Russell Shaw has some interesting insights about Vonage complaints that telco competitors are blocking its service from reaching certain types of end-user devices. We all knew this would happen eventually since there are currently no regulations on the books preventing carriers or ISPs from blocking certain ports. In fact, I recall reading that an ISP within a Southeast Asian country was already proven to be blocking VoIP traffic destined to a competitor, so it was only a matter of time before a U.S. company started blocking VoIP ports. Check out Russell's blog entry here:
Vonage to FCC: get the telcos off our back | IP Telephony | ZDNet.com" href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/index.php?p=251">» Vonage to FCC: get the telcos off our back | IP Telephony | ZDNet.com
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Digg
twitter
If your cable co is blocking access to voip it is censorship, the content of my internet traffic is my business alone.
Here's what you can do;
1. Disconnect your cable service and tell them you are going to DISH or one of the others and switching to DSL.
2. Contact the FCC and file a complaint.
3. Contact the ACLU and/or an attorney and file a lawsuit. This would be more effective if a group of people did this and less expensive.
When the ISP/cable companies start losing customer base and consequently MONEY, you folks will get their undivided attention. No one likes lawsuits. The FCC calls the shots for the cable companies they don't like to be bothered with a lot of complaints from consumers.
We have had several reports of port blocking submitted to the www.voiptroubleshooter.com forum, and have created a discussion topic for this.
As well as blocking ports, some ISPs are believed to be degrading the service applied to competing VoIP traffic. Potentially VoIP streams could be prioritized below normal data, which is likely to cause significant service quality degradation.
Well, I think it might have gone beyond ISP's doing this. I reciently moved and when I transfered my connection to the new apartment complex, I found out that they may be running an intranet connection, because my new IP is marked private and Cox will not do a truck roll here if there's a problem.
After I moved, I lost my VOIP connection, same equipment, same comp, called TS. Now I'm trying to figure out why I'm paying full price for the net if I can't use the full features.