potpourri (Re: Clearwire May Block VoIP Competitors )

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1

thegameiam@yahoo.com (David Barak) writes:

> anecdote: one of my good friends uses Vonage, and
my wife complained to
> me yesterday that she has a very hard time
understanding their phone
> conversations anymore. She correctly identified
the change in quality as
> originating from the VoPI.

as long as she's getting what she's paying for, or
getting the cost savings
that go along with the drop in quality, and is happy
with the savings, then
this isn't a bug.

Well, here's the catch - it wasn't the VoIP subscriber
who was complaining, it was the PSTN subscriber. The
experience left her with the opinion that VoIP = bad
quality voice. I suspect you'll see a lot of this...

unfortunately a lot of companies who use voip or
other forms of "statistical
overcommit" want to pocket the savings and don't
want to disclose the service
limitations. that gives the whole field an
undeserved bad smell.

agreed.

> Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but your
implication seems to be "damn
> the 911, full steam ahead." That's great for
optional voice (calls to
> Panama) but not so good for non-optional voice (to
the fire dept).

i'm not especially tolerant of governments telling
me how safe i have to be.
if i want a 911-free phone in my house then the most
the gov't should be
allowed to require is that i put a warning label on
my front door and on
anthing inside my house that looks like a phone.

occam's razor? We have government regulations
regarding things which look like (and function
similarly to) light switches, no? We have government
regulations regarding the nature of water and sewer
pipes, why not regulations regarding the nature of
data pipes?

most american PBX's don't have 911 as a dialplan.
you have to dial 9-911.

We work on different PBXes. The ones on which I work
are specifically configured to respond to 911 OR 9-911
to avoid a problem. Would YOU want to have been the
person who didn't enable one of those options, and
thus delayed response time?

< snip regarding corporate bad behavior in configuring

geez, where's the FCC when you need 'em, huh?

actually, yes - I see this as a public safety issue,
not a freedom issue. It is in the public's interest
for 911 to work the way we expect it to, everywhere.

i think the selective enforcement here is sickening,
and that if old money
telcos can't compete without asset protection, they
should file for chapter
11 rather than muscling newcomer costs up by calling
these things "phone" and
then circling their wagons around the NANP.

But VoIP companies calling their product a
"communications service" and saying that they're
exempt from 911 regulation, and at the same time
beating up the ISPs for deprioritizing their traffic
based on the same 911 access is completely fine, huh?

Voice is an application, but a gov't regulated one.
In this regard it is fundamentally different from
email or ftp.

but
that's not going to happen,
so i predict that the internet will do what it
always does-- work around the
problem. so, domain names and personal computers
rather than "phone numbers"
and things-that-look-like-phones.

<snip>

and when 20% or 50% of the homes in a region lack
this service because the
people who live in those homes don't want to pay a
POTS tithe, we'll see
some interesting legislation come down, and you can
quote me on that.

Yes, I'm certain we will. The legislation will likely
be due to a particularly bad fire during a power
outage or some other event which makes national news.

David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise:
http://www.listentothefranchise.com

2

thegameiam@yahoo.com (David Barak) writes:

Well, here's the catch - it wasn't the VoIP subscriber who was
complaining, it was the PSTN subscriber. The experience left her with
the opinion that VoIP = bad quality voice. I suspect you'll see a lot of
this...

like the libertarians like to say, "use your dollar-votes."

> ... the most the gov't should be allowed to require is that i put a
> warning label on my front door and on anthing inside my house that
> looks like a phone.

occam's razor? We have government regulations regarding things which
look like (and function similarly to) light switches, no? We have
government regulations regarding the nature of water and sewer pipes, why
not regulations regarding the nature of data pipes?

because some phones look like model cars, and that's not something any
gov't ought to have a say about.

... specifically configured to respond to 911 OR 9-911 to avoid a
problem. Would YOU want to have been the person who didn't enable one of
those options, and thus delayed response time?

i'm in favour of the warning labels and standardization. my point is that
out there in POTS-land there is wide variance in attitudes, and selective
enforcement of the rules.

... I see this as a public safety issue, not a freedom issue. It is in
the public's interest for 911 to work the way we expect it to, everywhere.

to that end, i've wondered why the US doesn't join other industrialized
nations in regulating cellular roaming agreements and tower spacing and
coverage. in the parts of sweden with a density less than 10 people per
square kilometer, cell phones work. in similar parts of the US, they don't.
market forces are allowed to dominate this equation even though we'd save
a lot of lives if cell phones worked in the hinterlands. yet the FCC is
ready to fine vonage if 911 doesn't work universally. why is it okay to
let the public's interest suffer so as to promote innovation and competition
when it's old money vs. old money, but not when it's old money vs. new money?

But VoIP companies calling their product a "communications service" and
saying that they're exempt from 911 regulation, and at the same time
beating up the ISPs for deprioritizing their traffic based on the same
911 access is completely fine, huh?

don't take it so personally. MMORPG companies also beat the stuffing out
of ISPs who can't maintain isochrony of packet delivery, too. anyone whose
application isn't supported by the infrastructure is going to complain --
and rightly so. especially, Especially, ESPECIALLY if it's done on purpose
with anticompetitive goals.

Voice is an application, but a gov't regulated one. In this regard it is
fundamentally different from email or ftp.

ah, yes, but when i run a voice app on my computer and use domain names to
reach out to folks rather than "phone numbers", it's fundamentally The Same
As email or ftp, and that's what makes it so wonderful and full of potential.

> and when 20% or 50% of the homes in a region lack this service because
> the people who live in those homes don't want to pay a POTS tithe,
> we'll see some interesting legislation come down, and you can quote me
> on that.

Yes, I'm certain we will. The legislation will likely be due to a
particularly bad fire during a power outage or some other event which
makes national news.

sure as hell, we'll see laws requiring every home to have a telephone, to
have that telephone in the kitchen or other main room of the home, and to
be clearly marked. then the POTS tithe comes back, it'll be with vengeance.

3

If / when we get back to the state of "monopoly" on data pipes such as water
and sewer are today (I doubt you have little if any choice on where your
water comes from or where your sewer goes - hence the regulation), then yes,
we will probably end up with such regulation - but will also have the same
"choice" of data pipes as we do water pipes today.

4

Being a Swedish cellphone subscriber, I cannot roam at all between the Swedish providers. If you are an user from outside Sweden, you can roam with them all. Three parallell networks trying to cover a country the size of california but with only 9 million people in it, and generally they're not allowed to use each others infrastructure. Silly.

The best coverage in the less populated parts of Sweden is still with an analogue 450MHz based system from the 80ties that is going to be shut down soon.

But I do agree, the whole US market would be better off with more regulation in all areas actually. There is no need for a lot of parallell networks really, in theory you only need one, especially in parts that are less populated. So the local loop is regulated in Sweden and a lot of the swedish population can choose from 3-4 different DSL providers, all competing with price and speed. Current best price for 8M/1M adsl is $35 excluding tax. Of this the phone company gets $8 for the shared copper used in the local loop. Wholesale of bandwidth and capacity and dark fiber works well, everybody buys from everybody at decent prices. The capital municipality runs its own fiber business where anyone can rent fiber for approx $200 per month and kilometer of fiber (cost per kilometer goes down as distance goes up). The PTT is competing with the same prices, they have to. Telia (the PTT) is even one of the first to aggressively offer digital broadcast TV over broadband to compete with the cable companies.

Comparing to other countries where the municipalities aren't involved in infrastructure, fiber in Sweden is cheap. When the municipality puts down other infrastructure such as heating and cooling pipes, paving roads etc, they also put in fiber. Doesn't cost much more when you're doing work anyway. The important thing of course is that they have to sell to everybody, otherwise you run into problems.

5

But I do agree, the whole US market would be better off with more
regulation in all areas actually.

No, we're not Europe.

There is no need for a lot of parallell networks really,

Our system is chaotic and annoying at times but it produces better stuff
in the form of whole new technologies and in the form of incremental
improvements to existing technologies. I mean, you guys can wait around
and then standardize on some point in the development cycle, but we're
inventing the technologies and the incremental improvements. If we did
what you do then we might as well all stop and stand still now.

Besides which, your exmple of parallel [and identical] networks shows that
there are dumb things to be found in trying to maintain artifical
competition in a non-competitive environment.

6

There are loads of non-municipal installs where if you want water and
sewer, you dig your own holes in the ground. Regulations still exist for
safety and such but that's separate from the monopoly providers found in
denser installs.

7

Our system is chaotic and annoying at times but it produces better stuff
in the form of whole new technologies and in the form of incremental
improvements to existing technologies.

  Don't pretend that just because you're an American, you
automatically know better,

I don't pretend, and it's not because I'm an American

or that your system is inherently better.

I didn't say the system was better, I said it produces "better stuff"
insofar as that applies to long-term advancement, but that's nothing to
say about here and now. Stability is cheap and friendly, which is arguably
better when you are trying to exlain why somebody's TDMA phone won't ever
work with a CDMA network. OTOH, I'm glad the world didn't stand still on
X.25 and OSI, if you know what I mean. They are different models is all.
But if you insist on reading something into that, then perhaps it's
yourself suffering from prejudicial bias. Just a thought.

It is entirely possible that the Europeans might know a thing or two

It's possible I guess. I mean, a European did bother advancing beyond
Gopher to create HTTP, although I suspect that says more about the
low-capitalization requirements of network services than anything about
the cultural differences.