From
Spectrum Online
The convergence of telephony and the Internet is a great thing for consumers. It
makes voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services, such as Vonage, Packet8, and
Skype, possible.
In particular, Skype Technologies SA, in London, looms as a dagger poised to cut
your phone costs and your local phone company's profits. With its SkypeOut
service, a call anywhere in the world costs about 3 US cents per minute. And
when the recipient is also a Skype user, the call is absolutely free.
In some countries, such as Saudi Arabia, regulations protect a phone company's
revenues, prohibiting customers from saving money by making phone calls using
any service other than the national carrier, Saudi Telecom, based in Riyadh.
Skype users there have gleefully flouted those regulations, paying cheap local
tariffs to access the Internet and use it for their calls, instead of directly
using Saudi Telecom's expensive long-distance and international calling
services.
Although these Skype calls travel along Saudi Telecom's network, the national
carrier had been helpless to prevent the practice. VoIP phone calls were just
ordinary data packets, indistinguishable from Web and e-mail traffic. Until now.
A seven-year-old Mountain View, Calif., company, Narus Inc., has devised a way
for telephone companies to detect data packets belonging to VoIP applications
and block the calls. For example, now when someone in Riyadh clicks on Skype's
"call" button, Narus's software, installed on the carrier's network, swoops into
action. It analyzes the packets flowing across the network, notices what
protocols they adhere to, and flags the call as VoIP. In most cases, it can even
identify the specific software being used, such as Skype's.
Narus's software can
secure, analyze, monitor, and mediate any traffic in an
IP network, says Antonio Nucci, the company's chief technology officer. By
"mediate" he means block, or otherwise interfere with, data packets as they
travel through the network in real time.
Another of Narus's Skype-blocking customers is Giza Systems, a consulting
company that specializes in information technologies. Giza, which is based in
Cairo, Egypt, installed Narus's software on the network of a Middle Eastern
carrier in the spring. Nucci wouldn't say which one, but presumably it is
Telecom Egypt, the national phone company. Narus already has a close
relationship with the carrier, having written the software for its billing
system.
The desire to block or charge for VoIP phone calls extends far beyond the Middle
East. According to Jay Thomas, Narus's vice president of product marketing, it
can be found in South America, Asia, and Europe. International communications
giant Vodafone recently announced a plan to block VoIP calls in Germany, Thomas
says. A French wireless carrier, SFR, has announced a similar plan for France.
Nor is it just Skype that's at risk. Most international telephone calling cards
also use VoIP technology.
In the United States and many other countries, a phone company's common carrier
status prevents it from blocking potentially competitive services.
But there's nothing that keeps a carrier in the United States from
introducing jitter, so the quality of the conversation isn't good, Thomas
says. So the user will either pay for the carrier's voice-over-Internet
application, which brings revenue to the carrier, or pay the carrier for a
premium service that allows Skype use to continue. You can deteriorate the
service, introduce latency [audible delays in hearing the other end of the
line], and also offer a premium to improve it.
U.S. broadband-cable companies are considered information services, which by law
gives them the right to block VoIP calls. Comcast Corp., in Philadelphia, the
country's largest cable company, is already a Narus customer; Thomas declined to
say whether Comcast uses the VoIP-blocking capabilities.
In August, a Federal Communications Commission ruling gave phone companies the
same latitude for DSL.
Narus's software does far more than just frustrate Skype users. It can also
diagnose, and react to, denial-of-service attacks and dangerous viruses and
worms as they wiggle through a network. It makes possible digital wiretaps, a
capability that carriers are required by law to have.
However, these positive applications for Narus's software may not be enough to
make Internet users warm to its use. Protecting its network is a legitimate
thing for a carrier to do, says Alex Curtis, government affairs manager for
Public Knowledge, a consumer-interest advocacy group in Washington, D.C. But
it's another thing for a Comcast to charge more if I use my own TiVo instead of
the personal video recorder they provide, or for Time Warner, which owns CNN, to
charge a premium if I want to watch Fox News on my computer.
Such concerns used to be largely academic, because carriers had no way of
restricting the activities of their customers anyway. Software such as Narus's,
with its ability to do what the company euphemistically calls "content-based
billing," puts the issue front and center.
