Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 08:45:30AM -0600, Adi Linden said something to the effect of: > > > If VOIP doesn't run on your network because you've oversold your capacity, > > no amount of QoS is going to put the quality back into your service. > > People will find better ISPs. If you deliberately set QoS to favor your > > services over a competitor, whom your customers are also paying for > > service, you'll be staring down prosecutors, at some point. It's > > anti-competitive behavior, as you're taking deliberate actions to degrade > > the service of a competitor, simply because you can. > > Let's say I sell a premium VoIP offering for an additional fee on my > network. I apply QoS to deliver my VoIP offering to my customers but as a > result all other VoIP service is literally useless during heavy use > times you'd consider this anti-competitive behavior? Possibly, but even if not it's a glancing blow at another violation. At the very least I would consider it failure to deliver service. Unless you explicitly and frequently refer to this non-QoS-ified service as "best effort" (read: in this case, no effort at all) and in the interest of anti-liability full disclosure explain that this traffic is regularly superceded by your premium subscribers' traffic (spin doctor as appropriate), you wll be fielding the angry phone calls of customers who rightfully feel that they were mislead. While you may not be hit with antitrust suits, you're pushing the envelope with the generic SLA that acts as junk drawer for the rest of your traffic, I would think... Then again, no one pays me to think. RTI, --ra -- k. rachael treu, CISSP [EMAIL PROTECTED] ..quis custodiet ipsos custodes?.. > > Adi
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Mon, 7 Mar 2005, Adi Linden wrote: If VOIP doesn't run on your network because you've oversold your capacity, no amount of QoS is going to put the quality back into your service. People will find better ISPs. If you deliberately set QoS to favor your services over a competitor, whom your customers are also paying for service, you'll be staring down prosecutors, at some point. It's anti-competitive behavior, as you're taking deliberate actions to degrade the service of a competitor, simply because you can. Let's say I sell a premium VoIP offering for an additional fee on my network. I apply QoS to deliver my VoIP offering to my customers but as a result all other VoIP service is literally useless during heavy use times you'd consider this anti-competitive behavior? Applying QoS to your VOIP traffic at the expense of *all* other traffic would be edging against a gray area. Applying QoS to competitive VOIP traffic specifically to improve the quality of your service at the expense of theirs is likely to be a problem. Again, I am not a lawyer. I would strongly suggest consulting one if this is a serious concern. The Internet is not regulated because operators tend to be effective at self policing. Engaging in these kinds of practices is asking for regulation. - billn
RE: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
Do you also offer premium "80" traffic? Or guaranteed delivery of UDP? Unbundled services will give the best price, and good service. Maybe we won't get the service anytime soon, but 2 out of the magical 3 isn't bad. [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adi Linden Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 8:46 AM To: Bill Nash Cc: Robert Blayzor; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP > If VOIP doesn't run on your network because you've oversold your > capacity, no amount of QoS is going to put the quality back into your service. > People will find better ISPs. If you deliberately set QoS to favor > your services over a competitor, whom your customers are also paying > for service, you'll be staring down prosecutors, at some point. It's > anti-competitive behavior, as you're taking deliberate actions to > degrade the service of a competitor, simply because you can. Let's say I sell a premium VoIP offering for an additional fee on my network. I apply QoS to deliver my VoIP offering to my customers but as a result all other VoIP service is literally useless during heavy use times you'd consider this anti-competitive behavior? Adi
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
> If VOIP doesn't run on your network because you've oversold your capacity, > no amount of QoS is going to put the quality back into your service. > People will find better ISPs. If you deliberately set QoS to favor your > services over a competitor, whom your customers are also paying for > service, you'll be staring down prosecutors, at some point. It's > anti-competitive behavior, as you're taking deliberate actions to degrade > the service of a competitor, simply because you can. Let's say I sell a premium VoIP offering for an additional fee on my network. I apply QoS to deliver my VoIP offering to my customers but as a result all other VoIP service is literally useless during heavy use times you'd consider this anti-competitive behavior? Adi
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
> > and your phone number has to be local to your location. > ^^ > > Thanks for proving my point. And who says that a location needs to have only a single phone number. Many VoIP providers will sell you extra vanity numbers anywhere in the USA or a number of other countries: http://www.telphin.com/numbers.php http://sipphone.com/virtual/ These are redirected to your phone in the same way that a personal 800 number gets redirected. A telephone number is rather more like a domain name than an IP address. So if the E-911 VoIP service requires that you have a base phone number that is within your E-911 region that doesn't seem like a problem to me since you can have any number of virtual phone numbers in addition to the base number. --Michael Dillon
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Robert Blayzor wrote: Bill Nash wrote: At the root of it, it's deliberate anti-competitive behavior, and that's what the fine is for. I'm generally fine to have the government stay out of the internet as much as possible, but this move was the correct one, as it was on behalf of the end consumer. It's not the choice of port blocking that matters, it's the intent. Wait a minute, since when is the Internet service I provide regulated by ANY entity? It's not, therefore I can run the network any way I see Since you applied for a license to operate a business in your city/county/state. fit. If customers don't like it, they can choose another ISP; if they can't choose another ISP, not my problem, I'm not a regulated entity, you get my service or none at all. Unregulated does not mean unencumbered by legal responsibilities. What would your take on a local competitor be, if they began filtering all traffic to your network when they happen to control all long haul egress? It's their network, they can do it, right? You don't get a say, do you? They're just leveraging their control of local peering to deliberately obstruct your ability to do business. That's legal, right? Lets take port blocking out of this. Lets say I'm an ISP that offers digital phone service to my customers. Of course I'm going to provide my customers with the best voice service possible, which means QoS for my voice customers. If Vonages service is basically unsable on my network due to oversubscription/latency/packetloss on some legs/remotes am I obligated now to provide voice quality? No, I'm not. My voice works because my customers pay me for that, is that anti-competitive? That's intentional as well... If VOIP doesn't run on your network because you've oversold your capacity, no amount of QoS is going to put the quality back into your service. People will find better ISPs. If you deliberately set QoS to favor your services over a competitor, whom your customers are also paying for service, you'll be staring down prosecutors, at some point. It's anti-competitive behavior, as you're taking deliberate actions to degrade the service of a competitor, simply because you can. Your obligation to your customers is to provide the service they're paying for. If they buy voice, you give them voice. If they buy packets, you give them packets. The first time a customer pipes up and says his competitive-VOIP service functions worse than his neighbor's, who's buying from you, it's absolutely in your best interests to pay attention to it, because you don't want your first hint about it to be from a state or federal investigator. Nobody says I have to carry Vonage traffic so long as I do not violate any SLA's with the customers I provide service for. Regardless if it's not competitive, if you want to really get technical and bring in regulation and law like the telcos do, Vonage should be paying ISP's to transport and terminate their voice customers traffic. Vonage DOES pay ISPs to transport their traffic. They're paying their direct peers for it, or at the barest minimum, the ISPs they purchase connectivity from, who are in turn paying, or being paid by, THEIR peers, ad infinitum, through transit agreements. Do you see my point yet? Seems that Vonage wants to have their cake and eat it to when it comes to regulation... Regulation doesn't even need to enter into this. The more peers you have, the less freedom you have to dictate what can and can't happen on your network, because you have a contractual obligation to live up to those agreements. In turn, those same obligations are passed on, from peer to peer to peer, until even Kevin Bacon gets the point: you can't just selectively refuse to transit traffic because a specific port number offends you. Note: I am not a lawyer. It's entirely possible I'm wrong. Please correct me, if so. To supply some legal context to this discussion, consider the rise of the CLEC, and the practices engaged by the incumbent telco's to restrict or inhibit market entry. Covad's struggles with Bell South. Caltech and Pacbell. Going back farther, MCI and AT&T's local loop squabbles. There's a lot of text in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that's relevent here, especially with regard to the provision of voice services, and the requirement of competitors to facilitate unhindered delivery of service to the consumer. (Sec 251, Interconnection) This does open up avenues for many other debates, including treatment of any given ISPs facilities as local loop, with respect to VOIP termination, and the obligations of ISPs to provide QoS, technical or otherwise, to VOIP traffic. - billn
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On 2005-03-05-18:43:38, Nathan Allen Stratton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [...] > In fact because of the lame way current providers are doing 911 > (hading calls to PSAP administration lines) BroadVoice does not > offer 911 at all yet. I would rather NOT offer it and tell users to > have a way to call 911 via CELL or PSTN then to have them count on > me getting them to a PSAP with the current options. I'd like extend a public "thank you" for that. It's a real shame more residential providers don't follow suit, given the brokenness (and false sense of security) of their existing implementations. -a
RE: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
> -Original Message- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Robert Blayzor > Sent: March 4, 2005 9:02 PM > To: Bill Nash > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP > > > > Bill Nash wrote: > > At the root of it, it's deliberate anti-competitive behavior, and > > that's what the fine is for. I'm generally fine to have the > government > > stay out of the internet as much as possible, but this move was the > > correct one, as it was on behalf of the end consumer. It's not the > > choice of port blocking that matters, it's the intent. > > > Wait a minute, since when is the Internet service I provide > regulated by ANY entity? It's not, therefore I can run the > network any way I see fit. If customers don't like it, they > can choose another ISP; if they can't choose another ISP, not > my problem, I'm not a regulated entity, you get my service or > none at all. > > While I don't run my network with that attitude, I certainlly > have the right to. You do? Since when do you (or any ISP, which is fundamentally a corporation like any other) have an exemption to antitrust, fair competition, and every other law regulating business practices? Just because you don't have a regulator setting prices and/or quality standards for your product, like you have in all kinds of sectors (ranging from electricity to automobiles to just about everything), does not mean you are free to run your business "any way you see fit". While you're at it, why not say that since you're an unregulated business that can "run your network any way [you] like", you can prioritize traffic from customers of one ethnic group rather than another? In most sane jurisdictions, a court would tell you that everybody using your "Whatever" service and paying you $Y/month for it must get the same quality of service whether they have black or white skin. Would you scream on NANOG about that, too, and claim that your right to run your network any way you see fit is denied? And guess what, to get back to this issue? Ask an antitrust lawyer. If company A has a quasi-monopoly (or is dominant) in product X, and company A and B both provide product Y, which requires product X (at least for company B's product Y to work), and company A deliberately acts to make sure that company B's product Y cannot work with the product X from company A, they're eventually going to get in trouble. That's the situation here. You need IP transit to do VoIP. Some company with a dominant position in IP transit that also provides phone service is preventing somebody else's VoIP service from working with their IP transit to product their own phone service business. That, under most reasonable fair competition statutes, would be prohibited. "Regulated" industry or not. Vivien (as always, speaking for myself, not any organizations that may appear in the headers)
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, David M. Dowdle wrote: > If Pepsi put a chain-link fence up around every Coca-Cola vending machine > in your city, do you think the authorities would do something about it? Give me a break, this is totally different. This ISP is not blocking ports on other ISPs networks, they are choosing what they allow on their network or not. Just like other networks have done with many other things. > Worse, in this case, there's laws that say you MUST be able to get > diet soda (911 calls) at all times. Hhehe, actually in this case there are NOT laws that say you must be able to reach 911 at all times. Sure their are people that are trying to make it that way and as a VoIP provider we are trying to get as close to lifeline as we can, but frankly we don't ship a UPS with every ATA. We don't protect the last line IP network. So I am sorry, no we can't offer 911 calls to our customers at all times. In fact because of the lame way current providers are doing 911 (hading calls to PSAP administration lines) BroadVoice does not offer 911 at all yet. I would rather NOT offer it and tell users to have a way to call 911 via CELL or PSTN then to have them count on me getting them to a PSAP with the current options. ><> Nathan Stratton BroadVoice, Inc. nathan at robotics.net Talk IS Cheap http://www.robotics.net http://www.broadvoice.com
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On 3/5/2005 12:02 AM, John Levine wrote: >>>Vonage has fought tooth and nail to *not* be a regulated entity. >> >>It's too early in the technology life-cycle for them to be treated that >>way. I mean, you can get a phone number anywhere the service provider has >>a pop, and if you want to feed that into existing 911 service systems >>you've got a lot of mapping issues to deal with, probably to the point >>where it's not economically feasible > > Packet8 offers E-911 on their VoIP product right now, for a $1.50/mo > surcharge which is not out of line with the POTS E-911 charge. You > have to tell them where you live, > and your phone number has to be local to your location. ^^ Thanks for proving my point. Regulating as-is behavior is not feasible, ergo regulation means loss of features or overhauled network(s), which is a bit unreasonable given where we are in the lifecycle. -- Eric A. Hallhttp://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
>> Vonage has fought tooth and nail to *not* be a regulated entity. > >It's too early in the technology life-cycle for them to be treated that >way. I mean, you can get a phone number anywhere the service provider has >a pop, and if you want to feed that into existing 911 service systems >you've got a lot of mapping issues to deal with, probably to the point >where it's not economically feasible Packet8 offers E-911 on their VoIP product right now, for a $1.50/mo surcharge which is not out of line with the POTS E-911 charge. You have to tell them where you live, and your phone number has to be local to your location. Looks pretty feasible to me. First the VoIP crowd says that it's an unstoppable juggernaut with such compelling technical and economic advantages that it will inevitably leave all of that old fashioned POTS telephony as road kill. Then in the next breath they're telling us that VoIP is such a frail, delicate hothouse flower that the merest chilly breath of regulation or E911 or USF or any of the other costs that real phones are subject to would make it crumple and die on the vine. I realize that if I were in the VoIP business, I'd be spouting that nonsense, too. What I don't undertand is why everyone else seems to believe it. VoIP is mostly a regulatory arbitrage play, not a technological miracle. Regards, John Levine, [EMAIL PROTECTED], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
Bill Nash wrote: > At the root of it, it's deliberate anti-competitive behavior, and that's > what the fine is for. I'm generally fine to have the government stay out > of the internet as much as possible, but this move was the correct one, > as it was on behalf of the end consumer. It's not the choice of port > blocking that matters, it's the intent. Wait a minute, since when is the Internet service I provide regulated by ANY entity? It's not, therefore I can run the network any way I see fit. If customers don't like it, they can choose another ISP; if they can't choose another ISP, not my problem, I'm not a regulated entity, you get my service or none at all. While I don't run my network with that attitude, I certainlly have the right to. Lets take port blocking out of this. Lets say I'm an ISP that offers digital phone service to my customers. Of course I'm going to provide my customers with the best voice service possible, which means QoS for my voice customers. If Vonages service is basically unsable on my network due to oversubscription/latency/packetloss on some legs/remotes am I obligated now to provide voice quality? No, I'm not. My voice works because my customers pay me for that, is that anti-competitive? That's intentional as well... Nobody says I have to carry Vonage traffic so long as I do not violate any SLA's with the customers I provide service for. Regardless if it's not competitive, if you want to really get technical and bring in regulation and law like the telcos do, Vonage should be paying ISP's to transport and terminate their voice customers traffic. Seems that Vonage wants to have their cake and eat it to when it comes to regulation... -- Robert Blayzor, BOFH INOC, LLC rblayzor\@(inoc.net|gmail.com) PGP: http://www.inoc.net/~dev/ Key fingerprint = 1E02 DABE F989 BC03 3DF5 0E93 8D02 9D0B CB1A A7B0 Sleep: A completely inadequate substitute for caffeine.
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On 3/4/2005 5:45 PM, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: > Vonage has fought tooth and nail to *not* be a regulated entity. It's too early in the technology life-cycle for them to be treated that way. I mean, you can get a phone number anywhere the service provider has a pop, and if you want to feed that into existing 911 service systems you've got a lot of mapping issues to deal with, probably to the point where it's not economically feasible, meaning no deployment. Heck, how long did it take for cellular 911 to work right, and now we're demanding the same level of service from a newbie market like VoIP right away? The time will come soon enough where the market will be stable enough for all of us to mandate certain requirements, and we'll get all the regulation we need then. In the meantime, allowing the technology to develop is the best strategy. -- Eric A. Hallhttp://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On 3/4/2005 4:05 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > There are two sides to the issue: > > 1.) FCC doesn't want companies preventing other companies from competing. > 2.) On the other hand, how do you tell a company what services it can or > can't block? There's another factor here, which is that the gov't wants to encourage technological innovation and advancement for numerous and sundry reasons (many of them even good). Generally speaking, it's right to favor deployment and growth of new technologies and markets over old ones. All other things being equal (which they never are), tilting the hand towards VoIP providers is the right call. -- Eric A. Hallhttp://www.ehsco.com/ Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
So who's going to be the IP cop that decided which actions are anti-competitive and which actions are 'customer care'? How many service providers oversubscribe their internet feed. Just because the advertisement says 384k upstream and 2Mbps downstream doesn't mean this is a guaranteed rate available 24x7 to any destination. In most cases there is some bandwidth management box somewhere that provides a fair share of bandwidth to all of the ISPs customers. I am really curious at which point shaping of traffic is viewed as anti-competitive... Adi
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 01:54:33PM -0800, David Schwartz wrote: > > I'm curious how you'd feel if your local telephone company started > preventing you from calling its competitors. How about if you suddenly Your local telephone company is a regulated entity. It's required to complete your calls regardless of which other carrier they terminate on. Vonage has fought tooth and nail to *not* be a regulated entity. But now it's turning around and complaining that other non-regulated entities are employing the same freedom from regulation that Vonage enjoys in a way that Vonage finds inconvenient. Meanwhile, Vonage has been pretty much entirely out of service for the entirety of this afternoon, for all subscribers. Something very similar happened yesterday. If Vonage were a regulated telephone carrier, it would be subject to millions of dollars of fines -- essentially, the regulatory regime would force it to give back to its customers the money it will doubtless not give back to them of its own good will (it would be suicidally stupid business practice to give it back unless they ask, after all, and most won't ask). But Vonage has used a complaisant FCC as a stick to beat another non-regulated entity with in order to force it to behave the way Vonage wants. This is all very effective but it does stink to high heaven. We can argue about whether it is best to have telecom regulation or not have telecom regulation, but "exactly as much regulation as Vonage happens to want, where and when Vonage happens to want it" is certainly neither equitable nor good. Thor
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Nathan Allen Stratton wrote: The fact is, the company was preventing it's users from using technology offered by said company's competitors. No, they are just preventing companies that are using port X, most providers have figured out how to make VoIP work on any port. It's a portable scenario, and it doesn't matter which port you block. Flip it around: HTTP can transit on any port. Block port 80 and see how long you last. Here's another take on it. Don't think of this in terms of tracing packet routes. Trace the path of SLAs, AUPs, and peering agreements between Vonage and those blocked customers. Madison River buys transit from someone. At some point, their contractual obligations for that peering arrangement are passing on elements of other peering agreements, which in turn pass on still more. This is the essential layer of cooperation and good faith that make the internet work. On the other end, Vonage, or any Voip provider, for that matter, has purchased peering and transit with the reasonable expectation that they can pass end-to-end traffic, unfiltered. It would not be entirely unreasonable to see a peering agreement terminated for this behavior. I am not a lawyer, and I am not privy to the details of the peering agreements for the networks between Vonage and their end customers, but it's their faith in the basic nature of peering agreements that make their entire business model viable. - billn
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Seems to me that said company "BroadVoice?" was attempting to prevent the > use of VoIP in an effort to prevent competition > with it's current phone customers. It's kind of a tough issue to deal > with, if you think about it. Hold, BroadVoice is a VoIP service provider I work for, I was just saying I am speaking as Nathan, not as BroadVoice. > There are two sides to the issue: > > 1.) FCC doesn't want companies preventing other companies from competing. > 2.) On the other hand, how do you tell a company what services it can or > can't block? > > The fact is, the company was preventing it's users from using technology > offered by said company's competitors. No, they are just preventing companies that are using port X, most providers have figured out how to make VoIP work on any port. -Nathan
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Nathan Allen Stratton wrote: I don't speak for BroadVoice, but this seams to be to be stupid. Why should the government get involved in ISPs blocking ports? If customers don't like it, go to a new provider, what country is this?? Frankly, I don't see the point, any provider that requires 5060 or any other port to offer VoIP services deserves to be shutoff by networks blocking those ports. It is just to easy to talk to CPE on any port. At the root of it, it's deliberate anti-competitive behavior, and that's what the fine is for. I'm generally fine to have the government stay out of the internet as much as possible, but this move was the correct one, as it was on behalf of the end consumer. It's not the choice of port blocking that matters, it's the intent. I'm a Vonage customer myself, because I like the flexibility and control it provides me over my phone service. I'm also a Cox broadband customer. With Cox being a telephone provider, the instant they decide to begin filtering VOIP in order to reduce competition for their product, you can bet I'm going to voting with my dollar. Any CPE based customer is paying for a connection to the Internet. Unless they're subscribing to a specifically limited or structured access service (like AOL, for example), they have a reasonable expectation to use the service to do.. customer-like things. Knowingly subscribing to a service that will allow me to connect, outbound only, to tcp ports 80 and 443, with all mail going to a specific MTA, I would not reasonably expect to be utilizing that style of service for VOIP, and that would be fine. This is not, however, the style of service I'm paying for, and far less than my provider has already agreed to provide me with. This extends all the way to transit peering agreements, as well. I don't recall ever seeing one that says "We agree to transit all traffic except VOIP." What would be the point? I wouldn't agree to buy incomplete transit any more than I'd try to sell it. To have a company that also provides telephone service to specifically block a competiting service, which customers are paying them to transit, is a breach of contract at best, and outright criminal at worst. - billn
RE: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
> I don't speak for BroadVoice, but this seams to be to be stupid. Why > should the government get involved in ISPs blocking ports? If customers > don't like it, go to a new provider, what country is this?? I'm curious how you'd feel if your local telephone company started preventing you from calling its competitors. How about if you suddenly discover your car won't drive you to a competitor's dealership due to a lockout included by the manufacturer (that you neither knew about nor agreed to when you bought it). It is only in the Internet business and the software business that a company can sell you a product with no representations that it will actually do anything and with you having essentially no recourse if it doesn't meet your expectations. If I pay for Internet access, I expect to get it. And if you're not actually providing Internet access, don't clima to. The Internet is not ports, it's not machines, it's not protocols. We could change all that and it could still be the Internet. The Internet is a philosophy, and the results of that philosophy. It's about making a good faith best effort to connect to and exchange information with anyone else who makes a similar effort. Let's not lose sight of the big picture. I sympathize with the "if you don't like it go elsewhere" view, but I also believe that people should provide the service they agreed to be provide, and when they fail to do so without justification, they should be penalized for their fraud. DS
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
It's worth pointing out that the companies in the article, are Vonage and Nuvia - not BroadVoice. - d. -- Dominic J. Eidson "Baruk Khazad! Khazad ai-menu!" - Gimli --- http://www.the-infinite.org/
Re: US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP
Seems to me that said company "BroadVoice?" was attempting to prevent the use of VoIP in an effort to prevent competition with it's current phone customers. It's kind of a tough issue to deal with, if you think about it. There are two sides to the issue: 1.) FCC doesn't want companies preventing other companies from competing. 2.) On the other hand, how do you tell a company what services it can or can't block? The fact is, the company was preventing it's users from using technology offered by said company's competitors. There are parts of this country from which you don't have "other isp" options. You mentioned something about ports. I highly doubt that BroadVoice used ports to deny the service. I'm sure the blocks were at least a little bit more complicated than just blocking out ports. It's a very interesting issue. For once, I tend to agree with the FCC on this one. Regards, Tim Rainier Nathan Allen Stratton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 03/04/2005 03:50 PM To [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc Subject US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/70081/us-slaps-fine-on-company-blocking-voip.html I don't speak for BroadVoice, but this seams to be to be stupid. Why should the government get involved in ISPs blocking ports? If customers don't like it, go to a new provider, what country is this?? Frankly, I don't see the point, any provider that requires 5060 or any other port to offer VoIP services deserves to be shutoff by networks blocking those ports. It is just to easy to talk to CPE on any port. ><> Nathan Stratton BroadVoice, Inc. nathan at robotics.net Talk IS Cheap http://www.robotics.net http://www.broadvoice.com
