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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Wow, grandstanding much? There's no evidence ISPs have throttled VoIP or plan to, but if they did it would be REALLY BAD for $key_voter_demographic.

Sorry guys, even if the end result is commendable, this is literally just FUD. If there's to be any hope of better politics, we need to reject this BS.

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Back around 2006-2008 Comcast was suspected of massaging Vonage data to degrade the connection when they were releasing their competing phone service.

See:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121564856618241033.html?mod=...

http://adamnoah.com/comcast-admits-to-blocking-vonage/

http://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_users...

http://gigaom.com/2008/07/09/did-comcast-just-admit-to-vonag...

And they were slapped around and stopped doing it, so it's great that politicians are taking action in favour of consumers only 6-8 short years later.

There is evidence, in Europe. I've also personally witnessed this in Russia - mobile operator was blocking VoIP. Don't think US is any different in this regard.

Unfortunately, a bookmark from 2012 for a full research text had died, but I've found a brief press release here: http://berec.europa.eu/doc/2012/TMI_press_release.pdf

Yes, you're right, mobile is different. But the article is explicity about broadband.

No idea about first world countries, but in Russia there are broadband ISPs who throttle or completely drop P2P traffic for various reasons. Don't know about VoIP, though - the only cases for blocking those I've read about are corporate networks with their inhumane firewalling.

I can't say throttling/blocking is completely universally bad - for example, we (I work for an ISP, too) had to drop uTP traffic when uTorrent just rolled that protocol, because due to high-PPS low-size packets it put quite a heavy strain on routers, so everyone had worsened network experience. Even though that was somehow controversial decision I still think that that blocking brought more good than evil (we didn't block classic BitTorrent protocol by any means, just uTP) so there should be some rare and sane exceptions from Net Neutrality rules, but nonetheless... the point is, that happens on broadband, too. Just less often.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior - we know ISP's have throttled streaming video to enhance their own streaming video offerings, so is it that far fetched to believe they would do the same with VOIP? Most of these large ISP's are heavy into bundling and offer their own VOIP packages, so I think it is fairly logical to assume this is being discussed internally somewhere. Definitely not FUD.

No, they've throttled streaming video to extort money from Netflix.

VoIP has been eating telcos long distance revenue lunch since Vonage came out 10 years ago. Why do you think it's "fairly logical to assume" that they're only just now getting around to to talking about what they might do about that?

Indeed, Comcast did try to throw its weight around in 2009. I'm not sure what came of if, but blocking competing VoIP evidently wasn't it.

They don't need to. They just need to neglect their peer infrastructure and the desired effect will be the same.

Net neutrality doesn't require ISPs to maintain their infrastructure to any particular standard. It's fine that it's crap as long as it's equally crap for all traffic.

If you neglect peering, gradually some peering points will become more congested than others. So it won't be equally crap for all traffic. Some sources will get crappier service than others.

Of course. There's just no language in any net neutrality proposals that will avoid that.

The net neutrality crime in the Netflix debacle was trying to charge Netflix for access, not refusing to upgrade the peering point (since all traffic is equally/neutrally affected by the congestion).

I can't remember the name off hand, but there is a VoIP provider that has part of their marketing about how they are stable in the face of degradation. They specifically pointed out samples between theirs and Vonage with the same (poor) network conditions.

Digicel is currently accused of blocking voip on its networks in the caribbean.

Jamaican here. It's not just an accusation. They've definitely done it and admitted it. I don't know if Skype is blocked, but they've accused Viber and other such services of "toll bypass", and blocked them. The Viber CEO said in an interview that Digicel wants them to pay to be allowed to work again.

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