On Fri, 14 Apr 2006, Derek J. Balling wrote:
In other words, what juice would the FCC have against MomNPopISP.com who decided to block VoIP?
Vonage has claimed in testimony to the US Senate and other places that at least one cable company and at least wireless ISP company is blocking VOIP and it was "useless" to complain to the FCC about it. Remember the "myth" that the Internet isn't regulated. On the other hand, Jeff Pulver has proposed that "Most actual cases of port blocking have been human error," Pulver said. Engineers often block the virtual network "ports" commonly used for VOIP without knowing what they're doing -- and there are ways around it, such as assigning calls to a different port, Pulver said. Even AT&T has had problems with its CallVantage VOIP service being blocked on some networks because some ISPs had blocked TFTP which was being used by some network worms, and is also used by some VOIP phones to download its configuration files.