downgrading the priority of competing voip packages in their network.

Believe me, it happens.

There are several major issues with IP Telephony and Video at present. Many of these issues fundamentally are created by the humans involved with the systems, and not the systems themselves.

The writer follows up on the suggestion that congestion may be to blame. Frankly, and I have to be blunt here, that’s complete crap. Tell me, what happens when you don’t recieve the entire data frame? Ahem.

Issues really come from poor experience. The density of Asterisk and OH323 installs has increased dramatically over the past few years and this rise has not gone smoothly really. The issue is that now the VOIP is moving out of set top boxes (traditionally maintained by Telecomms engineers, in at least at the level of the underlying transport medium). Now we have software techs who treat the entire system, and bandwidth, in the same way they treat all other applications and services.

There is a big difference however, between VOIP and say, a text messaging application. Text messages can have regular latency flux of well over 1s – such things are extremely destructive to a live phonecall. Poor implementations of both bandwidth control software, and configurations, as well as a poor understanding of the underlying requirements leads to these issues. As should have also been expected, many of the services were reliable and ‘seamless’ when first installed, but an understanding of growth was not properly considered in the first installation. This may even have come from the misunderstanding that “it’s software, we can just change it when we get there”.

To echo FotF – These guys make a completely unsupported conclusion from data that doesn’t even offer the data points they are drawing conclusions about and then states that this is why we need packet discrimination. If you can’t see through this transparent attempt to astroturf the anti-net neutrality cause you really shouldn’t be thinking about public policy issues at all. Fun to see that they are now trying to win over voip users, folks who have been strongly on the pro-neutrality side. One would hope that these folks, regardless of the trumped up congestion arguement, would see that net discrimination would eliminate their ability to use voip except through the nearly-as-expensive-as-pots telecom company versions.

It’s interesting to see that Cnet has taken sides in this fight, though given some of their past stories, not surprising. Still, the editors should be ashamed.

Those involved in providing a practical balence between neutrality and reality will tell you clearly that the only links which need control are the last-mile or choke-width links. These should be consumer controlled, not carrier controlled, as clearly it is the consumers preference to have reliable comms first. Carriers prioritizing data by higher level content (IP content on MLPS links, or VOIP content on IP for example) will break proprietary communications, damage encrypted tunnel performance and so on, providing a less predictable flow where previously congestion routines would provide a best-effort ‘fair’ division. You probably all understand these issues individually and the others involved, however the point of removing all control simply creates appalling performance in many scenarios, for example small business VOIP circuits over ADSL is unworkable if maintained completely neutral, as proven by Chrono S. Trigger above, if you don’t wish to simply think about it yourself.

The Internet is not a DUMP TRUCK!

voip doesn’t need tiering at all, what voip needs is terminators that don’t suck ass.