FCC Fines Company for Blocking Access to VoIP 294
peg0cjs writes "According to PCPro, the FCC has handed out a $15,000 fine to Madison River Communications Corp for blocking access to VoIP calls. The action is seen as a warning to other telcos not to prevent the growth of VoIP over their networks. The complaint was made to the FCC by two companies Vonage Holdings and Nuvio, which specialise in VoIP services. It appears that Vonage CEO Jeffrey Citron was willing to act on his earlier tirade about VoIP blocking." From the article: "The action is seen as a warning to other telcos not to prevent the growth of VoIP over their networks. Many of these companies see VoIP as a threat to their landline revenues as calls made over the internet can be made to anywhere in the world for the price of a local call."
Re:15 grand to a telco company... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Only fools block VoIP (Score:4, Informative)
Re:VOIP traffic characteristics (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mail and Web Servers (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can I complain to the FCC? Verizon blocks SMTP (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fine Money? (Score:4, Informative)
The whole idea of regulations, while necessary because corporations always try to defeat them, are kind of circular. We are paying to protect ourselves...from ourselves!
Re:VOIP traffic characteristics (Score:3, Informative)
You are, well, "so very wrong" about what goes on with popular consumer VoIP products like Vonage.
Vonage uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for call signalling and service feature delivery. Media Terminal Adaptors (MTAs), often also referred to as Analog Telephone Adaptors (ATAs), adapt analog voice media into Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) media streams which get encapsulated in User Datagram Protocol segments and then finally encapsulated in IP packets.
Which of those protocols provides "QoS" service? None, in Vonage's world anyway. Even if the MTA set a higher DiffServ Code Point or higher IP Precedence in the IP header, the consumer-grade broadband router will ignore it, and most intermediate ISP routers will ignore it too.
The ISPs that pay attention to QoS are likely to rewrite any DSCP or IP Prec setting inbound at their edge, unless contractual agreements state otherwise. You don't let untrusted entities flood your priority queues; it's bad for business.