How ISPs May Quietly Kill VoIP 388
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."
Not fair (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had control of our politicians.... (Score:3, Insightful)
But we do not have control of our politicians, our public servants. Why not?
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.
time for action (Score:1, Insightful)
It's time for militancy. I'm not talking about assassination, although some may suggest that. I'm talking about good old fashioned corporate terrorism.. Lets knock down their cell towers, burn their corporate headquarters, intimidation of executives.. etc
We've gotta grab this situation by the arms and control it. I'm not getting any younger, neither are you. Lets join forces and do something real about this because the lawyers and politicians aren't there to save us, just the opposite.
R.A.S.1974.
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.
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.
Won't this also harm online gaming? (Score:2, Insightful)
New ISPs? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Fortunatly there is a choice. (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately, very rarely do people have 3-4 options for their connection.
Re:New ISPs? (Score:1, Insightful)
As a country (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously: Look at all the crap we do to ourselves, just in the technology arena alone. It's only a matter of time before we are sitting here, argueing with each other, trying to screw everybody else to get the sweet deal for ourselves, when some small previously third world country blows by us and takes the lead.
Quite frankly, I'm disgusted by all the crap I have seen, and it's no wonder why other countries dislike us. I mean, if we are willing to do this to ourselves, what would we do to other countries?
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.
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.
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
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.
But will it be bad in practice? (Score:3, Insightful)
The "best effort" service is far from being a "bad effort". The users want to download files fast, so the ISP has to oblige and provide bandwidth. They want to play video games, so the ISP has to oblige and provide good latency. Guess what, voice over IP requires less bandwidth that downloading a file, and is more tolerant to latency than playing a video game.
In practice, we have been observing over the years a "raising tide of quality". The speed of the average connection over the Internet is more or less proportional to the speed of the user connection, because it is what the users expects. 20 years ago, 9600 bps was considered great. 10 years ago, 64 kbps. Today, users expect to use the 256 kbps of their broadband connection. Tomorrow, users will probably get connected through 100baseT Ethernet, or 50 Mbps WIFI. Yet, voice barely needs more than 20 kbps.
There is no doubt that some ISP somewhere is concocting some evil plot, but the chances are that the evil plot will fall on its face. Probably not much to worry about.
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.
Re:time for action (Score:3, Insightful)
That type of stuff is ignorance at its best. Before you jump to the conclusion of "let's destroy shit", why don't you try something constructive? Find out what's really going on, and if it's really that bad, try to start some sort of protest.
But just knocking shit down simply because it's related to a company that is vaguely associated to actions you disagree with is pure and utter bullshit. That's the exact same type of shit as when people in the middle east protest America by destroying McDonalds restaurants (regardless of whether the owners are native there or not). Or when ecoterrorists do their sabotages harm the environment more than helps.
Think before you do shit. Don't be such an idiot, and you may actually be able to do something constructive.
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.
Re:It's going to be bad, in theory (Score:3, Insightful)
This is damage. It will get routed around.
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:1, Insightful)
Capitalism with sensible government regulation is indeed the best path to rapid innovation.
So, some companies with government-created monopolies abuse that monopoly power to reduce or eliminate competition in a new area and that is somehow an argument that government regulation is good?
Seems to me that just proves the problem is with the government granting monopolies in the first place, not free-market capitalism.
Re:time for action (Score:1, Insightful)
It's time to join forces. Make it happen till Corporate america knows who they're dealing with. Lets not take this lying down FFS! Come on people!
capitalism isn't dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Um- did we put capitalism on hold here? If an ISP starts quashing VoIP traffic (or not handling it properly), consumers will, if it matters to them, move to someone who does things right. If it really matters to consumers, someone will charge a little bit more if they develop a reputation and guarantee(s), otherwise it'll be used as a tool of differentiation.
Want an example of this? Speakeasy. They don't care what you run on your line. They don't care if you share it. As a result, they can charge a little more than others.
If consumers don't care, well...guess what, it doesn't really matter, does it? No sense crying over it; it's still pretty useable technology for businesses and saavy techies at home...and if it gets a serious foothold there, that creates a bigger market for reliable long distance VoIP, and all it will take is one ISP doing VoIP for others to follow or struggle to compete retaining customers not interested in VoIP.
Re:Easy solution for VOIP's (Score:3, Insightful)
You obviously don't understand what's going on...
They aren't determining what type of packet is a Vonage packet based on source or destination ports, or even singling out Vonage or other VOIP providers at all.
What they're probably going to do is setting the packet priority of their in house to it's highest setting. Their internal routers will then see this priority flag and route the packets down a special high-speed shunt where they'll reach the home faster. 3rd part VOIP packets (Vonage, et al) will remain lumped in with all of the other data packets that exist on the interweb.
How does this differ from the current situation? Well, right now all of the packets on the interweb are lumped into the same pile both on your ISPs network and off, so the fact that their giving themselves priority isn't a big deal and won't directly effect the 3rd party VOIPs. But what will effect them is if they start purposly slowing down that lump of "everything else" just enough to cause Quality of Service issues for users of the 3rd party services. Sure, they'll be slowing down all web traffic that enters their building on purpose, but most traffic isn't as time sensitive as VOIP traffic and it won't really matter at all.
Also, since the Cringley article was just supposition anyway, I'll add my own opinion: The major ISPs will probably also ONLY do this to their home subscribers. The way I see it working is give most priority (with a seperate highspeed network) to the house brand VOIP. Then on the everything else network, us QOS to give business grade lines the next level of priority. This leaves the home users with the lowest priority and also allows them to throttle a little more to put pressure on home users's VOIP packets attempting to fight through without affecting the business subscribers where the profit margins are higher.
Re:time for action (Score:0, Insightful)
The same can be said for sabotage in the name of the environment (let's save the terrorism label for the killing of innocent people for a political cause, and not use it as a label for any convenient radical movement that George Bush disagrees with). The point is to cause enough damage that the cost exceeds the profit. You see, it is real free markets at work. People exercising their power to influence the world around them.
No matter what anybody says, property crimes are NOT terrorism. Killing 100,000 innocent civilians in a fraudulent war ostensibly to find WMD that never existed might be considered terrorism
Re:QoS and prioritisation (Score:3, Insightful)
What it cannot take is the latency or jitter.
It's obviously time to shut up and stop posting when I'm making that blatant of an error.
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.
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.
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.
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: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?
It's time for municipal broadband (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet they fight municipal broadband.
Profit maximization can only go so far.
Re:Verizon (Score:2, Insightful)
Telco ISPs cannot partition and prioritize traffic sufficiently to screw up 3rd party VoIP without screwing up everything else in the process.
This is new? (Score:2, Insightful)
It ties in with the growth in non-internet "internet" services - NAT'd subnets using "transparent" proxies, and blocking everything except ports 80/443 & 119 (saves them running a news server for all the warez & pr0n leeches). Not to mention the walled garden that the phone companines are calling "mobile internet".
Mind you, from a purely technical telecoms POV, I always thought VoIP was a badly kludged-together disaster waiting to happen - the hacks involved in adding QoS & priority in order to emulate the workings of a switched network are non-trivial and flaky at best, unless lots of bandwidth is thrown at them.
The only real advantages IP networks have over circuit-switched networks are (a) cheapness - near-commodity hardware helps there - and (b) reconfigurability to suit demand. That second point is the kicker - given the choice of over-dimensioning a network to provide good QoS to everybody all of the time, or minimally-dimensioning a network to provide average QoS to most people most of the time (while saving a lot of money) and reconfiguring to follow demand, which do you think a telco is going to do?
Re:time for action (Score:1, Insightful)
If you point that out on Slashdot, it's modded as flaimbait by all the wacko libertarians and right-wing nutjobs.
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Encryption for VoIP traffic (Score:2, Insightful)
Compress the stream, then encrypt it...
Re:capitalism isn't dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Um. Did we put our brain on hold here?
If the only highspeed provider in your area squashes competing VoIP traffic to force you to use their own VoIP service (which, interestingly, may not have even been available when you originally signed up with the other VoIP service), then exactly who will you move to?
For example, most areas only have one cable internet provider. Unless you are close enough to the CO for very high-speed DSL, cable is going to be your only bet (not to mention, high-speed DSL will still be enormously expensive in comparison).
See, capitalism works best when you have competition. In most regions, there's only one cable provider and one DSL provider (yes, more than one DSL ISP - but they all have to share the same DSL lines, usually provided by your telco).
Re:Not fair (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm with Vonage... it starts breaking up and has issues.... leaves a bad taste in my mouth for voip... why am I suddenly going to go to the cable companie's voip service????
Re:same mistake all over again (Score:2, Insightful)
What TFA is saying is that the network operators will prioritize their own voice so that it always gets delivered. Each line requires only 80kbps for G.711 (I know, G.729 uses less bandwidth, still the same issue holds). Guaranteeing 80kbps to every household is doable as opposed to 4mbps ( if you think the cable company is committed to delivering you 4mpbs, you are smoking crack). So their voice traffic gets a guarantee and the alternative products are left susceptible to node/dslam usage fluctuations.
As the market continues to move from early adopters to early majority, the quality expectation is going to continue to rise (no more outages and toll-quality voice). Will an end user pay $5-10 more per month for their ISPs own service if the quality is better?
What do the Vonages of the world do? Ask for the FCC to force QOS regulation? Please, they asked for an unregulated industry and even if they were able to get some sort of regulation, the cable/ILEC guys will butcher them with regulation gamesmanship (just ask the CLECs today). Nope, I would guess that they will seek to work with the biggest providers to pay for QOS guarantees or try to figure out their exit plan.
And to the point that service/application based filtering is techinically hard - nope. There are plenty of boxes that do this. I've used them to prioritize voice (tracks the sip signalling and matches up the RTP associated with the call) . Application based filtering is a given. Check out netintact.com for of just one solution already deployed.
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.
Re:This indeed disproves the myth of capitalism (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody ever mentions the specific regulations.
What regulations are we talking about here, standards that limit the amount of lead in gasoline or the amount of H2S that you can release into the air?
Train schedules? Limits on monopoly? Enforcement of Patents? Traffic laws? What?
Re:same mistake all over again [corrected] (Score:2, Insightful)
What it is in real life is something whose average performance exceeds the needs of VoIP manyfold and across which more and more content runs encrypted and opaque.
And what I am saying is that any broadband ISP that doesn't achieve >80kbps and
Surely your kidding - VPNs don't have more strict real-time requirements than voice. It doesn't matter. The issue of degredation is two fold. Premise bandwidth delivered and backbone bandwidth available. You are confusing the ability of an ISP to reliably deliver 80kbps to the premise and the ability of the ISP to deliver 80kbps of real-time voice traffic when the user is performing other tasks. If I'm a gamer, I'm not pulling an ISO at the same time that I'm playing - why? - because it affects my latency/lag. If I'm a voice user expecting to make a call, I'm not worried about my ISP download - why? - because "I can be on the Internet and the phone at the same time".
Lets say the user is downloading at 3mbps (his promised speed). He starts a voip call. His ATA/Router (w/ traffic shaper set to a download of 2800kbps to protect his call) properly protects his download from causing voice issues. But, the node he sits on gets slammed with traffic usage. Suddenly, the ISP is delivering 2500mbps to the user. Now his download can affect his voice call. So the ISP is delivering 20X the requirements for a basic call and yet the end user can experience a call degredation.
Yes, your ATA/Router could begin to detect the jitter/latency changes in real-time and try to compensate. However this will be after the initial issue occurs and the complexity will raise the price of the CPE.
Nope, I see the Internet as an interconnected group of reliable, flexible networks. But the last mile provider has an advantage as shown above. It doesn't matter how opaque the traffic is if the network is oversubscribed - the last mile provider can compensate for the oversubscription while the other providers can't.