Another Day, Another VoIP Blockage

Surprises

from the running-scared... dept

It appears that a lot of telcos/service providers really have very fragile egos, and the second someone shows up who’s vaguely competitive, their first reaction is to block them out. We’ve written about Clearwire blocking VoIP and Earthlink reserving the right to do so. Now, reports are coming out suggesting that, rather than blocking VoIP outright, Mexican telco Telmex has its Prodigy ISP service blocking all access to Skype’s website. If true (and it’s not entirely clear that it is), this plan is only going to backfire. First off, it’s going to piss off a ton of customers who want to try or use Skype. Pissing off your customers is never a good idea. They will, eventually, figure out to go elsewhere. In the meantime, people will still figure out a way to get Skype, and this ban will do absolutely nothing practical. Once again, however, this is a case where the telco/service provider doesn’t necessarily need to know what the data is that’s traveling over their network. So, if this keeps up, expect many more VPN style services that let you tunnel out while encrypting all your traffic, so that no one in between knows what “data” services you’re using.