hello all,
not sure if everyone here is familiar with the madison river case:
http://informationweek.smallbizpipeline.com/60405214<http://www.tmcnet.c…
not exactly the same thing, because they were blocking instead of charging
(they are a small rural CLEC who, like almost all phone companies, charge
less than cost for access and make their profit on minutes, and voip takes
away their minutes), but the principle is the same, and the FCC nailed them.
However, meanwhile the FCC chairman has changed, and who knows if the
general way of thinking is still the same...
at very least, it's good precendent.
as someone who works for a telecom regulator (i wont tell you which one and
where) i'd be very interested in what happens around the world. are there
countries where ISP's are not allowed to filter or otherwise interfere in
traffic?
I know there are companies that sell traffic filtering systems to ISP's so
they can prioritize and/or slow the performance of certain customers,
certain apps (filesharing and the like), etc. it's relatively trivial to
configure such systems to introduce massive packet loss to anything on port
5060, for example, or deprioritize UDP packets, or things of that nature.
-yair