With broadband Latest News about Broadband service providers in hot pursuit of the "value-add" dollars being vacuumed from their customers by VoIP Latest News about VoIP service providers such as Vonage Latest News about Vonage, it was no surprise to see the battle make its way to the front page of The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
In short, a regional service provider decided — apparently without mentioning it to customers — to block Vonage calls from traversing its network. The FCC came to the rescue and forced the service provider to remove the block. Score one victory for VoIP service providers, but the battle has just begun.
It's what the Israelis would call a "balagan" — a real mess. It might not be Gaza but the prospects for peaceful coexistence are probably about the same — at least in the short term. VoIP service providers naturally want to keep the status quo and are calling for the industry to adopt a stance of "net neutrality," which tells service providers to keep hands off third-party traffic.
A comment in the aforementioned The Wall Street Journal piece does a fairly good job of summing up the issue. In essence, "If they want to use my network, they need to pay for it," according to a CEO from an Internet service provider. Well, aren't "they" — the broadband customers — paying to use the network? I doubt they signed up for a package that restricted the type of packets or traffic that can flow across it.
To the ISP CEO, of course, "they" are the likes of Vonage, which charges and delivers a service to a common customer but without the broadband service provider getting any compensation.
This isn't the first time that at least some service providers have chosen to block certain traffic. A few years ago, our employees in New Jersey could reach our servers via Web access but couldn't get their VPN connections to work.
After contacting the cable provider's technical support Latest News about technical support, we discovered that because they had signed up for the default "home" service, VPNs were blocked. The rationale was that anyone needing such functions should sign up for the more expensive package — which basically offered nothing more. Eventually, the cable provider stopped this nonsense.
Today the technical becomes the political. If VoIP service providers can convince the FCC to mandate net neutrality as a requirement, and some believe that they can, they will neutralize service providers as competition. But the story of net neutrality would just be a fairy tale. Nice story, but not reality.
Service providers could comply with the letter and the spirit of any such regulation while simultaneously undermining the VoIP providers to the benefit of their own services. Their secret weapon? Benign neglect. Ultimately, to thwart the competition, all you have to do is ignore them — or ignore their traffic.
VoIP quality is quite vulnerable to latency jitter and loss. As those metrics degrade, so does the conversation. While the broadband service provider can be certain to tune its own brand of VoIP traffic, it can easily (and rightly) let the Vonage traffic slip into a "best effort" category. And, with the increasingly sophisticated QoS algorithms around, that could mean adding just enough latency to make the conversation borderline bad. Such added latency, by the way, would likely be unnoticed by Web and file transfer users.
So does this mean service providers would be required to file their traffic-shaping parameters with the FCC? Given that minutiae are their specialty, they would probably revel in having their lawyers become certified network engineers. As bizarre as it sounds, though, any less technical, less precise approach to ensuring net neutrality is likely to be just wishful thinking.