Debate rages over Internet phone fees

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No, it's not...

The regulations we're talking about originated as compensation for monopolies granted to the telcos. No such monopolies exist now even in the traditional phone market; they aren't even possible with VoIP.

Some of those charges are for "universal service", whereby some phone customers subsidize others to equalize the costs. But even without concerning ourselves with whether these subsidies actually work in practice, they are meant to pay the costs of the old technology, which is hundreds - or even thousands - of times more expensive!

Some of the charges are "access" fees, which long-distance providers pay to local exchange carriers. This is an artifact of the structural separation of local and long-distance networks, a distinction that is no more meaningful today than the 640K memory barrier in DOS.

As to the bandwidth question, you'd better do the math: replacing a 64kbps full-duplex channel that's only used half the time at best with compressed voice in half-duplex mode means that the voice traffic is almost undetectable. Business phone systems are currently being offered over DSL that offer 5 simultaneous VOIP conversations - without disturbing the original voice service. High-fidelity stereo streaming music takes much more than that, even highly compressed - and don't even think about video.

So, considering the much lower total bandwidth demands of voice, putting it at absolutely top priority would not even be noticeable to other, non-time-critical services in a packet network.

Oh, and don't forget - if it's encrypted there's no way even to detect, let alone to regulate it, so all the discussion is therefore moot.

Posted by: bthomasmo@...   Posted on: 03/29/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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