Other Stuff That Has Little To Do With PLA > Phones in the News

Telecom companies are blocking VoIP calls

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rbcp:
VoIP customers around the world are discovering that their calls cannot be connected because telecom companies are blocking the movement of such traffic across the net. Jane Dudman finds out why.

Theodore Peckler lives in Monrovia, California, and is one of the 1.5 million people in the US who uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems to make cheap phone calls via his cable modem connection. But last year, after five months using the VoIP service from the US provider Vonage without problems, he noticed an abrupt deterioration. "The line was choppy, very choppy and you could not understand any words spoken," he recalls. Puzzled, Peckler ran pingplotter - a program to detect problems such as packet loss and latency (delays in sending over the separate "packets" of internet traffic). It revealed major latency between his cable modem and local internet service provider (ISP).

"I contacted the ISP and was told it did not support third party VoIP," explains Peckler. "Vonage ran a test. It seems the ISP was blocking the cable modem when the Vonage adapter went into use. I ran a test of my own. I ran pingplotter for 10 minutes: no blockage, then I picked up my Vonage phone and placed a call: immediately there was a 100% blockage on the cable modem. This was a continuous loss as long as the phone was used."

Peckler is not alone. Users on VoIP online forums in the US and other countries, including Qatar and Mexico, have been noting similar problems since last year. For while VoIP (often pronounced "voype") might seem like a great deal for the average person, entrenched interests in the telecoms industry see it differently - and are taking action against it.

The rest of the article is here:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1747343,00.html

TerminalEcho:
I read that story too, and it pisses me off.  Phone companies either need to convert their systems to all IP based, or die.  My prediction is they will do the latter.  The telcos will refuse to innovate until they become obsolete (like they aren't already) and the companies will bleed to death.  No one I know has a landline phone anymore.  All I have in my house is OneLink DSL from Speakeasy.  I run asterisk and connect to Broadvoice for PSTN compatability.  I hope these greedy bastards die a terrible death.  Don't count on our representatives in government to back us up either, because they get a hell of a lot of money from these dinosaur telcos.

rbcp:
I've been a Vonage user for a couple of years now and so far I haven't experienced anything like this.  My Vonage calls sound great and I'm using Qwest DSL to run it.  Telcos have been fighting all forms of voip forever.  But really, this is a new low for them.

Shadow:
gunna be sweet when the anti-competitive lawsuits come down on the ISPs heads, especially with QoS starting to get implimented(the "tiered" internet)

CountyKid:
The day that congress gave the internets to the telcos, my dad came home ranting about how evil and wrong AT&T is.

  And he's an employee!

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