California Demands Licensure For VoIP Providers

muonzoo writes "Looks like California will be wrangling up the VoIP companies and mowing them down. Or, at least licensing them. CNET has a story about state legislators' push for all VoIP companies in the state to carry a Telephone Operator License. CNET also has a quick blurb about Vonage and how they have recently started charging customers a 'Regulatory Recovery Fee.' Ugly stuff for a young industry." Here's our earlier post about Vonage charging the regulatory recovery fee.

Here's a link

[Sir Haxalot]

to the same story on ZDNet [google.com].

Re:Operator license = fees and taxes

[PerlGuru]

I'm a vonage user and recently (a week ago, or the week before) received am email message indicating that they were lowering thier rates by $5, which they did. Vonage seems like a great company to me. I had difficulties getting ahold of support when we first went with them (about a year ago) but they have grown now. I haven't, however needd to call support since then.

Boy o boy

[stratjakt]

California's governors sure do know how to drive business out-of-state, don't they?

My VoIP phone is ringing. It's Ahnold. He says "Hasta la vista, baby bells!"

Re:Makes sense to me.....

[edstromp]

Because the laws and such were originally defined with the understanding that there would be a monopoly on telephone services (or at least the line into your house).

That is no longer the case. Especially with the internet, as you can get a connection by cable, dsl, satelite, wi-fi, fm, etc... It's a free market. Regulation (at least in this sense) is no longer necessary.

And becides does it make sense to charge a company in NJ for this? All they have are customers in other states. They don't own any property or goods outside of their centraly located servers... which don't reside in your state.

Vonage is NOT P2P

[justMichael]

With Vonage you can call ANY phone number you want, not just some other VoIP phone.

And you don't get a "handset" you get a Cisco ATA186 [cisco.com] that you plug any phone you want into.

It talks to their servers becasue at some point it has to get injected back into the POTS network as an analog call.

Re:Triple Bullshit on you

[zipwow]

Even more, why should you have to pay them again to people who don't own the lines?

If VoIP is the way to go, leave it unregulated, and let the phone companies do it instead of their regular phone service. They can become providers of general connectivity instead of sound in a can.

What's standing in the way of that? Isn't that a better solution anyway?

-Zipwow

Re:California

[Jhon]

...because he lied about the deficit. Not the taxes.

Actually, it's because he not ONLY lied about the deficit, he lied that taxes would not need to be raised. Days after he was elected, he said: "Oh... that 4 billion shortfall I was talking about? It's really 30+ billion". Then he trippled car registration (tax). Then he talked about going to the California supreme court to remove the 2/3ds assembly/senate majorities needed to raise/levy taxes. Then he talked about raising the highest income tax bracket to over 11% (which in CA starts at $38k!). Then he talked about raising sales tax...

Believe me... as a Californian, it's about the taxes and it's about spending money we don't have. If ANYTHING has come out of the recall effort so far, its that the surest way to PISS OFF the voters is to raise taxes to cover spending money we didn't have -- and it stopped most of what Davis and the legislature wanted to do.

Re:Cut spending where?

[NightSpots]

Actually, McClintock has said explicitly that he'd roll back all programs to their 1998 levels, which would cut spending by around, oh, a measly 30 billion.

Arnold has said that he wants an outside audit of all spending, and that anything deemed wasteful would be cut. Right now, for instance, the taxpayers are paying for 44,000 new jobs (created in the last three years), many of which (~15,000) aren't filled because there's no office space. The salaries for these jobs still get paid to the departments (once it's allocated, it's paid), and are basically vanishing... This type of waste (fraud is more accurate) needs to be eliminated.

More complete story on California regulating VoIP

[gardel]

This story was reported by Voxilla.com a day before CNET got to it. Voxilla's report is much more thorough. You can read it at http://www.voxilla.com/Article25-nested-order0-thr eshold0.phtml.

Re:Here's a link

[gardel]

Here's a better link to a much more complete story (that CNET clearly followed):

http://www.voxilla.com/Article25-nested-order0-t hr eshold0.phtml

Re:Bullshit

[iabervon]

The issue is that Vonage (et al) actually give you a telephone number and let you make telephone system calls. The VoIP step is irrelevant there; the issue is that you're making and receiving regular phone calls in Vonage's office, which then connects to you over the internet. It doesn't matter if you go to the phone company building to make your calls, have a long phone cord to your home, or connect over the internet. There's still a phone circuit there with your number on it, and the company still does telephony.

If governments start bothering pure VoIP companies (where the voice only goes over IP and you have nothing to do with the phone network), that would be a different matter. But that doesn't seem to be happening currently, and probably won't, because what's far more likely is that there won't be a services company doing that; it'll be peer-to-peer sound managing software and a directory service (or maybe it will just use DNS, like email does).

On the other hand, things like the operator and 911 are tied to the phone network and probably won't move to VoIP any time soon. It's these sorts of things that telephone regulation funds and that the phone network provides reliable access to.

Re:As I've said before...

[RustyTaco]

Ever heard of DID (Direct Inward Dial)? Trunks and phone numbers are in no way connected. It's trivially easy to have unique telephone & FAX number for everybody in a 500 person company(1000 numbers), and still only have two T1s (48 trunks) feeding them. It's really neat stuff. Most VoIP gateways take in T1s directly, and support DID so that they can support all sorts of interesting configurations after they are handed calls from the CO. Vontage might have something spiffier, with higher capacity lines and maybe SS7 signaling instead of T1+DID, but the net effect is the same: They tell the local monopoly exchange to send all call for the numbers Vontage operates to their trunk group.

- RustyTaco

Re:Internal VoIP Included?

[darrin60]

Don't confuse computer to computer VOIP as what the state governments have chosen to regulate. They are only going to regulate VOIP where it interfaces with the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). This interconnection is what differentiates your voice chat computer programs from what what companies like Vonage do. All service providers who interconnect with the PSTN are regulated.

Re:Internal VoIP Included?

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

Ah, but the local 911 will not allow VoIP to connect into their network, and as a taxpayer, I do not see paying for a service I am denied the ability to use.