I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned "Maia Mailguard."
http://www.maiamailguard.com/
I've never used it and would love to hear about it from folks who have. I was planning on getting around to test it one of these days...
I work for a small independant telephone company. Although I'm glad that VoIP isn't regulated, it puts my company in a very awkward position. Namely an inability to compete. If we have to charge our customers for 911, USF, federal and state taxes so should a VoIP provider if any their calls terminate on the POTS network. I would be equally okay with the deregulation of the POTS network instead.
People sometimes suggest we start providing VoIP service (and we are), but this is also a problem in certain areas. ILEC's can't really put this service in and charge less for it unless every customer can get it and the state PSC doesn't think its a waste of money (this is somewhat untrue, but the regulatory environment imposed on an ILEC is freakishly complicated). In our CLEC territory we are going to roll this out but can't offer it in our ILEC because we can't legally compete with ourselves. At this point we will have two different systems providing the same service. Not a problem until Farmer Joe calls the ILEC and demands to know why his friend 10 miles away gets his phone for 15 bucks less a month from (what appears to him) to be the same company. Suggesting he send his comments to the PSC to try and help change the situation just makes him more mad. People don't want to hear laywerish sounding crap about regulation. It really isn't our fault but thats why people hate the telephone company. I think 85% of the time there's some legal mumbo jumbo telling us we can't do something or making it prohibitivly expensive(I'll attribute the rest to human error and actual screw ups).
We like competition, it helps us serve our customers better and lets us know where we're messing up but only if everyone is on the same playing field. We like VoIP its going to save us quite a bit of money in the long haul. We don't like screwing half our customers because we legally can't implement VoIP for them.
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I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned "Maia Mailguard." http://www.maiamailguard.com/ I've never used it and would love to hear about it from folks who have. I was planning on getting around to test it one of these days...
People sometimes suggest we start providing VoIP service (and we are), but this is also a problem in certain areas. ILEC's can't really put this service in and charge less for it unless every customer can get it and the state PSC doesn't think its a waste of money (this is somewhat untrue, but the regulatory environment imposed on an ILEC is freakishly complicated). In our CLEC territory we are going to roll this out but can't offer it in our ILEC because we can't legally compete with ourselves. At this point we will have two different systems providing the same service. Not a problem until Farmer Joe calls the ILEC and demands to know why his friend 10 miles away gets his phone for 15 bucks less a month from (what appears to him) to be the same company. Suggesting he send his comments to the PSC to try and help change the situation just makes him more mad. People don't want to hear laywerish sounding crap about regulation. It really isn't our fault but thats why people hate the telephone company. I think 85% of the time there's some legal mumbo jumbo telling us we can't do something or making it prohibitivly expensive(I'll attribute the rest to human error and actual screw ups).
We like competition, it helps us serve our customers better and lets us know where we're messing up but only if everyone is on the same playing field. We like VoIP its going to save us quite a bit of money in the long haul. We don't like screwing half our customers because we legally can't implement VoIP for them.
In summery: Regulate VoIP for deregulat POTS.