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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: More on Vonage service disruptions...
> Yeah, I forgot about the regulation thing. I suppose I'd give the > ISP a call first, but I'd expect it to be working within a few > hours. But now that cable modem providers themselves are providing > VoIP/dialtone, wouldn't those be regulated by the FCC? The phone service is, the ISP isn't. Cableco phone service is not the same as what Vonage provides. Vonage style VoIP is unflatteringly but accurately called parasitic, it sits on top of someone else's network connection without supporting that connection at all, competing with any other IP traffic on the connection, with traffic going back to a switch wherever the VoIP company is. Cableco services use dedicated bandwidth on the cable separate from your normal Internet connection to connect back to their own switch which is typically on the cableco's own network. It's engineered as phone service and is designed to have performance and reliability much more like regular phone service than often-flaky VoIP. The particular case that Vonage has been complaining about is apparently an ISP owned by a small rural telco. Rural telcos tend to have very low rates (since your local calling area is small) but high costs (since they have few customers spread over a large area), with the difference made up by universal service funds. A large part of the USF money is "access" fees on each minute of incoming or outgoing phone calls, so if you use VoIP rather than POTS, the revenue they lose is a lot more than the $20/mo or whatever the local phone rates are. The quality of management at those telcos varies a lot (mine is pretty good, but others can barely find their own shoelaces) and it's not at all surprising that one of them would panic and block applications that are siphoning off "their" access minutes. The solution is to rationalize USF so it's paid at reasonable rates to whoever is providing service to high-cost customers, but the political obstacles to doing so are high. Western Wireless after a lot of arguing got USF money to provide cell service to underserved or unserved rural areas, but I've never heard of VoIP going that route. Since you first have to admit you're a phone company to apply for the USF gravy train, you can see why parasitic VoIP providers might feel a little conflicted. Regards, John Levine, [email protected], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "A book is a sneeze." - E.B. White, on the writing of Charlotte's Web
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