Will Providers Provide Equally? 237
theodp writes "Imagine the chaos if your power company could take money from Sony so that its appliances got a higher quality of juice - and thus worked a tad better - than those of Mitsubishi. The power system wasn't built that way, but ISPs have that very capability. It may seem like a dodgy competitive tactic, but Yankee Group analysts envision that broadband network providers could give precedence to their own revenue-generating services, possibly leading to the demise of the biggest VoIP player today, Vonage."
solution to everything.. ok maybe not everything (Score:3, Interesting)
Decentralise everything, encrypt everything. Your ISP will just see random packets going to random IPs with random data inside them - distributed filesharing, voip etc etc and on the plus side the pigs cant track you either.
A perfect Example (Score:3, Interesting)
Apart from poor bandwiths such pseudo "g" cards work only with propietary windows drivers. I tried using some Br chipset cards with linux and they did not work! It was the early days when g just came out.
You would think but... (Score:3, Interesting)
It has always been a fight for the homepage. The local paper used to have an ISP tied to it (infi.net) that ran dialup and hosting services for 100+ newspapers across the country (infi.net was owned by Landmark, Gannet and Knight-Ridder). Supposidly the big push from the papers wasn't that the ISP functions were really profitable, they just wanted their content on the homepage.
It is a bit monopolistic in a way, but I think everyone understands. More viewers, the more you can charge for banner ads.
The downside is none of the community sites are really innovative. In the case of Cox's, it is identical to every market they are in. Cookie cutter crap.
AOL probably has the biggest advantage, as normal netziens cannot access the content on their network. This is a major selling point for some of the AOL subscribers, even.
Re:Double-Edged Sword (Score:2, Interesting)
removing the ISPs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Face it... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd say its more a case of "they care about finding the cheapest way to keep you and prevent you from switching to another provider, with what you actually think of them being secondary"
ie: a company can sometimes get away with having horrible customer support as long as the service is outstanding. Likewise, they may be able to get away with "features" which would generally alienate its customers as long as it has something else up its sleeve that puts it ahead of its competators in terms of the overall value to the customer.
*shrug*
Re:Constant corruption.... (Score:5, Interesting)
On our own we can't do anything about this, but we are numerous, together we do have the power to make companies behave themselfs. It's time we bring together this power and use it to get all the wrong do-ers back in line.
We won't accept no DMCAs anymore, we won't bow down for DRM, MS shall not control us. RIAA will not lead us quitely into the night.
Geeks of the world, now it's time to rise up and tell them "no" in one strong, united voice.
Geek power!
Re:Getting around it... (Score:5, Interesting)
So vonage over ssl would be the same as vonage over nothing (well +performance hit).
I'd have no problem with this so long as they guaranteed internet as it is.
Ie; Comcast gives me about 3mbit down now, if they had their own content on local servers (movies, game downloads, VOIP etc) that I could access at 10mbit or higher, I'd probably pay for it - so long as my 3mbit pipe to the rest of the 'net isn't affected.
Reliability is a big hurdle for VOIP as it is, if comcast had their own route that guaranteed the service, and it was still cheaper than Ma Bell, and didn't interfere with regular internet service, I think that'd be cool.
Oh yes they would, oh yes they want to (Score:3, Interesting)
VoIP, cell phones, conspiracy theories (Score:3, Interesting)
1000ms all by itself would effectively kill most use of VoIP, as the noticable delays for some reason causes really annoying conversations... you don't know whether to start respond to what the other person just said, or whether they're going to follow it up with something else, causing you to accidentally start talking over them. Latency is so important to voice calls that the International Telecommunications Union recommends latency no greater than 150ms [nwfusion.com].
So is this just my conspiracy theory that T-Mobile GPRS provides way worse than 150ms for data, while providing better than 150ms latency for the voice side of things?
Re:Comcast... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I don't think they want to do this... (Score:3, Interesting)
This already happens (Score:4, Interesting)
That said, I find it generally unlikely that ISPs would do any type of overt targeted network shaping. They make their money by moving packets, and for more and more contracts these days, the more packets you move the more money you make.
The benefit of ISPs getting into the VOIP, streaming, and other services where network properties matter is that those are exactly the kind of people who can optimize their networks to give the customer the best experience. ISPs want to displace Vonage because Vonage isn't their customer, but they have to deal with all the network issues generated by customers that use Vonage. It is cheaper to offer an optimized solution designed and tested to work beautifully on your network for free or nearly free than to support the problems caused when people use whatever random VOIP software suits their fancy.
Not all networks are created equal, and this really starts to become apparent when using QoS sensitive services. It is cheaper and generally gives better results for the ISP to integrate those services vertically, which ultimately will be a win for the customer.
Re:Getting around it... (Score:4, Interesting)
While MAC addresses would provide a way for ISPs to uniquely ID servers, it wouldn't prove was using the service. All the manufacturer ID would tell them is for example, that the server was using an Intel network card. Certain MAC addresses could be given lower priority, but if a large infrastructure company were providing the connectivity on a round-robin system, there is no gaurentee that such action wouldn't also downgrade a bunch of unrelated sites/services. Also, the overhead required to do this could quite quickly become cost prohibitive. Think how many more resources it would take to inspect each packet for several different criteria and prioritize it differently based on the results than just letting most things through unchecked, and perhaps lowering the priority of things that are easily flagged.
Some priority checking is already in wide use; I use it on the LAN I run to raise the priority of email and DNS queries over web traffic/FTP-data, and SSH/Telnet/FTP-control over both. This type of prioritizing is actually a Good Thing, because it makes letency-sensitive services run better without noticably hurting other traffic. But that's a far cry from deliberately making your competitors's services run badly.
Of course, the best way to keep companies from doing this is to speak with our money. But the truth of the matter is that the average user won't know enough to realize why their fancy new VoIP isn't working well. They'll just write it off as another failed internet idea that only the nerds will use. Hopefully VoIP will become popular enough before this type of thing is implimented that people will expect good service, but it seems like people are much more willing to accept shoddy service and bad reliability with technology than with just about anything else that is so pervasive in daily life.
Re:More dumb analysis by the Yankee group. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was just talking to a vonage customer about this (Score:5, Interesting)
This has been an ongoing issue since comcast entered the voip market.
Any vonage (or comcast) moles want to comment?
Re:A Simple Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Getting around it... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Getting around it... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that many of you do check it out, even seem interested. Contact me if you're not in the USA, for an immediate invitation, and be prepared to install openvpn [sourceforge.net].
Which is exactly why... (Score:3, Interesting)
Currently phone companies are defined as such, and they have to carry all calls. They cannot exclude fax transmission, modem connections, or any voice connections. They must carry them all.
Current the ISP side of the cable industry is NOT defined in that way. They have every legal right to block content.