Vonage Says VoIP Traffic Blocked By Providers 410
Anonymouse writes "Advanced IP Pipeline reports that Vonage has filed numerous complaints with the FCC over their VoIP traffic being blocked by major providers, something providers have long worried about but had not yet been seen 'in the wild.' Analysts expect the issue of network neutrality (or network discrimination) is only going to get larger as the bell and cable companies expand their VoIP efforts and bump heads with smaller providers."
Re:there is no current law or regulation?! (Score:5, Informative)
That applies to telephone calls over POTS. It does not apply to IP traffic over their internet service.
Re:VoIP over SSL? (Score:5, Informative)
So SSL is not really an option. IPSec might be an option.
New port numbers or IP addresses may be simpler, but can also more easily be blocked.
Read the article! (Score:5, Informative)
Again, read the article (Score:5, Informative)
Re:quick question (Score:4, Informative)
server, really? (Score:3, Informative)
Comcast defines a server as:
A SIP device does not qualify as it is not providing service network content or service to anyone out sideo yoru home -- though it receives data, it receives data on behalf of the end user.Re:Vonage should be able to compete w/o regulation (Score:2, Informative)
This can only be negative for consumers.
Re:server, really? (Score:3, Informative)
A VoIP phone would definitly qualify as that (at least if you accept incoming phone calls). An e-mail client, does not listen on any ports (at least not any I've ever heard of). They might have a connection they established that exists for a long time. But at no point in time does any sane e-mail client issue:
However, any number of SMTP, IMAP and POP3 servers do that as part of normal operations.
You might see an FTP client listen on a port in one of the two modes (Passive or non-Passive, I can't remember which). However, that is the data connection, not the control connection.
Kirby
Re:Isn't this to be expected? (Score:3, Informative)
Vonage is limited to using standard IP QoS, since it is just a regular IP device. However, an MTA built into a cable modem has full access to the cable modem QoS code. Part of the DOCSIS specification states that a DOCSIS 1.1 cable modem must support multiple "service flows", which are basically different queues. Each of these queues has it's own classification parameters (i.e. drop packets, forward packets, QoS, etc.), so it is only natural that a cable operator would give voice calls through their MTAs a higher QoS.
Where Vonage calls might get screwed is because the packets that are being sent through the cable modem by the Vonage MTA would be considered as data, and would go out through the data flow. If the cable operator so chose, they could configure the voice flow to work with the Vonage MTA, but whether or not they'd do that is another story.
-- Joe
Re:It's an ISP... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, most of them can't. In most places, there is only one ISP.
And the comms industry in the US is pushing hard for "consolidation", to minimize the number of people who can make a choice.
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:5, Informative)
Vonage isn't in any way "leeching" off cable providers, just as amazon & ebay aren't leeching of any ISP. The Internet is an end-to-end system, so it takes two endpoints to be useful. Vonage is actually helping to make Internet service more attractive, by providing additional services *via* the Internet than were available previously.
If the cablecos want to build voip services also, that's great. The key to remember is that they are selling access to the global Internet, and if they start "pruning" of the sections of the Internet that happen to compete with their business, they're going to have to fight their customers, and the FCC.
You may be misinformed about "equal access" in the US. This refers to the publicly funded POTS system. The idea is that the phone system is owned by the govt, not the telco. So the govt can mandate who can use it. Privately funded cable systems OTOH, have no requirement to allow competitors to use their infrastructure. The difference is that a cable company is not obligated to allow a competitor to sell cable or Internet service over their lines. Because connectivity is a necessary element of Internet service, blocking/restricting connectivity is a (partial) failure to fulfill their obligation the service contract. Applying "equal access" to viop would mean allowing other phone service prviders to use the voip servers that the cableco owned.
Re:Corporations (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that's a good description of what they do. Hereabouts (Boston), the local linux/unix users group has had a discussion lately about Comcast blocking ports 80 and 25. Some people reported no blocking, others reported both ports blocked, others reported only one blocked. The story seems to be that they're slowly blocking these ports, one neighborhood at a time. If you don't like it, you can upgrade to business service.
Last year, we had RCN in our neighborhood. They started blocking port 80, then started blocking port 25. We switched to speakeasy in November, because they promise not to block ports (and are linux/unix friendly
A common excuse for blocking these ports is that it's an easy way for the ISP to block whatever malware is currently infecting Windows boxes and dragging the network to a standstill. But, of course, once a port gets blocked in your neighborhood, it never gets unblocked.
Unless you upgrade to business service.
Re:server, really? (Score:5, Informative)
VOIP calls run exclusively over UDP packets. There is not a TCP packet to be found. SIP, or Session Initiation Protocol is a UDP handshake that is used to setup a connection. With consumer VOIP circuits, the client will send a SIP registration request to the SIP proxy server (Vonage in this case). The proxy server will reply with an OK. The actual payload of the UDP packets looks just like an HTTP transaction (complete with a GET and headers) and ditto for the reply. It is just not in a TCP stream. If a packet gets lost, then it is lost and the transaction does not happen.
The SIP client will nearly continually repeat this UDP registration followed by shorter "keep alive" exchanges. The idea is to keep any NAT router happy so that the channel now is end-to-end connected.
If the server needs to ring your phone, it now has an IP address and UDP port number that it can send a packet to. This then causes the SIP client to setup an RTP "connection". Again, these are UDP packets and TCP is nowhere to be found. The RTP connection is basically a set of UDP packets sent out very quickly. For a non-compressing codec (like G711.u [aka ulaw]), this means 50 UDP packets/second of about 220 bytes each. The packets go both ways at full speed (which is why VOIP does not work over dialup). There is no error detection. If a packet is lost, 20ms of voice is dropped.
So is a SIP client a server. I don't think so. I think it is wrong to describe a server as something that listens on a port. In the case of residential internet access, it is not the listening that the ISP does not like. It is the bandwidth and usage patterns. A better metric would be "is this a one to one communication". A web server is one to many. Ditto for streaming video. SIP is one to one. If you want to call SIP a server, then you should probably call an IM client a server as well.
What the ISPs are really doing is trying to figure out how to charge some people "more" when they can get away with it. It is not just "usage", but also an arbitrary categorization of what is residential access. From a purely network and traffic point of view, bittorrent should be the first thing outlawed. A local webserver on port 80 is nothing compared to a good torrent.
The other issue is "should an ISP be allowed to block competitors traffic". A lot of people argue against regulation of any kind. If you are one of these then you are a fool. If you leave a company completely without regulation, they will steal from you. There have to be limits to their behaviour. I have seen VOIP companies that claim, in the contracts, that they don't honor local number portability requests. They are saying that if you get a phone number from then that they will not give it up. Perhaps the regulations have not caught up to VOIP providers, but this policy is wrong, probably illegal, and the government should work to stop it. Similarily, if an ISP has a policy to hurt a competitors traffic so that their service works better, then that ISP is wrong. If this is not against the law, then the law should be enlarged to stop the practice. At the very least, this policy should be openly disclosed by the ISP to all of their customers up front.
It is about time for businesses to provide service to their customers instead of feeling like their customers are their property to leverage.
Re:there is no current law or regulation?! (Score:5, Informative)
Test your ISP (Score:3, Informative)
Check out your current ISP with http://www.testyourvoip.com/ [testyourvoip.com]. It places a call in Java to test out your connection's ability to handle a good quality VoIP call. But it will also tell you if your provider is blocking VoIP specific ports.
-ben
Re:Who owns the network? Who makes the rules? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think I've ever seen a cable company that really paid for the whole cost of their network. If you're cable is on a pole line, the they are most likely using pole lines built and paid for by the electric and phone companies. This doesn't include the easement for the pole lines. Similarly, if the cable is underground, they make use of easements for their right of way. They may have paid to put the cable there, but they most likely DO NOT own the right of way.
Re:Can anyone explain this? (Score:3, Informative)
VoIP uses UDP, usually port numbers in the vicinity of 5060, and some units may have a way of moving away from these to other UDP ports that are not blocked.
UDP is much more appropriate... (Score:3, Informative)
Trying to tunnel a protocol which has its own reliability layer through another protocol which also implements a reliability layer makes bad things happen [sites.inka.de].
Re:"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along (Score:5, Informative)
It's been a while since I last tested Vonage's service. When we tested it, Vonage configured the Cisco ATA-186 to use non-compressed 64Kbit/sec data streams as the default. (IP/UDP encapsulation increases net bandwidth requirements to ~80Kb/sec in each direction). Get enough of those puppies running and you'll suck down a fair percentage of any smaller ISP's backbone. Note: This type of VOIP encoding technique requires more data bandwidth than carrying the same phone call over a POTS network!!!
At the time, you had to jump threw hoops to get Vonage to turn ON compression and reduce the network loading by a factor of 10 to 20x, (down to 4 to 8Kb/sec). But at the time, activating compression was a double edged sword, as quite a few of Vonage's termination switches&gateways no longer worked properly with the compression protocol activated.
Since then, they have improved things a bit. They've added a user configured "Bandwidth" saver to the account management web page, and "Probably?" fixed many of compression issues with the termination switches&gateways.
But from what I hear, the nasty (2 * 80Kb/sec) is still the default, and it inflicts a "Tragedy of the Commons" type problem on smaller ISP's. Where no single user causes a problem, but when dozens/hundreds of simultaneous users start placing calls using their Vonage service, an ISP with limited resources is forced to act. This problem can only be corrected at the source, (Vonage), since most users are blissfully ignorant of the implications. (I.E. A couple of intelligent users reseting their compression settings will have little net effect on the overall traffic patterns. )
In summary, Vonage is complaining about smaller phone companies not providing enough IP bandwidth to carry a significant portion of their PAID/Measured traffic over Uncompensated long distance backbone connections. Ha, fat chance! For the most part, I would say that Vonage's problems are self inflicted, story over.