Common Carrier Question

Sean Donelan sean at donelan.com
Fri Apr 14 16:23:23 UTC 2006


On Fri, 14 Apr 2006, Derek J. Balling wrote:
> In other words, what juice would the FCC have against MomNPopISP.com
> who decided to block VoIP?

Vonage has claimed in testimony to the US Senate and other places that at
least one cable company and at least wireless ISP company is blocking VOIP
and it was "useless" to complain to the FCC about it.

Remember the "myth" that the Internet isn't regulated.

On the other hand, Jeff Pulver has proposed that "Most actual cases of
port blocking have been human error," Pulver said. Engineers often block
the virtual network "ports" commonly used for VOIP  without knowing what
they're doing -- and there are ways around it, such as assigning calls to
a different port, Pulver said.

Even AT&T has had problems with its CallVantage VOIP service being blocked
on some networks because some ISPs had blocked TFTP which was being used
by some network worms, and is also used by some VOIP phones to download
its configuration files.



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