Skype Blocking in China

Verso has announced a partnership with a "Tier-1 Telecom" carrier in China to test their Skype blocking software.

“The trial is representative of the significant opportunities for Verso’s products in the Chinese market, where VoIP is highly regulated and the use of Skype software has been deemed illegal,” said Yves Desmet, senior vice president, worldwide sales, Verso Technologies. “More and more countries are following China’s direction in evaluating the risks associated with the growing popularity of P2P communication such as Skype, due to intense security concerns with the use of this medium for unlawful purposes and its impact on carriers’ revenues and the bottlenecks their networks are experiencing. We believe that this is just the beginning of a tremendous opportunity for Verso.”

Beware Ebay! Hopefully the more "open" markets of the west don't follow suit...

Testing Flock

I am testing Flock as a new tool for the IP Inferno editorial team...

technorati tags: Flock

Open vs. Regulated Markets

Today I had a visitor who commented on almost all of my recent blog posts. You can read his comments here, here, and here (two comments on that last one). While B.M.'s comments rant at times, the point is reasonable. And he/she might be surprised at the degree to which I agree with the points. The core question is, what role should government play in regulating industries? The poster seems to see this issue as black and white -- communism vs. capitalism. He/she makes the argument that we should try pure capitalism in this country. I think this is a great idea, except that a short history lesson will tell you that this hasn't worked in the past.

Sure, the world hasn't ever tried COMPLETELY unregulated commerce (no governments?) but our own past here in the U.S. has certainly included periods of significantly less regulation. In fact a reasonable argument could be made that industrialists in the first half of our nation's history would look at the system we have today and decry it as socialism, or worse. By comparison to today, the 1800s in the US were practically a time without regulation.

However, arguments like the ones put forth by B.M. tend to ignore a few sad facts:

Capitalism is good at rewarding
(a) short term investment horizons
(b) the people who have the capital
(c) private interests

Capitalism is not good at protecting
(a) the environment
(b) workers
(c) the public good

Would B.M., for example, like to live in a country where the highway system had to be built by private enterprise? It is unlikely that the modern US highway system ever would have developed without a strong federal government. Part of the problem is that the "repayment" period is far too long and uncertain for industry to undertake this kind of investment. Without the perceived needs of national security (moving wartime men and materials rapidly across country) the Eisenhower administration would not have receieved support for this infrastructure investment.

Another interesting example is the FDA -- how many worthless (or dangerous) drugs might be sold on the market to unsuspecting consumers if we didn't have an agency regulating these products? Sure, you can criticize the FDA for some of its mistakes and some of its commerce limiting practices, but does anyone really want to live without an FDA?

And how about working conditions? We can plainly see the difference between our relatively safe and clean working environments and those in countries that have no protections for their citizens. Does B.M. want us to return to an economy on which children routinely die in factories because of unsafe conditions? Check our own history books -- this was what the US was like before regulation.

Finally, lets talk briefly about the environment, something we still do a poor job of understanding and regulating in this country (but definitely the battle of this century). Capitalism provides no motivation to protect the environment for our children or our grandchildren. If I can pollute Louisiana today in order to earn higher profits for my California corporation, why not? And companies routinely foul the water we drink and the air we breathe -- even with the regulations we have in place. And this is a global problem -- the pollution that China is now pumping into the atmosphere is rapidly becoming a US air quality problem.

So yes, I like the idea of relying upon private enterprise to solve many of our problems, but no I don't "trust" them to always do the right thing -- because that is not how the incentives of Capitalism work. This is not black and white, it is about finding the right shade of grey.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming about the IP revolution - one entirely generated by business and which I wholeheartedly support...

EV-DO Coming on Strong from Sprint

It is possible that EV-DO is actually available in my neighborhood from Sprint. The company announced this morning that it has now rolled out service in "141 major markets and 250 airports." Looking at this map of the bay area I can't quite tell if my house is in the coverage area... but then again I already have Wi-Fi here at home. The important question is, will there be coverage in most of the places I travel to? And it is definitely starting to get there. Here is a link to Sprint's coverage maps so that you can check if your neighborhood currently has coverage.

The 222 airports alone might justify the service, which has "...average download speeds of 400-700 kbs and a peak rate of up to 2 Mbs" according to the company's press release. This is more than fast enough for email and web browsing and would entirely eliminate my need to find WiFi in the airport when travelling. It is even fast enough for high quality VoIP calls, which will definitely be interesting to test.

No Tollbooths

An excellent post by Tom Evslin on his fractals of change blog about the Ed Whitacre BusinessWeek interview (about which we previously wrote about here and here. Tom writes:

This isn’t about freeloaders; it’s about tollbooths. As local access monopolies, the baby Bells have been able to maintain tollbooths for voice traffic for years. Voice over IP (VoIP) got much of its original impetus by providing a bypass around those tollbooths. Even though they’ve done better than their long distance rivals (whom they are now buying), it’s getting harder and harder for the baby Bells to increase or even maintain profits. They could have been leaders in Internet access but they weren’t. Now they are providing DSL – great. Now they would like to erect new tollbooths on what used to be called the Information Super Highway – that sucks.

Read the rest of this excellent post. Tom ends: "Meanwhile, it’s a good idea not to get your broadband hookup from someone who’s already said that they intend to erect a tollbooth on YOUR pipe. If you have a choice, that is." And that lack of choice is the point, isn't it. SBC (when do we start calling them AT&T?) is trying to make sure that we don't have a choice. When will our government be back off of their Martin-vacation to protect us, the consumers? Wasn't that supposed to be their job?

SBC Digs Hole Deeper

Following up on my post a few days ago on how Ed Whitacre wants the end of the Internet, it is interesting to note that SBC press folks are now trying to squelch the flames lit by Ed. According to the VoIP and Enum blog:

SBC spokesman Michael Balmoris said Whitacre was not talking about charging companies for letting customers access their Web sites. Rather, he said, Whitacre was referring to access Internet companies may want to the "managed and secure" portions of the fiber-optic network SBC is building largely to deliver video to customer homes.

Read the rest of what Balmoris had to say over at VoIP and Enum. That blog post also offers a link to Kevin Werbach who adds:

Ahh, so broadband over fiber isn't going to be "the Internet." It's going to be a private, tolled garden controlled by the phone companies.

This all points back to a nasty littly technology called IMS that the phone companies are rather excited about. The new fiber network that SBC is rolling out will come complete with "gateway media controllers" which will allow the network to determine which applications and which content receive priority, and indeed are even allowed, to run over the network. If consumers allow the network monopolists to insert network controls over our applications and content, they network operators will try to turn the Internet into Television. Remember the Information Superhighway? Control from the top.

Worse than no 911

In general I have not been a supporter of the frenzy with which the telecommunications industry has pursued the nascent VoIP providers with the demand that 911 services be activated properly... My point in the past has been that cellular operators have squeezed out from under the requirement to have location analysis for 911 calls over and over again... so why are we insisting that VoIP providers know where there customers are calling from? But after reading this account of someone using the Vonage 911 service my views on the subject have changed.

In this case, Corey had correctly set up his Vonage account with his address... but when he called 911 the call had to be transferred twice before getting someone who would respond to the incident (gunshots in the street outside his building). Read his transcript of the experience.

Forget about the issue of having one's address correctly registered in the Vonage database. Forget the issue of whether or not you are using your Vonage account from that address at the time you make the call. We should hold VoIP providers, at least those like Vonage that offer VoIP as a primary connection to the PSTN (and thus a replacement for the PSTN) to the same basic requirement that cellular operators are held to -- sure, they may not know where you are. But they do have a system for funneling your emergency request to the right person for a response.

Ed Whitacre Wants The End of The Internet

Important notice to readers of this blog -- if you are a customer of SBC, you may not be able to read these priceless words in the future if SBC chief Ed Whitacre has his way. Whitacre, in a candid interview with BusinessWeek, has uttered a challenge to the Internet that cannot be ignored. In short, he wants to end the Internet as we know it, bringing on a new era in which broadband providers like SBC can completely control every website, service, or person that we can access over the network that they provide. Think I am exagerating? Here is an excerpt:

BusinessWeek:How concerned are you about Internet upstarts like Google (GOOG), MSN, Vonage, and others?

Whitacre: How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! (YHOO) or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Hello Mr. Whitacre, I (the end consumer) am paying you for that broadband access! What makes you think it is "free?" And what makes you think that you can tell me what to do with it??

I have to agree with Techdirt's observation that "If there were real competition (in providing broadband), SBC would never even dare to suggest that they might cut off a Google, Yahoo or Vonage.

FON - Anarchic Wireless Network

There may be others out there that have started building anarchic wireless networks, but perhaps no one with the class and style of Martin Varsavsky's FON. Martin writes about starting Fon in his blog:

What is FON? Very simple. At FON we developed a software client that you download from the net and you install it in your wifi base station. At that moment your wifi gives you a password of your choice but starts accepting all the other passwords of all the other FON members. FON is based on the premise that with wifi now being 54MB on cable and DSL platforms of 1MB or more that wifi users are only taking advantage of 3% of their capacity on the average or in other words wasting 97% of their capacity. At the same time what users want is for their laptops, PDAs, wifi phones, and soon wifi enable ipods, wifi enable digital cameras to access to everyone else´s wifi so they can walk around cities taking pictures, listening to music, playing games on wifi playstations, etc. And this we accomplish by turning millions of wifi installations into a unified wifi FON network with a standard interface to accept all kind of wifi enabled devices.

This could get very scary for the incumbent wireless network operators! A citizen driven network? Sounds a lot like democracy smashing down the walls of the tyrants, telecommunications style...