Is it Possible to Selectively Bar VoIP?
Having made calls using VoIP without issue for a long time I was perplexed as to why all of a sudden I had been having lots of issues. The quality of sound has massively deteriorated and latency issues have increased significantly. Users on VoIP online forums in the US and other countries, including France and Mexico, have been noting similar issues since last year. For a while VoIP might seem like a great deal for the average person, entrenched interests in the telecommunication industry see it differently - and are taking action against it.
Consultation
Well aware of what has happened elsewhere the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom took the decisive action in February of announcing that it will look at the burgeoning Voice over IP market and report next month on whether new laws are necessary to protect it. The consultation document says: “VoIP service providers have expressed concern that their ability to provide a reliable service may be impacted by internet access providers (ISPs) selectively degrading or blocking their VoIP traffic.”
Ofcom says it has no proof this is happening in the UK; only about 000 customers use it. But the prediction is for that to go up by 2.5m in the next six months.
And VoIP barring occurs in other countries, more often than not those where there is still only a single telecoms company. In Saudi Arabia, for example national carrier Saudi Telecom is using software from US supplier Narus to bar all VoIP phone calls.
Telecommunication companies in the United States as well as other countries are reluctant to have their bandwidth encroached on by traffic from which they get no money and have been challenged over similar alleged incidents of internet telephony blocking. Stopping internet telephony traffic is technically difficult but not illegal and blocking specific types of internet traffic is going up.
The European based VoIP giant Skype now owned by eBay has been particularly controversial. Skype is used by over 75m people. But not everyone wants Skype on their network.
Skype is seen by a lot of people to pose a potential security risk as it creates an encrypted channel out of the network and forms supernodes that sit on a network and connect VoIP calls. There is considerable debate about how much bandwidth such supernodes eat up. There have been warnings that in supernode mode, Skype may even saturate a 100 Mbps line.
