I am really glad I met someone who's also not from here, instead of trying to hook up with a Swedish girl.
And it can be a beautiful country (especially in the summer, when it never really gets dark), and some Swedes are actually quite warm and friendly. But it's also true that about 20% of my neighbours in this building are single, live alone, don't go out much, and seem to have few if any visitors.
It's a bit sad. And if you are at all prone to depression, it can be a real struggle to make it through the winter here. This comes from one who knows all too well.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The reasonable thing to do in a situation such as this would be boycotting Telia for not respecting their customers. Problem is, Telia is not the only operator that wants to stop Skype and equivalent services. In fact, I don't think there's a reasonable alternative at all. I don't want to share too much of my inside info even though I'm posting as Anonymous Coward, but enabling of blocking certain services is being built into charging systems that are used by huge operators all over the world. I believe this is just the beginning.
What sickens me is how Telia (and the others) seem to view their customers. They obviously don't care at all - and that I believe most people have understood for a long time - but do they have to be so obvious about it? Got a problem with me using your wireless Internet connection (which I pay for) to make "free" calls? Increase the price of the connection itself then, but keep your dirty noses out of my business and never you mind what I use your connection for.
Another thing that really bothers me is the slippery slope this puts us all on. What's next? "Oh, you can connect with people for free on Facebook - on OUR network? We're going to have to charge you extra for that." Maybe they should just start charging us for being able to communicate using morse code by flashing the monitors of our phones in different patterns..
I wonder if Telia has really lost much money on this anyways. People still make regular phone calls, don't they? Reminds me of how the copyright industry wants everyone to feel sorry for it, even though it's still making unbelievable amounts of (undeserved?) money.
I am quite frustrated over the media coverage of this. To a great extent, swedish media has bought the message that Telia needs to restrict these services because they need to be able to "charge for our services". Journalists don't seem to pick up on the inconsistency here. Telia undeniably does charge for their service, and their service in this case is to be a bitpipe provider. You do need to buy a data plan to be able to use Skype or similar services, Telia does not provide mobile broadband for free. And it is just not right to sell a plan with say 1 or 5 or 10 Gb of data traffic, and then cry in media about how they are hurt by free services using the data they just charged their customer for.
They are getting paid, they just don't want to spell out their real problem. The margin for data traffic is much lower than for voice or SMS. Now they are doing the wrong thing trying to filter which services their customers use on top of the bitpipe instead of adjusting the pricing plans to be aligned with the real cost of providing each service.
I do hope (and think) one or more of the other providers will take the opportunity to gain market share instead of following suit with the service blocking idiocy though.
In Sweden all mobile operators advertise almost exclusively mobile broadband. They want you to replace your traditional home broadband with mobile solutions, which in my eye makes them more ISPs than phone companies.
Bell didn't build their stuff over there - governments built their stuff and now some private companies sitting on top of it doing nothing but charging a toll. Do you get what he is writing about now?
Australia has a similar problem with Telstra doing as little as possible since 1996 and charging whatever they can get away with. It's not quite as bad because there is a little bit of privately built infrastructure but I can see where the above poster is coming from, especially since I need to pay more than $1000US per month to get 6M/6M to one site due to vultures charging whatever they can for old infrastructure paid for by the taxpayer.
Belize Telecommunications Limited, which is essentially a monopoly in Belize (there is another cell phone provider and some cable companies provide internet, but BTL owns all the infrastructure pretty much), charges an already poor nation ridiculously high prices. International calls to and from the country are incredibly high, sometimes measured in dollars (!!!) per minute. On top of that, they bought censorship software from China in order to block VOIP traffic. Their justification for this was so that they could maintain low (?) prices on their phone rates. When this happened, it broke a lot of things, most notably MMOs.
I left the country three years ago, and things have improved slightly since then, but at the time, a 128k DSL line cost a total of about $85usd a month, when all the charges were added up. This is in a country where minimum wage is around $1.50usd. There are about 350,000 people in the whole country, and if I'm not mistaken, BTL reported a net profit of $13.5mil USD last year. So I'm going to have a hard time with ISPs attempting to justify this sort of thing.
If they were smart, they would change the plan like this:
1. Lower voice prices drastically, to equal or less than the level of Skype (i.e. to break-even levels).
2. Raise price on their "unlimited" data plans if needed.
Seriously, if the phone company charges me $0.33 per minute to call overseas, and Skype or Google Voice costs me like $0.02, then the phone company is charging too much. If they managed to block it, I would just use my computer with a different internet source. For that price difference, being portable isn't even that big of a deal.
They could also try to be slick like NTT in Japan. They started their own VOIP service which is cheaper than normal service, but still costs more than Skype, etc. Yet they advertise it better, and it comes with a Japanese phone number included in the price, so more people will probably end up using it than Skype. (I'm sure that computer-centric people will use Skype or a similar tool).
Hi, while I'm glad you have liked your stay (so far), I'd like to point out that Stockholm (Göteborg and Malmö) have extraordinary divorce rates, all of them about 50% higher than any "normal" region, secondly swedes born in Sweden (married to another swede) are less likely to get get a divorce than other couples in other regions of the world (hard to make a fair comparison tbh since these figures are compared to very large regions such as EU27, EU except EU 27, Africa, North America etc.) - it is speculated (by the fine gents at SCB (Statistics Sweden) that Stockholm et al. had that high ratios because 22-30% immigrants live there (than other regions) and some minorities, like africans, divorce twice as often (as the mean).
So, please don't call swedes "uncommitted", if you think we're all lovable sex-maniacs at least say so :P
In both of these countries where I have recently lived, many companies (mostly the big players like Vodafone, T-Mobile, Orange, etc) are already either blocking VoIP or forbidding its use contractually. Yoigo, a spanish subsidiary company of Telia Sonera is one of these.
However, luckily users still have the option of changing to other operators (mostly "virtual" providers who sublet the network infrastructure from the main players) who are more than happy to allow access to VoIP in order to get new customers.
I think they will all eventually have to change their attitude; in Spain the 3 big players have been losing millions of customers in the last years because of their arrogance, poor customer service, institutionallized scams, etc.
P.S. there is a way of getting around VoIP blocking for making calls to regular phones. Just use "local access numbers" (normally you can call them for free) from one of the many Betamax clones and make your calls through there.
Not really angry, more like depressed. The winters are long, cold, and dark
The winters in Scotland are about as long, almost as cold, about as dark and damp. (I've been in both countries in the winter. Sweden is nicer: lying snow at least makes things look brighter, I don't like the mist and mud in Scotland. I've only spent about two weeks in each (in winter), though.)
Yet, although Scotland currently has a higher suicide rate than England, this wasn't the case 50 years ago: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-16950313
I think the other points you make are more important than the weather.
That fact was true in the 1950s, when Eisenhower quoted it in order to rubbish socialist governments. It has not been true for decades.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
And then only because the underreporting of suicides was lower in Sweden compared to other countries, probably for cultural factors.
It's sooo much easier to blame "the Internet" than figure out a pricing model that makes it sufficiently convenient to use the "telephone system" (yes, I know that the telcos frequently use the Internet themselves) to make a telephone call that enough subscribers continue to do that rather than putting the (not terribly much) extra effort to set up and use Skype, ...
Will be that the telcos complains that people not are using "their" music shop or video service or travel service or web page or looking at sites with "their" ads on, as well as that people are not shopping in "their" webshops...
This can continue forever.. They will always find a new "issue" with people using internet that the not get any profit from.
This might however stop by itself.. Telia tried with volumebased billing on their DSL services..
Then people only changed to a different ISP so Telia had to drop that "perfect" service..
It should be in the summary that this is a mobile telco. Not a landline provider. FFS most of the comments here about landlines. A little bit of accuracy on the summary wouldn't go a miss. But wait - this is slahsdot and it wouldn't get on the front page now would it....
Förlåt mig, kompis--you are quite right to distinguish between urban and other Swedes. And it also seems that (my experience only) Swede-Swede marriages, especially when one or both partners are not from the big city, do tend to last longer.
If we wind up staying on here many more years, I would really prefer to move down to Malmö or Kalmar. The folks in Skåne and Småland are much more congenial, and they have even offered to help me get rid of that horrible Stockholm accent and learn to speak proper Swedish instead. :)
I can't say much about Africans living here, as I don't know very many of them. Most of my non-Swedish friends here are from East/Southeast Asia.
I've noticed that the Swedish man + Thai (or Chinese) woman combo is quite popular here (at least in/around Stockholm), and those marriages seem to be quite happy and long-lived. The marriages most likely to fail (again, just my observation) seem to be between Swedish women and foreign men.
As for the sex-maniac part--I wouldn't know, never having slept with a Swede. (Although I have stumbled across one or two Swedish couples in the woods round Midsommar, celebrating the event in lusty fashion, so I am pretty sure that baby Swedes are made the same way as babies in other countries.)
So no, I didn't mean imply that Sweden is a bad or ugly country or that the people are completely uncaring.
But it can be damned lonely at times, even in the city. And I personally find the extremes in the seasons here to be a bit hard to deal with sometimes.
Bra så... tack för samtalet (och rättningen)!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
hmmh... you make it sound like divorce is the end of the world. If people come along with each other living in separate households, maybe it's better for everyone, at least if the kids are old enough to handle that, and new-families being so common no one needs to feel inferior because of it.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a telco, and was close to the C-level, so some actual business insight might be included, as long as supplies last, some assembly required.
The problem the telcos are trying to solve is twofold, especially for the old and large (often ex-government) ones.
The economic problem is that they have massive amounts of hardware, space and other investments tied up into POTS systems. Putting up the whole IP infrastructure wasn't cheap either, and now one of them is destroying the other. That's like having two cars and then your wife leaves - there's simply too much hardware in your garage you don't need. If you can't get rid of it, you will find yourself trying to use both, convincing yourself that one is better for city driving while the other is better for hauling stuff or long-distance or whatever. But the simple fact is that you simply don't like going perfectly good stuff to waste.
The other problem is pricing. Internet access was initially sold as an add-on, to gain more customers. The price point was designed for that case. Also, after privatisation, many countries in Europe entered a price-war amongst the telcos, driving prices down to a level that only few could sustain for long. Now they are at that point, usage patterns have long since changed with IP traffic being orders of magnitude higher, but they can't raise the prices because that would mean losing customers to the competition. And customers mean everything, because this is one of the businesses where the big honcho monkeys believe that only the top players can compete in the long run, so losing customers is the direct route for the CEO to lose his job. Not because of any actual facts, even if he keeps the company profitable, but because the big shareholders have all subscribed to a mantra that is accepted at face value.
All the throttling and filtering and bla that is being discussed is because during the land-grab phase of getting as many customers as possible, and Internet access being one big weapon in that, they basically allowed marketing to dig them into a very deep hole with its promises of unlimited high-speed access for almost no money.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Does it really matter? In the end, they are just going to raise the data-only plans if people are switching away from POTS/ISDN (which I personally think of as a shame, because circuit-switched networks still beat IP when it comes to QoS for voice communication)
Another solution would be to use a VPN to reach the VoIP provider. Sipgate at least I know offers this.
Atlas Shrugged?......anyone?
hmmh... you make it sound like divorce is the end of the world.
Ever been married? Divorced? Ever move to another country on account of marrying someone from there, then have them dump you a few years later, leaving you on your own in a foreign land (where they don't even speak your language) with no other reason to be there except the kids (who also don't speak your language, only their mother's)?
Doesn't sound like it.
Anyhow, I don't see where I've said or implied anything end-of-the-world-ish at all, and I view my own divorce as absolutely necessary and unavoidable. But I don't view marriage as something to be disposed of lightly, either.
Suggestion: You might actually consider and address the problems that such people face, instead of trying to dismiss them as unimportant, or to portray me as some sort of drama queen.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Ingen fara :) It wasn't really that I found your description incorrect per se (divorces are pretty common, but from my understanding most divorces are done either within three years, after ~20 years or not at all), I just thought it could use some nuances as I didn't want people unfamiliar with Sweden to think Stockholm is somehow representative of all of Sweden, and there are a lot of factors to consider when studying social phenomena (for an example one american study I found linked divorce rate in the US to economic prosperity (as the economy slowed down, so did marriages and divorces) - so perhaps our comparative wealth makes it easier to actually be single?) but I digress.
Normally I wouldn't care to argue the point since people usually don't move here for the marriage prospects anyway, but since I've seen swedes described as "uncommited" "cold" and "not-kind" (apparently not to be confused with unkind) within something like a week here on /. I guess some small patriotic flag-toting part of me thought it was worth to point out that we're not *quite* as homogenized as people seem to like to think of us and that some statistics may not even show "Swedish behaviour" but "urban/rural behaviours".
Lycka till med flytten, Skåne rekommenderas varmt - långt fler soltimmar per år än Stockholm (och mindre snö!).
Do yourself a favour and get out of Sweden :) I just escaped five years in Scandinavia and your experiences sound very similar to mine. Luckily, I avoided entanglements with local women and have moved somewhere with more opportunity and people who possess both manners/courtesy and soul. Two things distinctly lacking in that part of the world.
One of the things I actually like about the EU is that the courts here actually bit you if you violate competition law. Instead of the slap on the wrist you often see in US rulings, when a company is convicted of unfair business practices over here their options are basically to comply, cease doing business or face a fine so harsh it will eat up their profit margin.
When it comes to cellphones I expect they telcos will be in trouble if they try to pull a quick one here. Most EU politicians have to deal with many different telcos, and they are affected by unfair pricing structures more than most of us, since they tend to make a lot of international calls. Thus this nonsense is something that actually affects them personally, and they have been in a ruffle with the telcos before over unreasonable rates for international calls.
Scotland is about as dark as a fourth of Sweden - were I live, the sun is up for around two hours in december. A bit further north and it isn't even over the horizon.
that all hammer manufacturers hence forth cause there building htere houses need ot pay up or else be blocked form being used to build houses....
that will get em.
these idiots realize that i use free voip cause the god damn net is so expensive....you take it away.... i wont have any phone....
thanks form the disabled of the world you fucking retarded ISP...
I thought the EU was really adamant about stopping antitrust violations. You'd think this would at least be mentioned.
AccountKiller
If we wind up staying on here many more years, I would really prefer to move down to Malmö or Kalmar. The folks in Skåne and SmÃ¥land are much more congenial
Well if you're contemplating leaving Sweden anyway, there's no need to settle for Skåne. Just go the whole hog and move somewhere worth while, e.g. the continent proper. :-)
And if you need help with your accent then we'd be happy to help in Göteborg, but "congenial" I wouldn't go that far. :-)
Stefan Axelsson
Have gnu, will travel.
While it's true that the voice packets and data packets may be travelling over the same network, in a traditional telco situation they have very carefully designed that network to guarantee certain quality-of-service parameters for the voice packets.
There are very strict requirements for latency and drop rate when dealing with voice packets. Those requirements are *not* there when using skype or similar.
It is not helped by the fact that Swedes are notoriously uncommitted in their relationships, resulting in one of the highest, if not the highest percentage of 1-person households and single-parent families on the planet.
The rate may be high but it isn't exceptional - it's about the same in the UK, plus the UK divorce rate is higher - 19% versus Sweden's 14%.
Stockholm is littered with foreigners who married Swedes, moved here, then got dumped a few years later
Anecdotes about the difficulties of foreign immigrants aren't representative of the Swedish population as a whole, as immigrants make up only 14% of the population.
There are actually international standards about quality of service that apply to voice communications but don't apply to data communications, so it's not unreasonable for voice to cost somewhat more.
That said, it would make sense for the telco to come out with their own VoIP service that is priced similarly to Skype. They could then get some control over it while still being able to compete price-wise.
At the very least they should price their data plans such that they cover the costs. If actual voice traffic starts dropping this may mean that they need to increase the data plans to cover a larger share of network infrastructure maintenance.
If you find Swedes too introvert, welcome to Finland...
As it turns out I no-longer think of Rogers as a shit eating dung
Me neither. I think far, FAR worse of them. Rogers is a fucking shit-bag jumped-up cable company that should be completely destroyed. They wouldn't even exist in a fair world. Rogers is a prototype of the regulator-owning money-grabbing shit-corp from hell's hell.
And Bell has sunk deep into the shitter as well.
Then again, stephen fucking douchebag neocon fuckface and the greedy fat bastards-only party have taken over and are ruining the country in the name of global corporate takeover and foreign profit, so its time to flee this once-great nation for a sane land.
Canada is dead and done. I was born here and I'm old enough to remember when this was a great country, not a shithole (before aei-styled neoconism infected it). So don't fuck with me.
If you don't like their service switch.
Once I get a smartphone I've thought about ordering an Internet only SIM card and use that + Skype & SIP.
Why would I need a voice subscription in the first place?
Many of the Swedish voice subscription companies got this clausal in their user agreements. It's just poorly enforced.
I doubt any Internet provider have it though...
Assange, is that you?
Prosp long and liver.