[ NNSquad ] VoIP vs. POTS -- and Internet Regulation

[Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com>]

Happy New Year, all!

On the topic of migrating POTS to VoIP, please allow me to make a
little prediction.

Regardless of how you feel about Internet regulation in general and
regulation of ISPs in particular, any industry spearheaded and/or FCC
mandated move of basic telephone services toward a VoIP model (other
than perhaps on private intranets) could well become the main force
for large-scale (mostly federal) regulation of the Net.

As far as I'm concerned, most existing VoIP (over the public Internet)
voice services now aren't even in the ballpark when it comes to
necessary levels of reliability, security, (and in many cases) voice
quality required for basic telephone service, particularly for
critical or emergency functions.  To a significant extent, existing
cellular networks fall into the same category.

It's one thing to chat with your friend in a distant country for a
penny a minute.  But for serious situations, we've been able to know
that we can still pick up a regular, landline phone and usually get
the calls through, without worrying about crashed routers, denial of
service attacks, peering disputes, arbitrary ISP actions, and all 
the rest.

To be sure, we've seen "dilution" of Plain Old Telephone Services
already.  Many neighborhood analog access lines are already provided
via remote terminals that are subject to the same limited power backup
constraints as are common with limited-battery cellular microcells.

Abuse of VoIP interfaces to the public switched phone network has
decimated the value of calling number ID by making forgery of caller
ID not only possible but a widely used service provided by
unscrupulous vendors.

Over time there will obviously be migration to all digital telephone
services, including subscriber access lines.  

But AT&T's recent FCC filing (for example) that seems to categorize
existing Internet VoIP and cellular services as suitable replacements
for conventional phone services (particularly in the current U.S.
environment where ISPs are largely unregulated) appears to be
pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking.

Before we can seriously talk about moving all phone users into
advanced digital environments, there is a tremendous amount of
technical and regulatory/policy work to be done, only a small bit of
which has been seriously advanced to date.

--Lauren--
NNSquad Moderator