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How ISPs May Quietly Kill VoIP
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Mar 18, 2005 10:59 PM
from the poor-kids-never-had-a-chance dept.
from the poor-kids-never-had-a-chance dept.
ravenII writes "PBS's i'Cringley's informative piece gives an eye-opening look at the anticompetitive behavior of some ISPs who are showing up late to the VoIP game. This is not something that could be easily mandated, and the beauty of this approach is that they're not explicitly doing anything to the 3rd party service applications. They're just identifying and tagging their own services, which is within their rights."
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Not fair (Score:5, Insightful)
This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Capitalism with sensible government regulation is indeed the best path to rapid innovation.
Uh oh... did I just say that?!!
Parent
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously anarchy is the most powerful medium for innovation
SB
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:5, Funny)
And it cauterizes as it cuts off your arm...
Parent
WRONG (Score:5, Insightful)
The way out of this, is to either forbid monopolies(as in, allow competition in), or minimize the monopoly. Personally, I think that by minimizing the monopoly (fiber/cable to the home from the CO; NOTHING ELSE), society will be furthered as the interesting piece is in the service.
Parent
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, IMO capitalism is good but has one quirk which nobody solved yet:
Capitalism stops working well when "the thing" stops growing because there is no space to grow left anymore.
There are stages (but beware, I'm not economist, that's just my observation or my opinion, whatever):
While "the market" is in development and there is a lot of "land not taken", there are lots of businesses wich are growing and "taking the land". And there is competion and all the "fruits of competiton" which are good for customers.
Once "all the land" is occupied, bigger businesses start to either eat or kill smaler ones. At this stage there is still competition but it's dissapiering as the number of businesses is dropping.
Finaly "all the land" is occupied by one or very few businesses and that's when "the shit hits the fans". And that's what have to be solved somehow.
One obvious and "easy looking" solution is to make "the land" bigger. But that (at the end) effectively means to make more people for which we need to expand into space. With that approach we can solve, mitigate or avoid "stage 3" till we reach another limit (like we fill all the glalaxy).
Another ideas?
Parent
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
That's where the problem lies, and why your parent poster stated that capitalism needs some level of governmental regulation to be successful. Or would it be better if Standard Oil and AT&T hadn't been split up?
Parent
*Cringely's* not being fair - or accurate (Score:5, Informative)
But fundamentally, the things Cringely's complaining about aren't accurate, because he doesn't understand the technology or the resulting economics. Yes, telcos are dealing with the threat of VOIP, and it's making their heads explode, and VOIP is much *much* harder to integrate with an old-fashioned telephone infrastructure than to run as a pure-VOIP business. (The technology's difficult, making it scale is difficult, different parts are centralized or decentralized, all the assumptions about who hands money to whom are different, the regulatory infrastructure doesn't match well at all, etc.) And the telcos are making sure that their data networks will support any VOIP services they develop with as close as they can get to traditional telco voice quality, and they're not sure how to deal with the fact that cellphones have convinced the public to accept lower-quality calls and newer codecs with much higher frequencies can support speakerphones much better.
Some big ISPs happen to be owned by telcos, or by telco-wannabees like the cable TV companies. Most of them are working on adding CoS capabilities to their backbones, but that's the least critical part of the network because most of them own their own fiber plants, and it's cheaper for them to burn more wavelengths on their fibers than to add fancy engineering capabilities to their routers or to hire fancy engineers to run them. It's the friendly mom&pop ISPs (that Cringely's not worried about) who are most likely to have backbone congestion issues that need CoS support to prioritize VOIP over best-effort data applications, because they're running at a different scale and don't generally own their own fiber networks.
The places that CoS matters most are the skinny parts of the network - the ingress from the customer's premises to the ISP's POP, and the egress from the ISP's POP to the customer's premises. The ingress direction is really a customer hardware and management problem, making sure that VOIP packets get on the wire before data packets, but service providers (including Vonage) typically handle that by forcing the customer's data through the same box that converts traditional-phone signals to VOIP, and software-based providers like Skype handle that inside the user's PC. This doesn't require the ISP to do anything, though it's sometimes cheaper to build those capabilities into the DSL/cable modem.
The egress direction can benefit from CoS marking, or from other fair-queuing systems that share bandwidth between remote sites or protocol types, or even from dumber systems that prioritize UDP over TCP. In a symmetric environment, like most business T1 connections, this is the most critical part of the system, because data applications can drown out voice unless there's some QoS approach. But most consumer connections are asymmetric, with much faster downstream connections than upstream, so there's less of a problem. Also, in most home applications, if downstream bandwidth is the bottleneck, it's usually because of some application like downloading music that can be turned off or slowed down during phone calls, which isn't a practical approach in most multi-person offices.
Cringely's arguments are especially bogus because the impact of backbone QoS / CoS features on network performance is much smaller than the impact of slow upstream connections in ADSL and Cable Modems. A 12
Parent
capitalism isn't dead, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's part of the point here - if ISPs do it quietly enough, most consumers might not realize it. And for many that do, there's always that service contract - $99 if you stop the service before a year is up, for Verizon, IIRC. $99, I doubt that many will incur this cost in order to switch to a different ISP just for VOIP reasons only.
Parent
It's going to be bad, in theory (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, that's what we have now.
Face it, the reason people use VoIP is because it is cheap/free, not because it has superior QoS than POTS. Throw in compression and encryption and you're talking about some pretty serious degradation of service.
So, in summary, nothing to see here.
Re:It's going to be bad, in theory (Score:5, Interesting)
This, of course, raises huge issues for the general consumer, since those willing to pay what's probably a premium to NOT have their DSCP values stripped off at the edge of the network get further stomped, even without any form of 'anti-competitive' prioritisation -- the end users get squished first as they don't have a 'business class' service and the only real way for a backbone provider to make money is to over-subscribe their backbone and rely on the bursty nature of IP traffic to handle it. (At least, that was the plan when I was working with VERIO engineering a few years back; now I'm just a conslutant on the Cisco side... )
Parent
Re:It's going to be bad, in theory (Score:5, Funny)
is that the female form of consultant?
Parent
Re:It's going to be bad, in theory (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It's going to be bad, in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
As for packet loss, for telephone conversations, most of the time, people will barely even notice a single packet being lost if you're doing things right. I mean, do you change phone companies every time your cell phone drops a packet? I didn't think so. It's par for the course, and you're used to it and probably don't even remember the last time it happened to you (which was probably some time today).
This seems like much ado about nothing. Even on hops clear across the country without any QoS, iChat AV can shove freaking video streams. Compared to that, audio is a tiny drop of bandwidth. I just don't see how we'll get anywhere close to the limits of the backbones unless they put the priority for VoIP traffic lower than standard data traffic.... The mere notion just doesn't make any sense.
QoS, like MS isn't the answer. It's the question. No is the answer.
Parent
Re:It's going to be bad, in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
There is something to see here and you are averting your eyes. The throttling scam works like this:
Assume the total amount of VOIP traffic that wants to move across a telco's network is some number. Let's call that number 11 (think Spinal Tap). Now, of that 11, 3 is VOIP traffic from the telco's own service. The remaining 8 is Vonage, Skype and all the rest. Rather than fuck with the rest directly (illegal), the telco throttles total available VOIP bandwidth to 10 but assigns preferential QOS headers to the 3 that it profits from. Vonage and company now have to share the remaining 7 even though they need 8. Their quality suffers and they shed customers to the telco's VOIP service. As long as the telco tweaks the throttle correctly, they can bleed Vonage without breaking the law as currently written.
Parent
I use VoIP for business. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I use VoIP for business. (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is, you have to control money. They won't screw with "world's largest retailer", or if they are dumb enough to do it, they'll learn the lesson and from then on make sure their computers are nice to "world's largest retailer's" traffic. The problem is that when it's just grandma, they'll say "Hmm. That's too bad." or "We'll look into it" and nothing will ever happen.
PS: As a side note, I've heard of the new boom business for VoIP: telemarketers. No long distance to anywhere, and you could call from your call center in India to Seattle for the same price you'd pay if your call center was in Wala Wala. At least the national Do Not Call list works (for the most part).
Parent
Encryption is the simple answer... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Encryption is the simple answer... (Score:4, Informative)
And without some form of prioritisation across a public network, VoIP becomes a flaky proposition at best. You have a 250ms round trip latency budget, and encryption adds to the serialisation delay on both ends and impacts this. Plus any out of order packet delivery or jitter will further impact voice quality, along with compression.
And people expect their phone to work. All the time. Early adopters will tolerate the impact, but the money is in the commoditisation of the service and deploying it to everyone -- and everyone will not be willing to deal with a flakey phone.
Parent
That makes it worse... (Score:5, Informative)
"...the beauty of this approach is that they're not explicitly doing anything to the 3rd party service applications. They're just identifying and tagging their own services, which is within their rights."
The service providers are prioritizing THEIR VoIP traffic; so unless you can encrypt and then mask your VoIP service provider's packets to look like the ISP's, all encryption will do is increase the latency for voice - remember encryption/decryption requires time. The ISP doesn't explicitily delay Vonage's packets, for example, it simply upgrades the QoS priority of their own packets; this conveniently screws over 3rd-party providers like Vonage while not getting the ISP's in legal hot water.
Encryption can protect your 3rd party call from evesdropping, but can only increase latency under this new sneaky scheme.
Parent
If we had control of our politicians.... (Score:3, Insightful)
But we do not have control of our politicians, our public servants. Why not?
Packet shaping (Score:3, Informative)
But seriously, this has been a known threat for a while, at least it is a threat to every other P2P service on the Web. Universities routinely packet shape their networks, filtering out P2P filesharing programs, or giving them such a low priority it's as if you're using dial-up when using Kazaa lite.
www.theswitchboard.ca looks like the gold nugget in that article.
Fortunatly there is a choice. (Score:5, Insightful)
I get my Internet from wifi. There is also cable and DSL at my house. The electric company is talking about the IP over powerline stuff. I can go to someone else if they mess with my connection. Even if it isn't intentional, if the service isn't up to the level I want, I will go to someone else.
Remember people, vote with your feet.
Congress won't interfere unless it means taxation. (Score:5, Insightful)
You can bet they'll weigh in on this issue shortly, if the proceedings and back room deals haven't begun already.
Companies like Vonage will be fine, but it won't be long before things like "Federal Subscriber Line Charge" and garbage like that begin sweeping in to cut profits and make it much harder for Vonage to conduct business.
Be prepared to be taxed if the business is within the US, or is conducted in any way within US territory. It's coming regardless of your desire to see it or not. It's too big a honey pot to ignore.
Darwin Says... (Score:3, Insightful)
VoIP is going to take over eventually. These attempts at preventing it will only slow it down a little bit. In the face of progress, businesses have to figure out when to begin adopting the new standards or they don't stand a chance.
Encryption for VoIP traffic (Score:4, Insightful)
This looks like a MAJOR oversight here...a key-based/challenge scheme on negotiation and then compress the encrypted stream. Oh wait. I just described GSM (cell phone).
Grant it, the ISP can tag packets destined for the VoIP servers...that'll take something else. Perhaps off topic, but this encryption oversight makes me wonder.
Re:Encryption for VoIP traffic (Score:3, Interesting)
This article is of course mostly just stupid. Creating a vlan or QoS policy for VoIP will not cause the rest of the traffic to be crappy, not unless at least 50% of their actual traffic is voice traffic and that would require a whole lot of phone calls. VoIP is not r
Robert X. Cringely is a sick, sick man (Score:5, Funny)
Here Come the Commies... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think governments should control them and regulate phone costs to something reasonable. As it is all the phone companies as they are split up are just baby Bells, with their own small monopolies for local phone work, just as the old Bell had it's own big monopoly.
Mind, I also think that water, power, heating and basic television and radio services should also be under the domain of a government controled company. So my opinion is a little more left on this matter than most people's.
Re:Here Come the Commies... (Score:3, Informative)
Hmmm, this reference to commies made me think of something that made me chuckle... In the past in America the Reds were the evil outsiders, now they are the good ol' boys back home.
Bah, strange things enter a man's mind at 11:30.
I don't quite buy his argument (Score:5, Interesting)
However, without realizing it, he also explains why it won't happen. He argues that currently, all traffic is routed using "best effort". His argument then sxtends that these large organizations will effectively restrict other VoIP traffic as they give priority to ther own. I don't see how this necesarilly holds, though.
Imagine a high bandwitch connection. A certain percentage of that bandwidth is the used to service the "preferred" VoIP traffic. This leaves the remainder of the bandwidth to be divided amoung the other traffic. For this to actually affect the competitor's VoIP traffic, the amount of preferred traffic must be large enough to use enough of the available bandwidth that the remainder is unable to service the remaining traffic effectively.
Thus, this practice would not have a significant effect until a large amount of the VoIP traffic is "preferred" traffic - which supposedly would be the goal of starting to do so in the first place.
The only effect that creating "preferred" traffic will have is to provide better service for that traffic. I think that the actual effect on other traffic (even competitor's VoIP), will remain small.
Also (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying I particularly agree with the practise, but I hardly see it as being able to kill VoIP. If I have a fast broadband connection, I'll have more than enough bandwidth for VoIP. If that gets cut back, well then no reason to pay for it right? I'll jump ship for someone else.
Parent
Re:I don't quite buy his argument (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the ISP can send their VoIP traffic through dedicated virtual circuits (of whatever variety) and offload at preferential peering points (or to another subscriber on the same network) they can deliver a much better experience for their own VoIP apps. No more robot voice, random spots of dead air, or occasional electronic bursts, they can probably even do better e911 implementations - all those things will be very important for mainstream acceptance by people who expect VoIP to work exactly like their old land line.
That is all well within the bounds of legality. Add in the fact that the ISPs will play around the edges of legality in finding ways to actually degrade competing VoIP traffic and cover their asses at the same time and there is an actual problem.
Parent
Regulation could stop the ISPs from doing this (Score:3, Insightful)
And it wouldn't even be hard. All that'd be needed is an even-handed rule: an ISP can tag any kind of traffic they want any way they want, but they have to tag all of any particular kind of traffic the same way. If they want to give VoIP traffic priority over other traffic, they have to give all VoIP traffic on their network the same priority. Giving some (theirs) priority and others (the competition's) not would be a regulatory violation.
Gets Worse (Score:5, Interesting)
"And there are other dirty tricks available to broadband ISPs. Telecom New Zealand, for example, is reportedly planning to alter TCP packet interleaving to discourage VoIP. By bunching all voice packets in the first half of each second, half a second of dead air would be added to every conversation, changing latency in a way that would drive grandmothers everywhere back to their old phone companies."
Re:Gets Worse (Score:5, Insightful)
TCP is a poor choice for VoIP, because of the reliability factor (believe it or not). With something as free-flowing as a phone conversation, you would rather lose a packet here or there than wait for retransmission delays caused by TCP.
-- Joe
Parent
It boils down to ye olde story (Score:3, Insightful)
Two reasons: open VOIP will survive (Score:3, Insightful)
Technology and Free Market Competion
1) Free Market forces:
As you all know the ISP business is a very competitive business. If I am a paying customer and I am paying for high speed internet access, I will get this from my provider. This suggests that my packets will get these preferential tags for my internet (http, port 80 access).
2) Technology
Now if I use a VOIP software program that happens to:
(a) encrypt traffic (err like Skype for example)
(b) happens to run its traffic over an http proxy like mechanism through port 80 (which automatically separates the VOIP traffic from browser traffic), how can the ISP distinguish my VOIP packets from my internet packets?
The answer is as far as I know they cant (I'm not a VOIP expert, so please correct me if I'm wrong). I'm guesing they cannot distinguish a long high bandwidth legitimate transaction (which I am paying for) from a VOIP conversation.
It sounds like to me that innovation has changed the business model in the telecomunications industry, and players that missed the boat are now trying to compete by blocking these innovations...
However since they're not innovators they don't understand that theses bumps in the road will be simply be innovated around.
We heard this same argument in a different flavor about people being able stopping P2P filesharing before.
But hey what do I know.
i can see the headlins now.... (Score:5, Funny)
operator:"hello, 911 emergency."
random person being killed my a madman: "HE......
operator: "miss can you please repeat that."
R.P.B.K.B.M.M.: I SA.......
hours later police arive on the scene to find a psycho wearing our poor victams skin as a trendy new blazer. The coroner arrives shorlty there after and rules that the cause of death was none other then...LAG!!!
wow i guess gamers had it right all along. lag really does kill
same mistake all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
The only way to kill VoIP is through explicit, service-specific filtering, and that's technically hard to do in general, and quite anticompetitive.
An interesting throught (Score:5, Insightful)
What if, god forbid, because of providers tinkering with QoS, someone needs to make an emergency 911 call and can't or results in a call thats utterly unable to be understood?
Wouldn't that make the ISP in question doing the tinkering liable for interfering with a life or death situation?
Re:Verizon (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
As someone who's worked on archetecting this ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Giving quality of service guarantees means you treat some packets better than others. There IS no alternaitve.
You do this because some packets are more VALUABLE than others. Voice packets, for example, are FAR more valuable the file transfer packets - but only if they receive preferential handling. Delays and drops just slightly slow down a file transfer, but play HELL with a phone call.
Voice packets are also a drop in the ocean. A two-way phone call, with no compression whatsoever, is less than a megabyte of payload per HOUR. So giving its packets preference over, say, file transfers, won't even be noticed. Even giving it priority over best-effort VOICE traffic won't be noticed - except maybe in the very narrow pipe from the edge to the customer - because it won't interfere when there are no fat transfers going on, and when there ARE fat transfers the best-effort voice connection will still be broken.
If some packets are to be treated better than others because they're more valuable, it's fair to charge more for them. (Why should people pay as much for a packet that gets second-class treatment?) This also lets them subsidize the plumbing for the second-class packets.
ISPs only get a little for supplying fat dumb connectivity. They're looking for ways to sell "value-added services" to enhance their revenue. Providing a phone-network quality connection at far less than phone-company costs and prices is a good deal both for them and their customers - they can split the savings with their customers and both come out ahead.
If they're providing an extra-cost VoIP service, they are involved, not just in the payload traffic, but in the connection signaling. This makes it easy to identify the payload flows that need special handling. To do the same for other people's traffic they'd have to spy on the traffic to identify it - and then give it preference equivalent to their own extra-cost packets, for free? Why should they do extra work for free to help their competition? (Especially when it involves spying on the traffic and its routing, which some people might not want?)
What CAN be done, at a profit all around, is one of the following:
- The VoIP providers and ISPs can engage in agreements to handle each other's voice traffic at higher quality of service, and split the extra fee.
- Protocols can be arranged for a client application - VoIP or otherwise - to negotiate higher quality of service (at a higher fee) for its flows, and the ISPs can again engage in suitable contracts to handle the traffic prefferentially and split the extra fee. (This generalizes the service, uncoupling it from strictly VoIP applications.)
You wouldn't have to have a single tier of extra-price service, either. There are different levels, at different price points, that would be useful. (Even within VoIP: POTS emulation at a level that can handle appliances like FAX machines and 56k modems {without reencoding bridges} requires very tight guarantees - essentially every packet must go through with a tight limit on delay variability. Something suitable for compressed voice can accept more drops and jitter.)
And anybody - peer-to-peer or budget service - who doesn't want to pay extra to get their packets special treatment can still take best-effort delivery, and get service about like they get now. VoIP traffic is a very small drop in a very large bucket. Except at the very edge (like a narrow-band drop from the edge router to the customer site), giving company VoIP packets preference over non-company VoIP packets won't appreciably affect the latter: They'll still get through if there's no fat application competing with them, and still get creamed when you're downloading a file or browsing the web.
Parent
Begs for clear labeling (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't an issue that requires direct oversight.
It requires clear labeling of products so people know what they are buying.
One set of ISPs offers "Internet Service", by which they mean access to the web, and then a collection of other services that they will offer.
And there is nothing wrong with them offering that service. It is what many, perhaps most, customers want.
The problem is that it is not the "Internet Service" that others want, including most slashdot readers presumably. Which is basically unrestricted access to the Internet with at most a total bandwidth constraint (and protect-the-net restrictions like no forged packets).
If an ISP is clearly labeled as providing "Internet Access" then they could not violate their service guarantees to you to favor their own traffic. If you want to use Vonage, host a server, select your own email provider, or any of a number of things that "power users" find desirable you would look for an "Access Provider".
If you only have a vague idea of what the difference between VoIP and email is, then you probably want a "Service Provider" who will provide you with services and take responsibility for integrating them.
The key problem right now is the ISPs are bluffing at providing open access to the Internet. There is probably a strong case that stealing from the common pool of "best effort" capacity without explicit disclosure.
But the solution is not to restrict what business Service Providers go into, it's to make sure they clearly label what business they are in.
Parent
Nobody wants to supply residential access (Score:4, Insightful)
- clueless types who should have bought service
- a few odd nerds
- spammers
Even the nerds won't buy it, because normal service is way less expensive.Regulation is required because competition has been blocked, both legally by the government and economically by the prohibitive capital costs. You can't just get a business loan and start stringing fiber all over town. Probably you'd go to jail. If this were possible, the sky would be blacked out by overhead cable.
Parent
Re:Tag your own packets? (Score:5, Informative)
However, should you get a combination cable modem/MTA (the VoIP box) from you cable operator (i.e. Comcast), it works like this:
* The DOCSIS 1.1 specification calls for a nifty little feature called "service flows". Service flows have their own QoS, and can be triggered by a variety of criteria, including TCP/UDP port numbers, Ethernet frame type, etc.
* From there, the cable operators will provision two (or more) service flows for the cable modem. One would be for the voice, which would receive the highest priority possible (but with a lower bandwidth), and the other one(s) would be best-effort, with a higher bandwidth allowed.
Cable operators can also use this to throttle any arbitrary connection (i.e. P2P), and in fact, have done so in the past, I would imagine.
A "side effect" of this would be that Vonage boxes would considered as best-effort, simply because they don't get classified into the voice flow by the software of the modem. This is because they won't meet the characteristics of the voice flow.
-- Joe
Parent
Re:And kill the net as a whole? (Score:4, Interesting)
All packets that the ISP favors (their own VoIP packets) go first in line. All other packets have to fight for a spot in line. (Non-VoIP packets are treated the same as every other packet*).
Now, assuming that there's enough spots in the line for all of the packets, nothing is dropped. The ISPs VoIP packets go out first, giving them a slight advantage, but everything goes out. If there aren't enough spots, then some of the packets get dropped.
*In practice, this isn't quite true. There are also packet priorities built into the IP specification, and it is likely that VoIP packets are using these as well. Therefore, the line would really look like this:
1. ISP approved packets
2. Non-ISP approved packets with high priorities
3. Every other packet.
Once these packets leave the ISPs network, it's "catch as catch can" again, however, it is likely that the ISP voIP packets have IP priorities as high as, if not higher than the non-ISP VoIP packets, causing them to still have a slight edge.
-- Joe
Parent