|
What is VOIP Blocking? |
|
It used to be that the major telephone companies owned all of the voice lines and traffic worldwide. If you wanted to make a phone call it had to travel entirely through their systems. While the quality and reliability of this system was un-paralleled it came at great cost. As the internet matured people experimented with digitizing phone calls and sending them across the internet for free or at a very small price. At first there were many hurdles. The internet was designed to transmit data in a non time critical pattern. It didn't matter if information arrived at various times or even in a non sequential manner. The computer on the other end would take this data and sort it all out and present it. However voice data had to arrive in sequence and without significant delay in order to work. After all, a conversation with a 20 second delay in which the first few words came last and the middle words came first wouldn't work. After several years several companies introduced functional technology that would allow reliable voice communication across the internet. This type of service is known as VOIP (Voice over IP). Several companies these days offer this service and provide low cost calling around the world. Unfortunately, by bypassing the telephone companies for a good portion of the call the phone companies revenue started suffering. Many phone companies who also happened to own the internet access of their customers started blocking this type of data traffic, trying to force consumer into using their more costly alternatives. Governments around the world concerned about the profits of state owned telephone companies also began blocking this type of service on a country wide basis. Today all over the world companies and governments are trying to block VOIP for any number of reasons. The reason that VOIP blocking works is that the system works on various well defined ports that can easily be shut off without preventing access to the web. Continued...What to do about VOIP blocking.
|