Greed and exploitation by fellow Americans is the doctrine here buddy.
That is factually false, buddy. Portugal, a largely Christian nation, initiated the Atlantic Slave trade in 1444, bringing slaves back to Portugal from northern Africa. Other predominantly Christian nations, including the Dutch, French, Spanish and British, got involved and expanded to the triangluar "Europe, Africa, Americas" route soon after that.
Directly to your point: Only a 1/*30*th of all slaves arrived in the southern US. Over half of all slaves went to Brazil, and a third of all slaves went somewhere in the Carribean. Currently, Brazil has the highest population of African descendents in the Western Hemisphere. The US has the second highest population of African-American's because the slave population grew more quickly here than other countries.
Oh yeah, and 'segregation' - here again is just another American example of ignorance and arrogance.
What is the predominant religion in the US again? Many mainstream religious institutions supported segregation through the 1960s and beyond. That can not be ingored in an intellectually honest discussion on the topic.
Christians killing muslims after 9/11?? WHAT? Huh? Beligerent exchanges by two idiots in a parking lot...explain to me how "Christians" collectively have mistreated muslims as you state.
I didn't state anything, that was another poster. But if you want to bring it up... The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported over 600 hate crimes, up to and including murder, against Muslims in the first 5 months after 9/11. Sounds like more than the occassional "beligerent parking lot exchange" to me.
Manifest Destiny is suddenly a christine doctrine?
Not so suddenly, as it turns out. History contradicts your assertion that Manifest Destiny had no Christian foundation. To quote John O'Sullivan's own words, from the very work that originated the term:
"We are entering on its untrodden space, with the truths of God in our minds, beneficent objects in our hearts, and with a clear conscience unsullied by the past. We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can...."
"In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles; to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High -- the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere -- its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens, and its congregation an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God's natural and moral law..."
"This is our high destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man -- the immutable truth and beneficence of God...."
So... Did Christ tell us we deserved America? Well, clearly the people who believed in Manifest Destiny at it's inception thought so.
you're an american citizen, you still support the same goverment that has these same people kept in refugee camps across the land. What an abhorent event in AMERICAN history.
Actually, I support our system of government, but not whatever morally flawed (or consciously malicious) men or women sit in power at any given time. The reservations that exist today are treatied sovereign nations, not "refugee camps." Are they equitable exchanges for all the atrocities committed (by Christians) towards Native Americans throughout US his
And one more biggie I almost forgot: The wholesale slaughter and "relocation" of Native Americans under the doctrine of manifest destiny. Can you imagine the terror and pain of the people forced down the Trail of Tears? What an abhorent event in Christian history.
Let's see if I can do even better than the previous reply you received...I think so:
The Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, the Salem witch trials, the Holocaust, institutionalized and violently-enforced racial segregation in the US, ethnic cleansing in post-Soviet-era Eastern Europe, the Oklahoma bombing...all off the top of my head, mind you.
The first events may be "distant" history, but some have happened in my lifetime, and several more have happened in my father's lifetime. All of them terroristic acts of Christians, some perpetrated in the very name of Christianity itself.
BTW, I am Christian, and I blame these acts, and all terrorism, on psychopaths, not the various religions they use to rationalize their internal crazyiness.
For a general reply regarding IP blocking and VoIP, read my previous comment on why ip blocking is a bad idea.
I also followed up with this one to cover a base I missed with the first one.
And to answer some of your specific points:
don't IP addresses usually tell what COUNTRY the computer or service is located in?
Not really. If the relevant "whois" info is public and accurate, you will find out which regional IP netblock registry assigns/allocates the netblock, and possibly where the entity who was assigned or allocated the netblock is headquartered. But there is nothing defined in the Internet Protocol itself that relates IP addresses to geographical locations.
What makes you think spam and "v-spam" from any particular country actually originated in that country? Most spammers are homegrown right here in the US...
The article specifically talks about...will target any phone.
And I read the article so closely too...How did I miss all that?;)
Regardless, I was commenting on IP blocking as a technique for blocking calls inbound to a "broadband" VoIP solution. It's just a bad idea. And the funny thing is, looking at my initial reply, I see I didn't even get that right either. It's possibly even worse than I thought.
I didn't consider that most voice-savvy enterprise or carrier IP networks deploy "session border controllers", or at least SIP/H.323 proxies, at their edges. If your IP telephony provider does this, the majority of the VoIP "world" will look like your provider's SBC/proxy IP address. If you block that IP, you'll filter yourself right off the network.
It depends on how the telemarketer connects to the VoIP network. If they're coming in from the PSTN, then the source IP will be the PSTN gateway where they enter the IP world.
While this isn't so bad if the telemarketer is running their own analog-to-IP telephone adaptor/IAD/Asterisk etc., it is quite problematic if the gateway belongs to a major carrier for a large exchange (say, for example, in NYC.)
PSTN carriers can't risk common carrier status by filtering or denying access to telemarketers (e.g. they can't operate like an ISP with an AUP against spamming) so they can't stop the traffic themselves. And you could be cutting off connectivity to large portions of the PSTN every time you apply a filter. Even if it worked for awhile, eventually you would notice severe end-to-end connectivity problems.
Actually, I think they both were discussing the merits and realities of end-to-end QoS for VoIP. The difference in perspectives is that the great-grandparent is discussing consumer VoIP services running over consumer broadband, where end-to-end QoS is a remote possibility at best, while the grandparent is discussing a QoS-enabled and geographically diverse enterprise network running VoIP.
Either way, IP QoS is not usually defined in the various terms you used. IP QoS commonly refers packet delivery delay times, jitter (i.e. differences in delivery delay for packets in a single flow), L3 packet-marking (IP Precedence, Diffserv), L2 and MPLS packet/frame-marking (802.1Pq Ethernet CoS, MPLS EXP), and egress-queuing (priority queues, class-based weighted fair queues, etc.)
While call-control servers, IP phones, PSTN gateways, etc. can mark packets with IPP or Diffserv, it's the routers and switches (e.g. the network) that prioritize packets by queuing and processing them based on their markings.
They also provide for mapping IP-layer packet-marking into 802.1Pq and MPLS marking when the originating equipment doesn't support those protocols. Finally, routers and switches may use traffic identification methods (source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port etc.) to mark or re-mark certain packets, if required.
Well, empirically, you can expect only about a 10% difference (0.5 points in a scale of 5) in predictive MOS scores between the lowest quality (G.728: ~3.6) and the highest quality (G.711: ~4.1) codecs commonly used for VoIP.
Jitter and delay introduced by intermediate networks has much more potential impact on MOS scores for VoIP calls.
Since Vonage, Packet8, et al. all ride across the public internet, starting with "Joe Bob's Broadband", VoIP packets generally get best effort delivery along with gramma's email.
If you've ever called anyone using a LD calling card, or if someone has called you with one, you've probably used VoIP and not even realized it. Most LD calling cards use VoIP carriers to cut costs.
My parents call us all the time, and it sounds just fine.
(Also, I my work desk phone is IP, and it sounds great. Of course, I'm a network engineer for a IXC/CLEC/ISP/VoIP provider. So I may be biased about our service:).)
One of the many price hooks of VoIP is that the calls are cheaper because they circumvent these fees. The PSTN switch that gateways the SIP/RTP or H.323/RTP into SS7/TDM is considered the originating switch.
In some cases, the call may translate several times between IP and PSTN worlds. Any PSTN origination or terminating fee tarriffs apply to the PSTN legs only, so international call billing may occur at several legs, and be billed each leg as a local, LD or a "cheaper" international call based on which carriers originate and terminate the various legs.
Regardless, the terminating PSTN carrier will see some termination fee based on the incoming trunk type.
If you're defining journalism as "reporting news" then blogging generally doesn't rise to that standard. News reporting, done properly, relates information verified against three or more sources, not including the reporter. It is not necessarily accurate, but due dilligence was applied to accuracy. While some blogs may meet these criteria, I would argue that they transcend the genre and are, in fact, journalism.
If you're defining journalism as simply "publishing unreliable information" then blogging is definitely an eligible synonym.
The answer for VoIP is pretty easy. Current design guidelines (that most networks are following it seems) is to mark VoIP packets with these (equivilant) values depending on how your IP Precedence/Diffserv knobs work:
IPP = 5
Diffserv Per-Hop Behavior (PHB) = EF
DSCP = 46
I know you didn't specifically ask, but interactive video should normally get marked:
IPP = 4
PHB = AF41
DSCP = 34
Now your P2P question is trickier... There's nothing lower than default priority of 0 (aka "best effort"). If you can reliably separate P2P from the rest of your data flows, you could give that default classification exclusively to P2P and *raise* the classification of the rest of your data flows to these (equivalent) values for "bulk" or "transactional" data, respectively:
IPP = 1 or 2
PHB = AF11 or AF21
DSCP = 10 or 18
BTW, we have not found too many instances where Diffserv marking is any better performance-wise over IPP marking, and more equipment supports IPP marking. If you don't need the molecular control of Diffserv, I'd probably recommend just using IPP to mark traffic.
What Vonage is doing is giving rebates on routers with built-in phone jacks that prioritize the customer's own upstream traffic, favoring VOIP. This way your call will survive if somebody in your house starts web browsing or Johnnie left Kazaa running or your box is a spam
Aha. Thanks for the heads up.
So is it true that bandwidth across the Internet is generally sufficient so long as the upload to your ISP is good enough? In my experience, yes.
In the cell phone era, consumer voice quality expectations can limbo under a very low bar.
Quantitatively, we have found in lab testing that voice quality (predictive MOS) scores degrade noticably when mixed traffic, such as you would see in the wild, increases delay and jitter in voice streams. This occurs on GigE links running at less than 100Mbps.
I'm a network engineer and planner for a VoIP provider, and despite years in this business, I have no earthly idea what you're calling a "QoS server".
You are, well, "so very wrong" about what goes on with popular consumer VoIP products like Vonage.
Vonage uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for call signalling and service feature delivery. Media Terminal Adaptors (MTAs), often also referred to as Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATAs), adapt analog voice media into Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) media streams which get encapsulated in User Datagram Protocol segments and then finally encapsulated in IP packets.
Which of those protocols provides "QoS" service? None, in Vonage's world anyway. Even if the MTA set a higher DiffServ Code Point or higher IP Precedence in the IP header, the consumer-grade broadband router will ignore it, and most intermediate ISP routers will ignore it too.
The ISPs that pay attention to QoS are likely to rewrite any DSCP or IP Prec setting inbound at their edge, unless contractual agreements state otherwise. You don't let untrusted entities flood your priority queues; it's bad for business.
Personally, I think Vonage should make their software impossible to trace. Yeah it could make the quality/speed take a hit but it would protect them.
The problem is that to sell and sustain a scalable, cost-effective VoIP-in-a-box service, Vonage needs to use standards-based protocols and equipment.
"Rolling their own" VoIP signalling/payload protocols would be very, very expensive to deploy and support. They'd have to convince equipment manufacturers to support them and train (and retain) a whole support infrastructure in complicated proprietary protocols.
Or they could whine in the press about "censorship" and yell "there oughta be a law" for free.
Well, when I turn up service in a new location on our region-wide VoIP network, I make sure there's a 911 trunk from my VoIP/PSTN switch directly to the PSAP (the technical name) in that service area.
I'm not sure how your PSTN services are priced/packaged, but I have several friends here in the US that use Vonage for their primary home telephone service, and only keep the most basic POTS-line service for 911 access.
I also know a couple folks who've configured their FXO-equiped Sipura (sp?) analog telephone adaptors to failover their VoIP to 1FB-lines.
Except the "longest nonstop flight without refueling" record. It is an established mark that Fossett broke. And it is different than the "shortest time for a single pilot to circumvent the globe in a nonstop/nonrefueled flight" record that Fossett _set_ today.
Check your VoIP service contract. I bet there's a clause in there that disavows the use of the service for "lifeline" applications such as 911--even though you do have 911 access. Vonage, Packet8 et al. are well aware this type of thing may happen.
I know of one large cable provider that occasionally and unintentionally catches VoIP packet streams in their DDoS prevention systems. Their network architects are actively working with VoIP equipment manufacturers and service providers to tune these systems better.
Keep in mind that it's not "industry groups" that are accused of blocking traffic. It's actual network owners/operators that are deciding what they will transport on circuits and equipment they own/lease/manage.
Many, many ISPs have been port-blocking for years to prevent spam or worm propogation. And they were lauded for doing so. IMHO, it's never been the right thing for ISPs--who want to argue "common carrier" status--to do, and it breaks the end-to-end connectivity that I expect as an internet service customer. I personally would rather protect my own network/equipment than have my ISP chip away at my connectivity, beyond my visibility, in a benevolent (or not) attempt to help me.
People need to remember that the internet is not public like a national park, it's public like a shopping mall. It's consists of mostly commercial enterprises with equipment and circuits they buy or lease from other similar enterprises. Even the "public" institutions that have an internet presence also buy or lease from the same commercial sources.
Much like you can get arrested for trespassing by the owner of a mall, at their whim, you can get your traffic blocked by an upstream or intermediate network, at their whim.
The VoIP signalling and call-control protocols define well-known ports for those tasks. Any standards compliant VoIP implementation (which are the only scalable type) needs to use those ports.
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No. I don't most historians would say "suddenly."
Greed and exploitation by fellow Americans is the doctrine here buddy.
That is factually false, buddy. Portugal, a largely Christian nation, initiated the Atlantic Slave trade in 1444, bringing slaves back to Portugal from northern Africa. Other predominantly Christian nations, including the Dutch, French, Spanish and British, got involved and expanded to the triangluar "Europe, Africa, Americas" route soon after that.
Directly to your point: Only a 1/*30*th of all slaves arrived in the southern US. Over half of all slaves went to Brazil, and a third of all slaves went somewhere in the Carribean. Currently, Brazil has the highest population of African descendents in the Western Hemisphere. The US has the second highest population of African-American's because the slave population grew more quickly here than other countries.
Oh yeah, and 'segregation' - here again is just another American example of ignorance and arrogance.
What is the predominant religion in the US again? Many mainstream religious institutions supported segregation through the 1960s and beyond. That can not be ingored in an intellectually honest discussion on the topic.
Christians killing muslims after 9/11?? WHAT? Huh? Beligerent exchanges by two idiots in a parking lot...explain to me how "Christians" collectively have mistreated muslims as you state.
I didn't state anything, that was another poster. But if you want to bring it up
Manifest Destiny is suddenly a christine doctrine?
Not so suddenly, as it turns out. History contradicts your assertion that Manifest Destiny had no Christian foundation. To quote John O'Sullivan's own words, from the very work that originated the term:
So ... Did Christ tell us we deserved America? Well, clearly the people who believed in Manifest Destiny at it's inception thought so.
you're an american citizen, you still support the same goverment that has these same people kept in refugee camps across the land. What an abhorent event in AMERICAN history.
Actually, I support our system of government, but not whatever morally flawed (or consciously malicious) men or women sit in power at any given time. The reservations that exist today are treatied sovereign nations, not "refugee camps." Are they equitable exchanges for all the atrocities committed (by Christians) towards Native Americans throughout US his
And one more biggie I almost forgot: The wholesale slaughter and "relocation" of Native Americans under the doctrine of manifest destiny. Can you imagine the terror and pain of the people forced down the Trail of Tears? What an abhorent event in Christian history.
Did I miss some event in the world?
Apparently several.
Let's see if I can do even better than the previous reply you received...I think so:
The Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, the Salem witch trials, the Holocaust, institutionalized and violently-enforced racial segregation in the US, ethnic cleansing in post-Soviet-era Eastern Europe, the Oklahoma bombing...all off the top of my head, mind you.
The first events may be "distant" history, but some have happened in my lifetime, and several more have happened in my father's lifetime. All of them terroristic acts of Christians, some perpetrated in the very name of Christianity itself.
BTW, I am Christian, and I blame these acts, and all terrorism, on psychopaths, not the various religions they use to rationalize their internal crazyiness.
For a general reply regarding IP blocking and VoIP, read my previous comment on why ip blocking is a bad idea.
I also followed up with this one to cover a base I missed with the first one.
And to answer some of your specific points:
don't IP addresses usually tell what COUNTRY the computer or service is located in?
Not really. If the relevant "whois" info is public and accurate, you will find out which regional IP netblock registry assigns/allocates the netblock, and possibly where the entity who was assigned or allocated the netblock is headquartered. But there is nothing defined in the Internet Protocol itself that relates IP addresses to geographical locations.
What makes you think spam and "v-spam" from any particular country actually originated in that country? Most spammers are homegrown right here in the US...
The article specifically talks about...will target any phone.
;)
And I read the article so closely too...How did I miss all that?
Regardless, I was commenting on IP blocking as a technique for blocking calls inbound to a "broadband" VoIP solution. It's just a bad idea. And the funny thing is, looking at my initial reply, I see I didn't even get that right either. It's possibly even worse than I thought.
I didn't consider that most voice-savvy enterprise or carrier IP networks deploy "session border controllers", or at least SIP/H.323 proxies, at their edges. If your IP telephony provider does this, the majority of the VoIP "world" will look like your provider's SBC/proxy IP address. If you block that IP, you'll filter yourself right off the network.
It depends on how the telemarketer connects to the VoIP network. If they're coming in from the PSTN, then the source IP will be the PSTN gateway where they enter the IP world.
While this isn't so bad if the telemarketer is running their own analog-to-IP telephone adaptor/IAD/Asterisk etc., it is quite problematic if the gateway belongs to a major carrier for a large exchange (say, for example, in NYC.)
PSTN carriers can't risk common carrier status by filtering or denying access to telemarketers (e.g. they can't operate like an ISP with an AUP against spamming) so they can't stop the traffic themselves. And you could be cutting off connectivity to large portions of the PSTN every time you apply a filter. Even if it worked for awhile, eventually you would notice severe end-to-end connectivity problems.
Interesting...One of us wears the label of coward systemically, and the other characteristically.
I'm still curious why you think curiosity is ignorant.
Actually, I think they both were discussing the merits and realities of end-to-end QoS for VoIP. The difference in perspectives is that the great-grandparent is discussing consumer VoIP services running over consumer broadband, where end-to-end QoS is a remote possibility at best, while the grandparent is discussing a QoS-enabled and geographically diverse enterprise network running VoIP.
Either way, IP QoS is not usually defined in the various terms you used. IP QoS commonly refers packet delivery delay times, jitter (i.e. differences in delivery delay for packets in a single flow), L3 packet-marking (IP Precedence, Diffserv), L2 and MPLS packet/frame-marking (802.1Pq Ethernet CoS, MPLS EXP), and egress-queuing (priority queues, class-based weighted fair queues, etc.)
While call-control servers, IP phones, PSTN gateways, etc. can mark packets with IPP or Diffserv, it's the routers and switches (e.g. the network) that prioritize packets by queuing and processing them based on their markings.
They also provide for mapping IP-layer packet-marking into 802.1Pq and MPLS marking when the originating equipment doesn't support those protocols. Finally, routers and switches may use traffic identification methods (source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port etc.) to mark or re-mark certain packets, if required.
But iLBC is better on bad lines.
Fair enough. I'll be more curious about it, though, when carrier-class equipment supports it.
Well, empirically, you can expect only about a 10% difference (0.5 points in a scale of 5) in predictive MOS scores between the lowest quality (G.728: ~3.6) and the highest quality (G.711: ~4.1) codecs commonly used for VoIP.
Jitter and delay introduced by intermediate networks has much more potential impact on MOS scores for VoIP calls.
Since Vonage, Packet8, et al. all ride across the public internet, starting with "Joe Bob's Broadband", VoIP packets generally get best effort delivery along with gramma's email.
If you've ever called anyone using a LD calling card, or if someone has called you with one, you've probably used VoIP and not even realized it. Most LD calling cards use VoIP carriers to cut costs.
:) .)
My parents call us all the time, and it sounds just fine.
(Also, I my work desk phone is IP, and it sounds great. Of course, I'm a network engineer for a IXC/CLEC/ISP/VoIP provider. So I may be biased about our service
One of the many price hooks of VoIP is that the calls are cheaper because they circumvent these fees. The PSTN switch that gateways the SIP/RTP or H.323/RTP into SS7/TDM is considered the originating switch.
In some cases, the call may translate several times between IP and PSTN worlds. Any PSTN origination or terminating fee tarriffs apply to the PSTN legs only, so international call billing may occur at several legs, and be billed each leg as a local, LD or a "cheaper" international call based on which carriers originate and terminate the various legs.
Regardless, the terminating PSTN carrier will see some termination fee based on the incoming trunk type.
If you're defining journalism as "reporting news" then blogging generally doesn't rise to that standard. News reporting, done properly, relates information verified against three or more sources, not including the reporter. It is not necessarily accurate, but due dilligence was applied to accuracy. While some blogs may meet these criteria, I would argue that they transcend the genre and are, in fact, journalism.
If you're defining journalism as simply "publishing unreliable information" then blogging is definitely an eligible synonym.
IPP = 5
Diffserv Per-Hop Behavior (PHB) = EF
DSCP = 46
I know you didn't specifically ask, but interactive video should normally get marked:
IPP = 4
PHB = AF41
DSCP = 34
... There's nothing lower than default priority of 0 (aka "best effort"). If you can reliably separate P2P from the rest of your data flows, you could give that default classification exclusively to P2P and *raise* the classification of the rest of your data flows to these (equivalent) values for "bulk" or "transactional" data, respectively:
Now your P2P question is trickier
IPP = 1 or 2
PHB = AF11 or AF21
DSCP = 10 or 18
BTW, we have not found too many instances where Diffserv marking is any better performance-wise over IPP marking, and more equipment supports IPP marking. If you don't need the molecular control of Diffserv, I'd probably recommend just using IPP to mark traffic.
What Vonage is doing is giving rebates on routers with built-in phone jacks that prioritize the customer's own upstream traffic, favoring VOIP. This way your call will survive if somebody in your house starts web browsing or Johnnie left Kazaa running or your box is a spam
Aha. Thanks for the heads up.
So is it true that bandwidth across the Internet is generally sufficient so long as the upload to your ISP is good enough? In my experience, yes.
In the cell phone era, consumer voice quality expectations can limbo under a very low bar.
Quantitatively, we have found in lab testing that voice quality (predictive MOS) scores degrade noticably when mixed traffic, such as you would see in the wild, increases delay and jitter in voice streams. This occurs on GigE links running at less than 100Mbps.
G.711 (all forms) 87 kbps
G.729 (all forms) 31 kbps
G.726 (47 kbps or 55 kbps depending)
Predictably, these roughly approximate another reply's numbers for Vonage quality "settings".
I'm a network engineer and planner for a VoIP provider, and despite years in this business, I have no earthly idea what you're calling a "QoS server".
You are, well, "so very wrong" about what goes on with popular consumer VoIP products like Vonage.
Vonage uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for call signalling and service feature delivery. Media Terminal Adaptors (MTAs), often also referred to as Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATAs), adapt analog voice media into Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) media streams which get encapsulated in User Datagram Protocol segments and then finally encapsulated in IP packets.
Which of those protocols provides "QoS" service? None, in Vonage's world anyway. Even if the MTA set a higher DiffServ Code Point or higher IP Precedence in the IP header, the consumer-grade broadband router will ignore it, and most intermediate ISP routers will ignore it too.
The ISPs that pay attention to QoS are likely to rewrite any DSCP or IP Prec setting inbound at their edge, unless contractual agreements state otherwise. You don't let untrusted entities flood your priority queues; it's bad for business.
Personally, I think Vonage should make their software impossible to trace. Yeah it could make the quality/speed take a hit but it would protect them.
The problem is that to sell and sustain a scalable, cost-effective VoIP-in-a-box service, Vonage needs to use standards-based protocols and equipment.
"Rolling their own" VoIP signalling/payload protocols would be very, very expensive to deploy and support. They'd have to convince equipment manufacturers to support them and train (and retain) a whole support infrastructure in complicated proprietary protocols.
Or they could whine in the press about "censorship" and yell "there oughta be a law" for free.
How else would you have it work?
Well, when I turn up service in a new location on our region-wide VoIP network, I make sure there's a 911 trunk from my VoIP/PSTN switch directly to the PSAP (the technical name) in that service area.
I'm not sure how your PSTN services are priced/packaged, but I have several friends here in the US that use Vonage for their primary home telephone service, and only keep the most basic POTS-line service for 911 access.
I also know a couple folks who've configured their FXO-equiped Sipura (sp?) analog telephone adaptors to failover their VoIP to 1FB-lines.
I doubt the plane needs the full two-mile runway length. He may have taken off in the first mile and landed in the second mile.
Except the "longest nonstop flight without refueling" record. It is an established mark that Fossett broke. And it is different than the "shortest time for a single pilot to circumvent the globe in a nonstop/nonrefueled flight" record that Fossett _set_ today.
Check your VoIP service contract. I bet there's a clause in there that disavows the use of the service for "lifeline" applications such as 911--even though you do have 911 access. Vonage, Packet8 et al. are well aware this type of thing may happen.
I know of one large cable provider that occasionally and unintentionally catches VoIP packet streams in their DDoS prevention systems. Their network architects are actively working with VoIP equipment manufacturers and service providers to tune these systems better.
This can not be allowed to happen.
Keep in mind that it's not "industry groups" that are accused of blocking traffic. It's actual network owners/operators that are deciding what they will transport on circuits and equipment they own/lease/manage.
Many, many ISPs have been port-blocking for years to prevent spam or worm propogation. And they were lauded for doing so. IMHO, it's never been the right thing for ISPs--who want to argue "common carrier" status--to do, and it breaks the end-to-end connectivity that I expect as an internet service customer. I personally would rather protect my own network/equipment than have my ISP chip away at my connectivity, beyond my visibility, in a benevolent (or not) attempt to help me.
People need to remember that the internet is not public like a national park, it's public like a shopping mall. It's consists of mostly commercial enterprises with equipment and circuits they buy or lease from other similar enterprises. Even the "public" institutions that have an internet presence also buy or lease from the same commercial sources.
Much like you can get arrested for trespassing by the owner of a mall, at their whim, you can get your traffic blocked by an upstream or intermediate network, at their whim.
The VoIP signalling and call-control protocols define well-known ports for those tasks. Any standards compliant VoIP implementation (which are the only scalable type) needs to use those ports.