I just finished reading this incredible news item from Hong Kong. It seems the dominant wireline telephone provider PCCE sent a letter to its broadband customers informing them of the risks associated with VoIP. They even mention Vonage’s recent outages as evidence. One can take issue with their point or dismiss it saying that the customers will be wiser.
But they also make a policy statement: “You should not be connecting your Netvigator broadband service to any unauthorised device other than your personal computer, as this may affect the quality of your broadband service,” For me this is unfathomable. Even if the local regulations allow an ISP to stipulate it, I wonder how they will know whether a customer is using an ATA or a softphone running on a PC. Next, are they going to list the approved applications that can run on the PC? If browser is such an approved application, what about the applet? Where will it end?
To repeat myself once more, the ISPs must be regulated at least to the extent that access is equally open to all applications.
Posted by aswath at September 9, 2004 03:30 PM