Vonage Hits ISP Resistance

Bill Nash billn at billn.net
Thu Mar 31 04:23:56 UTC 2005


On Thu, 31 Mar 2005, Jamie Norwood wrote:

> On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:36:19 -0600, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>>
>> Once upon a time, Eric A. Hall <ehall at ehsco.com> said:
>>> Do you also block NNTP so that customers have to use your servers?
>>
>> Change that to SMTP and you'll get a bunch of "yes" answers.  Why is one
>> right and the other wrong?
>
> Heard of a little thing called 'spam'?

SMTP and NNTP are an apples / oranges comparison. Email is well nigh 
ubiquitous, when people think about the Internet. NNTP, like IRC, is a 
niche subset compared to HTTP, SMTP, and IM.

The long and short, is that popular services will remain largely 
unregulated, by ISPs or by government, until it's clear that they're being 
abused. Many ISPs did this with NNTP before they did it with SMTP, largely 
with the advent of higher speed connections facilitating shorter 
turnaround on warez traffic. Once spam took off, same deal.

If ISPs can't play nice with third party service providers, I predict 
things will get ugly. Regulators are already sniffing around, both locally 
and internationally. VOIP is quickly becoming a hot item, and 
anti-competitive tactics that limit or remove the consumers choices are 
going to be blood in the water for politicos looking for something to gnaw 
on.

Obviously VOIP needs QoS to function well on oversold, commodity broadband 
networks. Why not just paint VOIP with a broad QoS brush (as in, 
prioritize all of it, not just your own service) and defang the folks just 
looking for an excuse to step in and take the option away from you?

- billn



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