If you're in the US, what's attached below may be of interest to you,
especially if you consider that the default behavior of Asterisk breaks
the law in several states.
Also for those of you in the US: lately there has been a spate of ads on
TV portraying the FCC's proposal to regulate broadband service as a
clumsy attempt to extend its reach and interfere in an industry that
seems to be working just fine on its own. This is political haymaking
by the cable companies to try to exploit conservative resentment of the
current administrations growth of government.
The bottom line is that most of the improvements in cable and telephone
service have come despite the carriers, not because of them. FCC
mandates (such as 911) have lead to many new user services that the
telcos would not have deployed otherwise (because of the massive expense
involved in replacing an amortized infrastructure with something
entirely new and more costly).
I'm no fan of government expansion, nor of telcos (I've worked for
CLECs, ILECs, and competing technology companies that tried to erode
telco subscribership... anyone remember the old Ricochet wireless modems
10 years back?)... but FCC regulation and Net Neutrality is a good thing.
And even what "net neutrality" is has been misportrayed in these TV
adverts: they claim that the carriers like Comcast and Verizon don't
stop you from going to the service and content providers that you want
(like Hulu, Youtube, and Vonage, for instance).
This is true... they don't outright stop you. But they often do
*impede* you. I've encountered cases where Verizon either quashed my
QoS settings (which are critical for streaming or realtime IPTV or
VoIP), or Comcast ignored QoS settings on packets except those destined
to their servers. (I've also had Comcast renew my 12 hour DHCP lease
with a different IP address [thereby violating the DHCP spec] every
hour, thus interrupting any VoIP calls that were in progress when the
lease refresh happened.) This is clearly not "neutral".
So they're not "stopping" you, but they are trying to degrade the
service enough to the point that you'll consider buying the telco's (or
cable operator's) services over a 3rd party's if it's your perception
that the carrier's "just work" and the 3rd party's don't.
I encourage everyone on this list who is stateside to call their
legislators and urge them to support both Net Neutrality via FCC
regulation of broadband, as well as supporting the "Truth in Caller ID
Act of 2009".
If you have any questions about these, please contact me offline.
Thanks.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [asterisk-users] US "Truth in caller id act"... and it's
impact on services
Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 13:28:22 -0600
From: Philip Prindeville <[email protected]>
Reply-To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
<[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
For the 3rd consecutive term, the US Senate has introduced the "Truth in
caller ID Act of 2009".
It was passed by the Senate (finally) in January, and has moved to the
House for a vote.
A lot of states have ambiguous or overly restrictive language on how
caller ID may be manipulated.
For instance, if you have a PBX, and a call comes in from the PSTN,
which you then loop back out or "hairpin" (without a redirect) to the
PSTN (therefore as two separate but bridged call legs) and put the
caller ID of the 1st call onto the 2nd leg (which is, by the way, the
default behavior of Asterisk) you may be breaking the law in some states.
This law introduces uniformity across all states (it's nice to have a
level playing field, whether you agree with this law or not).
It also very specifically defines under what condition spoofing/swatting
is illegal:
(1)IN GENERAL- It shall be unlawful for any person within the United
States, in connection with any real time voice communications service,
regardless of the technology or network utilized, to cause anycaller ID
service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller ID information, with
the intent to defraud or deceive.
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc111/h1258_eh.xml
which is nice, because it's less ambiguous about when the activity is
illegal (and avoids unnecessary contention between customers, telcos,
and PUC's).
For instance, if you're implementing "single number calling" for your
employees, so that their cell-originated calls indicates their primary
(deskphone) work number, the "the intent to defraud or deceive" is absent.
This act delivers a badly needed brightline definition of what can and
can't be done within the limits of the law.
If you agree with this law, and believe that it facilitates the
deployment of useful calling features, then please contact your congressman.
And if you don't, well, you have a voice too, so tell them why it falls
short.
Either way, this act has been backburnered way too long and it's time to
have a final conclusion on the matter.
-Philip
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