System information
VoIP spam
Yes, it’s coming. There will always be people who believe they have the right to incon-
venience and harass others in their pursuit of money. Efforts are under way to try to
address this, but only time will tell how efficacious they will be.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
The industry is making the transition from ignorance to laughter. If Gandhi is correct,
we can expect the fight to begin soon.
As their revenue streams become increasingly threatened by open source telephony,
the traditional industry players are certain to mount a fear campaign, in hopes of un-
dermining the revolution.
Bottleneck engineering
There is a rumor that the major network providers will artificially cripple VoIP traffic
by tagging and prioritizing the traffic of their premium VoIP services and, worse, de-
tecting and bumping any VoIP traffic generated by services not approved by them.
Some of this is already taking place, with service providers blocking traffic of certain
types through their networks, ostensibly as some public service (such as blocking pop-
ular file-sharing services to protect us from piracy). In the United States, the FCC has
taken a clear stand on the matter and fined companies that engage in such practices.
In the rest of the world, regulatory bodies are not always as accepting of VoIP.
What seems clear is that the community and the network will find ways around block-
ages, just as they always have.
Regulatory wars
A former chairman of the United States Federal Communications Commission,
Michael Powell delivered a gift that may well have altered the path of the VoIP revo-
lution. Rather than attempting to regulate VoIP as a telecom service, he championed
the concept that VoIP represents an entirely new way of communicating and requires
its own regulatory space in which to evolve.
VoIP will become regulated, but not everywhere as a telephony service. Some of the
regulations that may be created include:
Presence information for emergency services
One of the characteristics of a traditional PSTN circuit is that it is always in the
same location. This is very helpful to emergency services, as they can pinpoint the
location of a caller by identifying the address of the circuit from which the call was
placed. The proliferation of cell phones has made this much more difficult to
achieve, since a cell phone does not have a known address. A cell phone can be
plugged into any network and can register to any server. If the phone does not
592 | Chapter 27: Asterisk: A Future for Telephony