US slaps fine on company blocking VoIP

Mon Mar 7 17:54:13 UTC 2005

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 08:45:30AM -0600, Adi Linden said something to the effect of:
> 
> > If VOIP doesn't run on your network because you've oversold your capacity,
> > no amount of QoS is going to put the quality back into your service.
> > People will find better ISPs. If you deliberately set QoS to favor your
> > services over a competitor, whom your customers are also paying for
> > service, you'll be staring down prosecutors, at some point. It's
> > anti-competitive behavior, as you're taking deliberate actions to degrade
> > the service of a competitor, simply because you can.
> 
> Let's say I sell a premium VoIP offering for an additional fee on my
> network. I apply QoS to deliver my VoIP offering to my customers but as a
> result all other VoIP service is literally useless during heavy use
> times you'd consider this anti-competitive behavior?

Possibly, but even if not it's a glancing blow at another violation.  At the 
very least I would consider it failure to deliver service.  

Unless you explicitly and frequently refer to this non-QoS-ified service as 
"best effort" (read: in this case, no effort at all) and in the interest of 
anti-liability full disclosure explain that this traffic is regularly 
superceded by your premium subscribers' traffic (spin doctor as appropriate), 
you wll be fielding the angry phone calls of customers who rightfully feel 
that they were mislead.  While you may not be hit with antitrust suits,
you're pushing the envelope with the generic SLA that acts as junk drawer
for the rest of your traffic, I would think...

Then again, no one pays me to think.

RTI,
--ra

-- 
k. rachael treu, CISSP       rara at navigo.com
..quis custodiet ipsos custodes?..
> 
> Adi