Fergie's Tech Blog

Vonage Claims Price 'Blocking' Of VoIP

Paul Kaputska writes in Advanced IP Pipeline:

Vonage Holdings, the poster child in the debate about how open Internet services need to be, claimed Monday that an unnamed service provider was forcing its broadband customers to pay a premium to use Vonage’s Voice over IP services.

While it wasn’t a case of outright “blocking” of VoIP like the company has previously experienced, Vonage CEO Jeffrey Citron used the example of the extra-fee-for-VoIP incident as part of his argument in favor of a “broadband bill of rights,” that would put into law the type of service a user of broadband services could expect.

“Those who say there’s not a network neutrality problem need to take their head out of the sand,” said Citron, speaking on a panel at the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit conference here. While the FCC was able to bring judgement against a firm that previously tried to block Vonage services, Citron said that right now “there is no law that prohibits [blocking], so you can’t adjucate against it.”

While Citron hedged on naming the offending service provider, Brooke Schulz, Vonage’s vice president of communications, said the incidents have been occuring with customers who get broadband from a cable TV company. The provider, Schulz said, detects that its customers are using Vonage, and then moves its customers to a higher-cost broadband service (one with a static IP address), claiming it needs to do so to be compliant with federal law-enforcement regulations. According to Schulz, Vonage’s services do not require such technical enhancements.

posted by Fergie @ 8/22/2005 04:03:00 PM