From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Apr 12 15:24:21 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i3CJOLP29866; Mon, 12 Apr 2004 15:24:21 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 15:24:21 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200404121924.i3CJOLP29866@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #180 TELECOM Digest Mon, 12 Apr 2004 15:24:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 180 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Who is "VOIP News"? (Ron Chapman) Re: Who is "VOIP News"? (Jack Decker) Re: CRTC: VoIP is Just Phone Service (John Levine) VoIP Problem With Alcatel OmniPCX 4400 (Simon Templar) Taking Talk to a New Dimension (VOIP News) Survey: VoIP Has Consumers' Ears (VOIP News) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 06:53:13 -0400 From: Ron Chapman Subject: Re: Who is "VOIP News"? In article , joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) wrote: > In light of the recent spate of postings from "VOIP News," I'm > wondering of this is really a news service. So far, it looks more > like a propaganda campaign designed to promote certain aspects of > VoIP. I agree. I've killfiled this author. That's the very first time in 15 years that I've done ANYTHING like that in comp.dcom.telecom. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Personally, I would take care about putting anything in a killfile. Its a lot like having someone toss out all your spam without even a cursory glance to see if there was a mistake made in the judgment. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 05:08:21 -0400 From: Jack Decker Subject: Re: Who is "VOIP News"? Pat, please conceal my e-mail address. On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 22:59:38 GMT, joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) wrote: > In light of the recent spate of postings from "VOIP News," I'm > wondering of this is really a news service. So far, it looks more > like a propaganda campaign designed to promote certain aspects of > VoIP. What this is, is a Yahoo Group, which is Yahoo's name for an e-mail mailing list. I chose the name "VoIP News" for it because that's what I wanted to talk about -- news about VoIP -- and because there wasn't a group already named that way on Yahoo. If you want details of the group, you can go to the home page at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VoIPnews/ I would be very curious as to what you might consider "propaganda." I look at many news sources on most days, and I find a lot of these items either posted in other VoIP-related forums, or using freely-available search engines like Google News. Now, having said that, I do have my own opinions about certain things, and much as Pat does here in the Digest, I sometimes tend to add commentary, which I try to make sure is always clearly marked as such. My normal convention is to put my comments in [square brackets] and I also usually actually note that it is a comment. > (I also note that there is a website, "www.voip-news.com," which is, > in fact, a "technology marketing and lead generation" website, and not > a news service. Any connection?) None whatsoever. I don't think I had ever even heard of that site until you mentioned it. Please understand that although I may hold opinions of which VoIP providers are good ones and which are not so good, I get no money from anyone for passing along these news items. That particular site is probably far more commercial than anything I would do. The VoIP News list is actually an outgrowth of the MI-Telecom (Michigan Telecommunications) list that I've been moderating since probably about 1995 (although it has only been on Yahoo Groups since November). In the last year or two I've developed some better techniques for ferreting out news, and I recently realized that there just wasn't as much news about traditional telephony anymore - that all the real "buzz" lately is about VoIP. And VoIP news is hardly Michigan specific (for the most part), so I figured that it would be better to have a separate list for the interesting VoIP news items I've come across. > I have no problem with anyone posting ideas, of course, "propaganda" > or otherwise, but so far it seems like the "news" aspect is a bit > misleading. Well, again, the Yahoo Group is intended for the posting of VoIP News *and the discussion thereof*. The way the group is set up, though, you have to be a subscriber to the group to actually post to the group (this is to limit the amount of spam -- most spammers won't bother to subscribe to a group before sending their tripe, and if they do subscribe and then attempt to spam the group, I can block further posts from their address automatically). Note that you can subscribe to the group and then set yourself as "No Email" for message delivery, which (if I understand how this all works) should allow you to post to the group but not have to receive the messages twice. On Sun, 11 Apr 2004 22:04:16 -0400, Fred Goldstein wrote: > So what's to complain about? But then John got a reply from a Mr. News, > who so loves VoIP that he apparently took it as his first name: Now Fred, that was a dumb comment to make. It's obvious that "VoIP News" isn't the name of a person. Pat has already explained how he mungess the message headers at my request, again as an anti-spam measure. Please bear in mind that Yahoo Groups doesn't allow me to directly change or conceal the "From:" address on outgoing e-mail, although interestingly enough, it mungs it according to its own rules. You have to keep in mind that the TELECOM Digest winds up on the Web in several places, thus e-mail addresses posted here are probably more likely to get spam than those posted in other lists that aren't accessible from the web. But then, you must realize that or you wouldn't munge your own e-mail address. >> From: VOIP News >> John, in my opinion the flaw in your logic is that you think "VoIP >> advocates" want special treatment for VoIP, even though what we're >> really asking is that it be treated like any other *Internet >> application*. VoIP gets no more of a "free ride" than e-mail, web >> browsing, instant messaging, streaming audio and video, usenet news, >> or any of the other thousands of applications that people run over >> their Internet connections. > That is the case with "computer to computer" VoIP, which both the FCC > and the CRTC have given the hands-off to. Indeed Jeff Pulver's snide > remark comparing Canada with Panama totally missed that distinction. > Panama has tried to ban computer-to-computer VoIP because it does > threaten their huge international call termination revenues. Not the > same thing at all, and indeed probably futile. Indeed. Someone actually sent me a link to a somewhat dated news story about that: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5144030.html Anyway, you have to realize that I'm not perfect -- I sort of figured that Jeff Pulver had actually seen the order and was making an informed comment on it. Perhaps I should not have assumed that. However, living as I do in a border state (Michigan), I do know that the CRTC has made many decisions in the past that has caused Canadians to gnash their teeth and wish the whole Commission were abolished -- but then, apparently, the upset Canadians either have a beer, or a coffee and a donut, and forget the whole thing, because despite all the restrictions that the CRTC has placed on Canadians (particularly with regard to what they may watch and listen to), nobody ever seems to be able to put a limit on their power. But basically, here is where I'm coming from: I do not feel that under any circumstances should VoIP be automatically assumed to be the same as traditional wireline telephony. Indeed, in some respects it shares more characteristics with cellular or wireless telephony than with wireline telephony, but in reality it's something totally new. Cellular telephony connects to the PSTN, yet it does not get hit with exactly the same taxes and regulations that are imposed on wireline phones. VoIP shouldn't either. Now, I'm sorry for all you socialists out there, but I think it is high time that the Universal Service Fund and similar corporate subsidies went away. I feel they do far more harm than good, because the biggest recipients are the medium-sized independents that operate primarily in rural areas (I'm thinking here of the wireline side of companies like CenturyTel and AllTel and some of their slightly smaller brethren). And yet these are the areas where, very often, the incumbent phone companies seem to be every bit as monopolistic and hostile to competition as the old Bell System ever was. The "small" phone companies have a higher profit ratio than the "baby Bells" these days, and it's no wonder given the way they're rooting in the trough of the USF. Maybe it doesn't bother you that a few bucks out of every phone bill you pay takes a circular route right into the pockets of the stock- holders of these "rural" telephone companies, but it does me. That's why I get so upset when I hear people saying that it's only fair that these same taxes and fees should be applied to VoIP. No, they shouldn't -- they are unfair taxes. They are the government playing Bizarro Robin Hood, stealing from the poor (the ratepayers) and giving it to the rich (the fat cats that own these second-tier phone companies). The right thing to do is abolish these taxes and fees, not extend them onto new forms of communications. Maybe Canada doesn't have any of these added taxes and fees on phone service (if so, it would surprise me given the way they like to tax everything else, such as the tax on blank CD's to support the Canadian music industry), but still, I think that there should always be a clear distinction made between wireline telephony and VoIP. The two are not the same thing at all. > Mr. News misses the point: >> Think about this: If you try to tax Internet telephony, what's to stop >> people from making an "Internet walkie-talkie" application (there >> actually was such a thing once, I don't recall the name offhand, but I >> think it went belly-up in the big dot-com bust. But a similar program >> could easily be created). Now you don't have telephony per se, you're >> just shipping audio files back and forth. Where, exactly, do you make >> the distinction between "audio files" and "telephony", and do you >> really want government officials trying to draw that line? > Nobody in the USA or Canada is trying to tax such applications! The > ONLY question concerns what happens when you interface to the PSTN, or > offer a PSTN-attached telephone service. Well, the VoIP companies can't just interface to the PSTN through some kind of black wormhole that passes through the fourth dimension. They actually have to use a licensed CLEC to make the connection to the PSTN. And guess what, the CLEC does pay their share of the taxes and originating and terminating charges, all of which gets passed onto the VoIP company. It might be helpful to think of a VoIP company as a customer of a CLEC (usually several CLEC's) that is simply sharing their service with their customers. In a way it's like the Chicago hotel that Pat used to live in, where the hotel itself had a certain number of lines coming in and then provided service to the tenants. As far as the phone company was concerned, the end user was the hotel, not the individual tenants. And I think that is the case where the VoIP companies are concerned -- they are like the hotel; they buy PSTN connections in their own name. Then they run those connections through a "switchboard" of sorts (actually more like an automatic PBX) and onto the "tenants", who are actually the customers on their private network. That's not a perfect comparison, of course, but it illustrates that an endpoint on a VoIP network is not really part of the PSTN. The people who do connect to the PSTN, namely the VoIP carriers, do pay all the taxes and fees required of them and those do get passed on to customers. What upsets certain government officials is that instead of being able to gouge each VoIP customer individually (and thereby get more money), they only see the VoIP company as a customer of PSTN services. > [...] How much should Verizon, SBC, or Citizens charge when you call > one of their subscribers from across the country? Whatever it is, the CLEC or terminating long distance carrier has to pay it. But personally, I'm hoping we all go back to "bill and keep." You may have noticed it's the second-tier phone companies that are the only ones fighting that tooth-and-nail, because they've been gouging everybody on terminating charges for years. [..... several paragraphs snipped .....] > A rather important reason that the Modem Tax didn't happen -- that > ISP-bound calls are NOT viewed as LD -- is that voice and data are > different! We argued, quite convincingly, that the nature and value > of ISP-bound calls are very different from toll calls. The > "communication" may be worldwide, but the "telecommunications" tends > to be local, just to the modem, and the ISP does a lot of processing > in the meantime. Lots of "oversubscription" of the interstate > bandwidth, too. The argument stuck, and ISP-bound calls are not LD. > But some VoIP fanatics, like Mr. News, are ignoring that history and > view the exemption as if it were the most powerful entitlement. So > rather than have no modem tax because voice isn't data, they want > voice to be exempt because it's kind of like data, sort of, in that > it's possible to run them both over IP. You've lost me here. Maybe it's because I'm tired and it's late, but I just don't see the connection between the "modem tax" thing and VoIP. Of course, being called a "VoIP fanatic" probably doesn't help my comprehension skills any. On Date: 12 Apr 2004 02:54:50 -0000, John Levine wrote: > Then you should be a very happy guy, because all of the proposals I've > seen do just that, treat VoIP like any other Internet application. > If you have Internet-only VoIP that connects only to other Internet > users, it's not subject to phone taxes. If you run VoIP over a > broadband connection, that doesn't make the broadband subject to phone > taxes. (The weird politics of DSL make some DSL subject to phone > taxes, but that's unrelated to whether there's VoIP in the picture.) > But if you use VoIP to connect to the network that provides access to > the other billion phones in the world, that makes it a real phone, and > that's what makes it subject to phone taxes. This is so obvious that > it's hard to believe that the anti-tax people are so dim that they > don't grasp this. And I would also say to you, the CLEC's used by the VoIP companies do pay taxes and fees. And from the standpoint of the PSTN, the VoIP company *is* the end user, not each of the VoIP company's individual customers. Yes, each individual users gets a PSTN phone number, but that's simply a DID (direct inward) number out of a group of numbers assigned to the VoIP company. This is why individual customers aren't listed in the phone book, and why a VoIP customer can't take their VoIP number with them when they move to another provider. The VoIP customer isn't buying PSTN service, they're buying the right to use a private VoIP network that allows them to connect to the PSTN using connections for which the VoIP company is the customer. Now the real problem is, they don't advertise themselves that way. If the marketing people would quit insisting on advertising these services as telephone service, they probably wouldn't be coming under the gun as they are. But when certain companies advertise themselves as telephone companies -- even though in no way are they a telephone company under any legal definition -- then naturally regulators start to say, "Well, if you are a telephone company then you should register as a telephone company, pay taxes as a telephone company, and comply with all the regulations that telephone companies have to comply with." But these are not telephone companies -- they are VoIP companies that have inward and outward gateways to the PSTN. It's a subtle but important distinction, one further muddied by marketing hype. >> If U.S. providers are forced to impose these taxes, what's to stop >> some VoIP company from setting up shop in Mexico or Bermuda or >> England and offering tax-free calls to U.S. customers? > Other than the fact that Mexico, Bermuda, or England charge their own > phone taxes, which are probably higher than the ones in the U.S., and > will apply them to anyone who interconnects with their phone network, > nothing. What's your point? My point is that if some country sees that they can start raking in the dough by allowing VoIP providers to set up shop there and make connections to the PSTN, they may well do it. Maybe they charge their own phone taxes and maybe they don't, but maybe they would forego the phone taxes in the case of VoIP companies that set up shop in their countries, particularly if local help were used and/or the proper "payments" were made to the right officials. And there would not be much the U.S. Government could do about it. >> Think about this: If you try to tax Internet telephony, what's to >> stop people from making an "Internet walkie-talkie" application > That's what Pulver's FWD is. If you're satisfied with a phone that > can only talk to the other 4000 people on FWD, tax-free, that's fine, > go ahead. If you'd rather have a real phone that can talk to the > billion other real phones in the world, you owe the same taxes as any > other real phone, be it ILEC, CLEC, mobile, or VoIP. And not to sound like a broken record, but the VoIP companies already pay such taxes. If you keep the "private switchboard" analogy in mind, you'll understand that VoIP users themselves don't have "real phones" (in the sense you are using that phrase), but they can connect to real phones through their providers' "private switchboard", so to speak. I'm really getting too tired to reply to any more of this tonight, but hopefully I have clarified my position just a little. Jack Decker [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The reason why hotels/motels were the original 'resellers' of telephone service (back in the days when no one else was allowed under FCC rules to do it) was because telco was in a tight spot. Every 'qualified' (i.e. pays the bill and does not attempt to defraud telco) applicant who wishes telephone service is entitled to have same, since telco is a common carrier. But telco says it is extremely inconvenient for us to meet that obligation in a hotel or motel setting where a new applicant (for phone service) stays for a week or two then moves out; someone else moves in, etc. We would always be there in your building installing and removing service, etc. So the compromise was telco puts a 'switchboard' there, installs the phones initially, then turns over the 'customer service' aspect of business the hotel/motel. Hotel/motel (including hospitals, universities, etc) *guarentee payment of the bills* and hotel/motel/whoever is responsible for the collection from their tenants. A hospital, after all, is just a 'hotel' (or temporary housing place) for sick people. Telco pays a commission to establishment for their help in collecting the billings and answering the whining complaints of the users, etc. Part of hotel's guarentee to pay the bills was a sub-guarentee from telco to quote 'time and charges' in a timely way (usually three to five minutes after a call was completed so the hotel could get the money from the guest before the guest checked out and did not pay for any last minute phone calls. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 2004 12:38:07 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: CRTC: VoIP is Just Phone Service Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to John Levine: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: At what point, John, should an > application which was designed primarily for computers (as VOIP is) > become part of the telephone network? When it has *any* interchange > with the phone network, some interchange with the phone network, or > exclusive interchange, or what? We talk about Vonage as if it were > somehow different than Pulver/FWD for example, but the only real > difference is that Vonage 'defaults' to NANPA-style telephone numbers > and is mostly used on the public telephone network. Um, there's the little detail that my Vonage phone has a real phone number that the billion real phones can call, while a FWD phone has a fake phone number that only the 4000 FWD phones (and maybe a few other equally tiny VoIP networks) can call. I agree that you have to draw a line somewhere, but whether you have a real phone number is as good a place as any to draw it. We can agree to argue about hair-splitting situations like ones where callers call a gateway number and then enter the fake number when the gateway answers. I'd probably assign the phone taxes to the gateway rather than whatever's behind it. There have been one way IP to phone gateways for many years such as Net2phone's pc2phone, and I don't know of anyone who wants to tax them as phones. They're not phones. Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY http://www.taugh.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So you would assign the taxes to the gateway. But that is what Jack Decker just said. Vonage is the customer (to use an example). They already pay taxes as any phone customer does. Now you want to tax *their customers* as well? Isn't that a lot like saying customers of hotels, etc, because they have a phone in their hotel room which any one of four billion other phone subscribers can call should also have to pay taxes and surcharges as well as the gateway (hotel PBX)? PAT] ------------------------------ From: le_prelude@yahoo.fr (Simon Templar) Subject: VoIP Problem With Alcatel OmniPCX 4400 Date: 12 Apr 2004 09:56:41 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi all, I have a trouble with VoIP on one of my sites: Everything works well for 10 minutes (after a phone reboot for example), then when you call the VoIP phone, you can hear them but they cannot hear you. I tried to set up the phone to AUTO-NEGOCIATE, 10FULL, 100FULL, 10HALF, 100HALF (and the switch on the other part too), and I had EACH time the same case ... After a while, I can hear the user, but the user cannot hear me... Any tricks ? Thank you. ------------------------------ From: VOIP News Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 11:10:30 -0400 Subject: Taking Talk to a New Dimension Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.nj.com/living/expresstimes/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1081760704220350.xml Voice over Internet arrives in the area. By AMY SATKOFSKY The Express-Times AT& T at the end of March announced the launch of Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP service to residents of northern New Jersey, including much of Warren and Hunterdon counties. The company expects to roll out service in Pennsylvania this summer. For years, computer techies have been making computer-to-computer phone calls requiring microphones and special setups. Today's cutting-edge companies such as Vonage Inc. and AT& T make it possible to place phone calls on any traditional phone with the use of broadband capacity. Those who offer the service say Internet telephony is the wave of the future. Consumer Electronics Association analysts predict Internet telephony will forever change the way people think of phone service. Mitchell Slepian, a spokesman for Vonage, says VoIP will transform the telecom industry and forecasts that in the next 10 years the majority of phone calls will be made using it. So what is it about VoIP that's making analysts say it will be the next high-tech phenomenon? VoIP is a technology that allows people to make telephone calls using a broadband Internet connection instead of a regular phone line. According to the Federal Communications Commission, some services using VoIP may only allow an individual to call other people using the same service, but others may allow people to call anyone who has a telephone number, including local, long distance, mobile and international numbers. Also, while some services only work over a computer or a special VoIP phone, other services, including Vonage and AT& T's CallVantage along with the lesser known VoicePulse, Packet8 and Broadvox, allow people to use a traditional phone through an adaptor. Full story at: http://www.nj.com/living/expresstimes/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1081760704220350.xml How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/ ------------------------------ From: VOIP News Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 11:07:24 -0400 Subject: Survey: VoIP Has Consumers' Ears Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/technology/article/0,1299,DRMN_49_2799915,00.html That's good news for firms like Qwest that are pushing service By Jeff Smith, Rocky Mountain News Consumers have a strong enthusiasm for alternative telephone services such as Internet-based calling, a new survey shows. The survey, conducted by Gallup for UBS investment banking research, found that 34 percent of the respondents would switch to voice-over-Internet-protocol if it means saving at least 20 percent on their phone bills. Respondents also said they were more willing to sacrifice voice quality than reliability. That suggests that consumers are willing to accept a service that is more like what they get from their cellular phone than their traditional landline. "We view this as a positive for the cable and Bell operators" planning to introduce VoIP as a primary line service, wrote UBS analysts John Hodulik and Aryeh Bourkoff in a report issued last week. Qwest Communications, which has launched a limited Internet- based telephone service in Minnesota, said the survey results are consistent with its view of the potential of VoIP. Full story at: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/technology/article/0,1299,DRMN_49_2799915,00.html ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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