A couple of weeks back Duane Freese wrote in Tech Central Station argued why AT&T petition be granted. That petition essentially requests that all communication that uses IP network even partially be exempted from access charges. Mr. Freese suggests that not doing it is “class arbitrage” because only “poor or lower middle class” do not have access to computers and so will be disadvantaged. It turned out that the column was a bit premature. It looks like that he was expecting that FCC will exempt computer originated communication from regulations. But FCC has concluded that (at least for now) only end-to-end VoIP should be exempted from regulation because it is an “information service”. Based on some of the reports on the statements made by the Commissioners during the review, it looks like any call to/from PSTN will encounter the same set of regulations independent of the origin/destination. I hope they hold to this line of thinking. Otherwise, all service providers will use VoIP technology just before handing the traffic to the LECs, just to avoid the charges, and the industry will not put much effort is deploying VoIP in the access. In other words, VoIP will become a regulatory tool and the technology will not advance to benefit the consumers.
Posted by aswath at February 17, 2004 05:42 PM