POTS Death Rattle: The Dinosaurs Strike Back!

If it isn't the Chinese government, the EU, and others of their ilk trying to wrest away the Internet from the hands of the USA and into the rather incompetent hands of the United Nations (its getting hard for the commies to block those Google cache links ya know... ) its entities such as the Saudi state-owned telecom dinosaur trying to frustrate users of Skype and other discount VoIP services.

The IEEE Spectrum magazine recently ran an interesting article about the technology of a California company by the name of Narus, Inc. that operators can use to scan packets and identify VoIP sessions and block or otherwise frustrate the users, with the goal of course of to use the operators legacy circuit based services or VoIP services that will inevitably be light years behind the services offered by Skype, Vonage and other VoIP pioneers.

Actually its not just telecoms in mideast countries that are trying to frantically strike back against the rising tide of successful VoIP service providers, who threaten to eat their lunch. According to the article, Vodafone has announced plans to block VoIP traffic in Germany. While there appears to be no evidence they are doing so, broadband providers in the USA can legally block VoIP traffic as well.

Read the IEEE Spectrum article.