Death Of VoIP, Or The Next Digital Battle.
John C. Dvorak has made a sweeping claim in his PC Magazine column about The Coming Death of Cheap VoIP. That’s right, he thinks that VoIP services will be hijacked by the major telcos and the price will rise and the small providers will die a painful death. However, to get to this opinion he’s made some amazing assumptions.
The first assumption is that VoIP will only succeed if the 911 issue is addressed. However, VoIP doesn’t have to address the 911 issue to be successful. It just has to coexist with current telecommunications to supplement some of the services at a cheaper rate. In fact, that’s exactly how Skype has positioned itself with the FCC. How many of us currently use VoIP to the exclusion of regular cellular or land-line technologies. Not many, and certainly none that rely on it for emergency services. Most people use it as a supplement to get cheap international calls.
Now those VoIP providers that do position themselves as a replacement service will struggle. The Internet isn’t like a regular telecom service. It does require power to shift packets. So, without power, there is no service. Logically it can’t be used in an emergency. That doesn’t mean the death of the service though. Just a clear positioning and disclaimer from the provider.
The second assumption is that government regulation will allow major telcos to mandate that VoIP can not be used on their networks. For the US at least that sounds like a breach of the first amendment issue. Sure mandate that they need to disclose that the service can not be relied on for emergency purposes, but I can’t see how they’ll allow a telco to mandate no VoIP. Of course this will be easier for a telco to control if the service is one like Vonage. One like Skype on the other hand will be too difficult.
The third assumption is that major telcos will sniff their wire for VoIP traffic and ban its use.
This sort of traffic will eventually be sniffed out by the telcos on their networks and quashed or made unusable. When you sign up for a DSL account, you’ll find in the license agreement that you will not be allowed to use the system for VoIP (unless, of course, the VoIP is provided by the DSL/phone company). The cable companies will then be given access to the telcos’ networks (for a fee), if they agree to crush the independent use of VoIP and Skype.
So they’ll avoid any first amendment issues and disallow use of any VoIP but their own, and they’ll monitor the line with some fantastic magical algorithm that can detect that the bits flowing down the line are VoIP, even if they are encrypted by someone like Skype.
Wow, magic.
In response to this, I’d like to quote John Perry Barlow who said “The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.”