August 23, 2005 General 2

Advanced IP Pipeline | Vonage Claims Price ‘Blocking’ Of VoIP
ASPEN, Colo. — Vonage Holdings, the poster child in the debate about how open Internet services need to be, claimed Monday that an unnamed service provider was forcing its broadband customers to pay a premium to use Vonage?s Voice over IP services.

While it wasn?t a case of outright ?blocking? of VoIP like the company has previously experienced, Vonage CEO Jeffrey Citron used the example of the extra-fee-for-VoIP incident as part of his argument in favor of a ?broadband bill of rights,? that would put into law the type of service a user of broadband services could expect.

?Those who say there?s not a network neutrality problem need to take their head out of the sand,? said Citron, speaking on a panel at the Progress & Freedom Foundation?s Aspen Summit conference here. While the FCC was able to bring judgement against a firm that previously tried to block Vonage services, Citron said that right now ?there is no law that prohibits [blocking], so you can?t adjucate against it.?
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This is so unintelligent. You provide a service that’s true..but you provide the service over somebody else’s network. When that network gets tired of you piggybacking they block you or make it hard for you to freeload. Get over it. If you want true neutrality, build your own network. If I had Comcast’s or Time Warner’s network and i had VOIP you bet I would restrict Vonage. Why? It’s my network and i can do what i want with it. If I did not have VOIP or I just did not want to bother with it then I would work with Vonage or another VOIP provider and have them do it for me. It comes down to the networks are not Vonage’s and therefore Vonage has no right to freeload off of it unless the network operator decides they can.