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."
It's an ISP... (Score:2, Insightful)
They have these loopholes to stop spam, P2P, servers, etc. Yeah, it's annoying, and yeah it sucks, but unfortunately they have that right as private carriers.
Find an ISP that doesn't have those restrictions and use them instead.
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:4, Insightful)
Other ways work as well.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It's an ISP... (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't have their cake and eat it, too.
anyone else find it funny.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Vonage should be able to compete w/o regulation (Score:3, Insightful)
To reiterate my point, if Vonage wants to not be regulated, it should not expect others to be regulated for its benefit.
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the market and/or the FCC will quickly put a stop to this.
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's like saying it takes a lot of money to build the infrastructure for broadband and iTunes and similar services are pretty much leeching on, so ISPs should be able to block off iTunes, Napster, et al... AFAIK, the ISPs and telcos didn't need to do anything particular to allow for VoIP, just provide enough bandwidth. Bandwidth for which they charge already.
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
If your cable company started an on-line newspaper and thus blocked access to all other news sites on the net, would that be OK?
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then substitute blocking say, Google's http traffic on MSN's network because MSN has a search feature now that they want their users to use... can you see how this can quickly lead to an ISP going down the drain when other's retaliate?
Are you really getting "Internet" access from the cable provider now? Sound like some of AOL's problems? At least AOL doesn't selectively prevent their customers from accessing their competitors.
Many cable companies have a government granted monopoly on cable internet access for these customers. Should they really ban their customers from say, accessing dishnetwork's site because they're a competitor?
It's like Microsoft making a mod to the DNS resolution in windows to keep people from accessing any Linux promoting websites. Would you be up in arms over that?
If an ISP's contract with their customers prohibit's a protocol, then fine, but someone with a government monopoly to provide a service (in this case, cable internet) shouldn't be able to put restrictions banning their customers from accessing their unrelated competitor on that service.
Of course, the problem with the cable companies has always been their government monopoly status. Thank goodness for DSL and satellite dishes allowing for a little relief lately.
Why not tunnel? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:there is no current law or regulation?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:1, Insightful)
What do you expect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:anyone else find it funny.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe because the FCC is supposed to oversee the regulated monopoly that is the offspring of the old AT&T? It's a business competitiveness issue, not a what-travels-on-the-wire issue. Any new communications service that is perceived as a threat to the Bells can be stopped cold by anticompetitive means, and the FCC is charged with watching that.
Provider block == new provider. (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, I like my cable modem and all, but the day Time Warner decides to shit on my VoIP connection in favor of their overpriced junk ($15/mo Vonage does me just fine, don't need unlimited talking LD or local) is the day I drop the whole megillah.
Re:How they get away with it (Score:3, Insightful)
Hopefully, competitive pressure will keep ISPs from becoming too onerous. I have Comcast (from way back when it was @Home, and then AT&T Broadband) and haven't had any problems running anything, or any issues with Comcast's floating bandwidth cap and all that. Yet, other people I know (not in this area) have had problems, so whatever policies they have they aren't enforcing them very consistently.
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole dynamic IP things irks me too. I want a real IP address and the right to use the Internet however I see fit without having to buy a business package. I'm not running a business in my home so why should I need a business package? For that matter why should a business need a business package if it's the same type of connection.
We should just create community-funded networks and leave the commercial guys in the cold if they won't give the consumer a good enough deal to compete. Why don't we have city-wide gigabit networks plugged into every home and business?
Monopolies make the problem much worse... (Score:5, Insightful)
More than competing services from providers, the consolidation of communication companies is going to have a huge negative impact. Maybe they'll start providing VoIP for free, by raising monthly cable/DSL prices by $20/mo., gradually. Perhaps they'll institue a system-wide policy to slow-down VoIP traffic from other providers, and/or drop a fairly small number connections from competitors over a (randomized) length of time.
More than that, the consolidated companies can throw their weight around much more. The FCC should slap any ISP for doing something like this, but with such large companies, they can bribe everyone in Wahington, and have enough lobbyists to provide as many sound-bytes as it takes.
As I type this, Verizon is merging with MCI, and somewhere a few more politicans and CEOs are getting richer, while driving service, reliability, etc., into the ground.
There is, and it will bite them in the butt. (Score:5, Insightful)
With one side of their face, they claim that they cannot be held accountable for the content that traverses their network. This is the "common carrier" argument, they are selling connectivity only. Just like the road is not liable for being sped upon.
But with the other side of their face, they block services that they think are inconvenient to their business model, such as blocking port 80 inbound to subscribers unless they buy "business" rate services, or block port 25 outbound with the excuse that "it blocks spam".
So what happens when they are dragged into court, and have to explain how they can do both of these things at the same time? Likely nothing, they have good lawyers.
Which reminds me, the FCC would just LOVE to get their regulatory claws into the IP service business. This gives them multiple paths, "ensuring customer equity", "preventing unfair competition", and worst of all is their claiming that since the content of services they already regulate (like phones and TV) are being delivered by IP now, their regulations apply to the new medium.
Whatever you do, don't remind them that the entire justification for the FCC is to "regulate scarce resources (broadcast spectrum) for the good of all", and IP is not a scarce resource.
Bureaucrats hate being told they have no jurisdiction. They will go get some and come back in force. Watch out, you selective filtering IP providers, you're just setting yourselves up for a nasty fall.
Bob-
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:2, Insightful)
With VOIP it is different. If an ISP is selling a VOIP offering and blocking the competitors, then they are using their blocking "to compete unfairly". With outbound mail thru SMTP, and to a lesser extent with the prohibition of web servers, the ISP is not trying to make another of their products more appealing.
Just imagine the uproar if Vonage paid ISPs to block UDP port 5060 destined to any network but theirs.
Re:server, really? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's exactly what it has to do, if you are to receive incoming calls. In the IP sense, a traditional telephone is a "server", because it is always listening on the line for the voltage wiggle that signals an incoming call. An IP phone has to listen for incoming connections; this is done by calling the listen() library routine. The term for such a program is "server". If an ISP doesn't allow servers, they are intentionally blocking things like IP phones.
The common ISP "no servers" rule is equivalent to having a telephone line that only allows outgoing calls. That isn't very useful, of course, though phone companies can sell you that sort of service if you want it. They can also sell you a "server only" service that only allows incoming calls. This is actually a bit more common, though still fairly rare. You don't see many phones set up these ways, because people normally understand how useless such a phone would be to them.
The main reason that ISPs have gotten away from this is that the Internet reached popularity with the idea of "web browsing". This led to people accepting the idea that a web site was something that someone else did, and you just looked at them. But the real value of the Internet is two-way communication, just as with the telephone. You shouldn't have to relay email through a third-party site, any more than you should have to use voice mail to send someone a telephone message. You should be able to make some of your own files available on the Web, by running a web server on your machine. Not allowing such things is as limiting as an outgoing-calls-only phone line would be. You have a pale shadow of an Internet connection, and are missing some of the Internet's most important capabilities.
It'll probably all sort itself out in a few more decades, and we'll be able to use the Internet as it was designed. But we're seeing one of the battles here. The big companies want their control back. They don't like these little upstarts providing a comm service. If they can get away with it, they will block traffic to and from their competitors, so you'll have to pay them extra for a service that your own computer could do on its own.
Re:Why not tunnel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dynamic ports is certainly a good idea, though.
Re:there is no current law or regulation?! (Score:1, Insightful)
Gotcha. We're turning off those spam & virus filters at our edge routers, and shutting down the firewalls too (except the ones that protect our own servers). Stop bugging us about the spam and get your *own* firewall, Johnnie!
Signed,
Your ISP
Re:anyone else find it funny.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you find it funny if you were angry at the FCC for not being allowed to setup a small radio station, and then your phone company began denying you service?
Vonage is absolutely right not wanting to be taxed like traditional phone companies. They certainly should be taxed for their potential use of 911 services, but not for the other fees which don't make sense for a phone-company without a physical presence.
Re:anyone else find it funny.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty confident that Yahoo and Google would prefer not to be taxed like telcos, but if a bunch of ILECs started blocking all traffic from/to Yahoo and Google and the ILECs' customers they would raise holy hell about it too.
In other words, the content doesn't matter. This is the internet, bits are just bits.
Re:server, really? (Score:3, Insightful)
The latest SIP RFC (RFC 3261) *requires* (in normative text) that all devices support both TCP and UDP as transport protocols. SIP devices MUST use TCP as a transport mechanism if the message to be sent is within 200 bytes of the MTU of the transit link.
Also, SIP has no "GET" header (like HTTP). The SIP methods defined by RFC 3261 include INVITE, REGISTER, ACK, BYE, CANCEL, and OPTIONS. Other subsequent SIP-related RFCs include other methods such as PRACK, SUBSCRIBE/NOTIFY, INFO, and UPDATE. These are all well defined and the RFCs are publicly available.
I agree with the parent poster that SIP devices should be considered servers. I'd go one step further that the RFC defines a PEER TO PEER protocol, where all SIP devices MUST act as both clients AND servers. If I call you, my request is made from the "client" aspect to your "server" aspect. Once the call is setup, if you hang up the phone, your BYE message is sent from your "client" aspect to my "server" aspect. This is the nature of SIP.
Re:there is no current law or regulation?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:there is no current law or regulation?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's not forget wireless broadband, which will most likely cut a nice big piece out of the cable and telephone companies. When you eliminate "fiber to the curb" as a prerequisite for getting in on service provider racket, a whole new crop of providers will start popping up.
Re:there is no current law or regulation?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Under US law, as interpreted by the FCC, ISPs are engaged in "information service". This is a service rendered atop underlying "telecommunications", which, if provided as a "service" (for a fee), would be common carriage. But what that means is that ISPs usually buy their bandwidth from common carriers. (They can also self-provision, as via wireless, or when a cable companies provides it over its own wire. Then there's telecommunications without common carriage.)
ISPs, as information services, are expected to do more than pass along raw information. Indeed one of the legal justifications for their being treated a "information" rather than "carriers" is because they do have the right to pay attention and sometimes do. Spam filtering, address-range blocking, virus filtering, pr0n filtering, etc., are all "information processing".
Now along comes VoIP. It flaunts its non-common carrier status. Vonage got an FCC ruling (now being appealed by state regulators) that it is not a telephone company subject to common carrier rules (and taxes). The logic basically goes like this:
- Telephony is common carriage
- IP is usually used to carry information
- Information is carried above common carriage
- VoIP is carried inside IP packets
- Therefore VoIP is information, not telephony.
If you look carefully, you can see why the states are upset. As an analogy, assume that postmen wore gray suits and policemen wore green suits. If a postman put on green trousers, could he give you a traffic ticket? (There's a minor technical flaw in their reasoning, because Vonage-type companies actually interconnect with the telephone network via regulated, taxed telephone companies. But they don't always play by the same rules.)
Still, the point is that ISPs are not common carriers. Vonage and other parasitic VoIP service providers (that's a technically-correct description, not an insult, because they take advantage of ISP and telecom services already paid for by their customer) don't pay like telephone companies, and have to adapt to the underlying transport (ISPs), to whom they pay nothing. So if the ISP wants to block them, it's perfectly legal. Your recourse is to change ISPs. Telephone companies pay for their wire. It shows up in the price.
Now here's the catch -- what choice of ISPs do you have? Cable companies don't usually offer choice, or else usually only offer two (themselves and maybe one little-advertised option). Telco DSL is technically a common carrier telecommunications service that has to offer service to any ISP that asks; Verizon Online is supposed to be just another ISP to the Verizon Telephone Companies. That's why Speakeasy can run over Verizon wire. However, Verizon and BellSouth have petitioned the FCC to drop all of those rules. They want to not be common carriers, and want instead to use their wire to carry their own ISP, period, no choice. See the FCC's web site, e-filing, ECFS, Docket # 04-405 and 04-440. As "self-provisioned ISPs" (like cable companies), they would be allowed to block Vonage freely, and deny you access to competing ISPs. This is what the Bush FCC appears to have planned for you.
not seen in the wild?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Voip has been enemy number 1 for PTTs the world over for many years. Get out from under that rock and take a look around.
Re:In fairness to the cable companies... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is really capitalism at best. The ISP actually needs to compete by putting out better service to survive. The community here is essentially just a company owned by its customers.
Re:traffic shaping? (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point there is that you can't favour a particular "who" - if a railroad company said "freight trains are too heavy for this bridge and will have to divert" then probably ok, wheras if it blocked freight trains from other companies but allowed its own, it wansn't.
If the ISPs are just blocking _all_ VOIP traffic then fine - they aren't delivering a full IP connection, but (in most cases) nothing forces them to. If they are blocking Vonage VOIP whilst allowing their own VOIP then I would have thought you are right into the realms of competition law, particularly if the ISP has a monopoly on the network provision.
Re:Can anyone explain this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not gonna happen.
That would be pretty stupid and neanderthal, too. It can't be done in secret. The first technician who is hauled before a Grand Jury is going to give up his managers in a heartbeat. The first manager hauled in will give up the droid suits in a heartbeat. The droid suits will be indicted. I imagine they're stupid enough to try it until a few of them have been consigned to the graybar hotel for a few years.
Vonage has over 350,000 "lines" and is adding them at 30,000 per month. The genie is well out of the bottle and can't be put back. VoIP growth is now running at 900% per year. Shipments of VoIP switch equipment have surpassed shipments of traditional switch equipment. The avalanche is well underway and people who have tasted affordable, flat rate VoIP service that works from almost anywhere on the planet are going to be out for blood if any politician, bureaurat or weasel telecom tries to get in the way.
I invite any telecom droid who wants his career to turn into a blackened, smoking pit to just try messing with VoIP traffic. Expect existing laws to be stretched to cover this and expect interference with VoIP traffic to be criminalized very soon.
Grandma to her congresscritter: "I don't know why, but as soon as my cable Internet company offered its own voice over Internet service, my Vonage service began to develop noise and dropped calls."
congresscritter: "We'll look into it, ma'am. We've had a lot of calls about this in the last week."
congresscritter to aide: "Harvey, get on the phone with FCC and the AG's office. These ISPs are fucking with my consituents' lives and safety. Find a law, and let's break their fucking legs with it."
RTFA!!!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
"According to Powell, his understanding is that the blocking is not coming from major service providers, but from rural Local Exchange Carriers (LECs). Brooke Schulz, Vonage's senior vice president for corporate communications, said Monday that the company would not comment on the report."
From that it sounds like it is certainly the phone companies not the ISPs that are blocking the Vonage traffic. This probably means that they *are* common carriers. However the article states there are currently no laws regarding this type of blockage. But, I repeat, "this has nothing to do with the ISPs"!!!!!!
Bad news for whomever is doing the blocking (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along (Score:3, Insightful)
You are also wrong that Vonage is complaining about smaller phone companies not providing enough IP bandwidth; what they are complaining about is ISP's *specifically targeting* and blocking VOIP traffic. Failing to deliver adequate capacity is another matter. There are no real quality of service guarantees in residential service, though no failure could be more grave for an ISP which, after all, has nothing to offer but bandwidth.
Compression is not necessarily a good idea, not if it increases latency.