GigaOM

Telmex Blocking Skype, Vonage In Mexico?

Another monopolistic telco block VoIP. It won’t last long….

[...] nouncements, and baseball musings Chilean Incumbent Blocking VoIP First Telmex now Telefonica. Regular reader, Leo emailed me a link to story [...]

30,000 Pounds of Bananas

This morning, after my morning class and before dropping my girlfriend off at her work, we went to pay the phone bill at Telmex (who according to Om Malik has tried blocking Skype). This is still a process that amazes me. It shouldn’t. I should be use…

FACT 1
• Infinitum service is designed to provide Internet access at the best possible quality of service module or “Best-Effort (BE)� as it is known worldwide, in which there is no mechanical implementation that differentiate services or applications.
• This is the way the Internet was originally conceived, based on the delivery of “best-effort� data, point-by-point.
• Infinitum is not designed to distinguish traffic types or priorities. All of the data packages are treated equally.
• Infinitum service will be provided without a commitment value in certain parameters like in the case of percentage losses in the database, jitter, delays, etc.
• We cannot guarantee continuous functioning under this definition of net in real time applications, like remote video, multimedia conferences, Internet voice or virtual reality, because of variable delays and the potential loss that naturally occurs in the Internet.

FACT 2
• All ports are open in the Infinitum service.
• Firewalls on the customer’s side can cause that certain applications cannot use some of the ports.
• Telmex does not block any sites.
• Like all of the major ISP’s of the world, a DNS degradation caused by worms, request an explosion of information and will temporarily compromise the service.

FACT 3
• PTP (Peer-to-Peer )traffic deteriorates the user experience and can cause congestion to Internet access.
• The congestion caused by P2P is because of the use of applications like: Kazza, Edonkey, Bittorrent, Limewire, Morpheus, Emule, etc,
• P2P will radically change traffic behavior.
• P2P increases operator costs on traffic and Internet capacity.
• P2P complicates Internet planning.
• P2P prevents the development of sensitive services to quality services
• (QoS)(VoIP)
• Infinitum service has experienced enourmus P2P traffic explosion. That is very similar to the one experienced by European operators: P2P traffic can variate between60%-80% of the total.
• In the U.S., traffic fluctuation is between 60% to 65%
• 10% of customers consume 80% of the available bandwidth .
It is not only what customers´ download from the Internet (perceptible to them), it is also what other consumers are downloading in other PC´s (not perceptible), what consumes all of the customer´savailable bandwidth. .
• The impact on Internet traffic on P2P applications is not only measured by the amount and file size exchanged, but also by the process involved in this system.
• All equipment connected to these applications establish constant communication and are victims of the process of other equipments searching also for files and because of this, the equipment is permanently emitting information.
• It is even worse when a customer decides to configure a PC as Supernode that absorbs all of the available bandwidth.

FACT 4

• The unpredictable and continuous “worm� attack, and SPAM has grown out of proportion
• Worms like “MyDoom and Bagle� (the Troyan like Phatbol) give control of the equipment to “Hackers�. This huge net of zombies and compromised equipment (so-called “Botnets�) can be used for “SPAM� distribution or used as a platform for DDos attacks (denial of service) throughout the Internet.
• SPAMERS use these mechanisms to hide their real IP addresses.
• A huge amount of SPAM (between 60% to 80%) is originated in “SPAM ZOMBIES�.
• When you have a large group of equipment carrying out these attacks, it is very difficult to locate the origin of these attacks and solve them in real time , without causing massive interference on other Internet operations and to real and legitimate users.

FACT 5
The challenge for the major ISP´s is:
• Introduce control mechanisms without creating Internet delays.
• Face constant traffic growth, risk of degradation of the service and the Internet costs related to P2P traffic.

FACT 6
• For Infinitum service we have not implemented a technology that will make the prioritization of some Internet services possible. Eventually, we will evolve in this direction in order to provide and guarantee the provision and charge of these services.
• Eventually, we will offer Internet services with a different commitment “QoS� (Quality of service), with a SLA mechanism (service level agreements).
• In order to support services with “Real time� quality, we need to modify the infrastructure to follow up with these Internet characteristics from beginning to end.
• We will acquire the capacity to control the distribution of Internet bandwidth for each user with different types of traffic. Therefore, we need to divide total traffic in different categories and assign a minimum percentage of total bandwidth to each one, under high usage and congestion conditions.
• These different kinds of traffic can represent different kinds of users and protocols.
• In a Net with these characteristics, the cost for the use of this particular service will be higher than the traditional best-effort transfer.

FACT 7
• Recent surveys reflect that Infinitum is a product with the highest satisfaction index that is above average of the G-8 Group members.
• Our commitment is to offer our customers with the best bandwidth service and we constantly improve the infrastructure introduce new benefits and enhance capacity.

ANNEX.

Clauses from the contract between the user and Prodigy INFINITUM.
SEVENTH. POLICIES OF INTERNET USE.

The use of the SERVICE as a Customer, implies the acceptance and conformity of the following:

• The customer is aware of the nature of the INTERNET and its limitations, its technical qualities and the response time to consult, question, or transfer data and information.
• Social, political cultural, among other events, can sometimes cause that the use of the INTERNET to increase significantly affecting optimal operational conditions., causing a temporary saturation that creates a delay in the Service.
• The customer understands that the Internet is a net in a net of networks, and the paralyzation of one of these nets can cause temporary saturation that slows down Service.
• TELMEX will not be held responsible for any damage or loss of information by the customer, caused by configuration, delays, non-delivery, failed deliveries, errors or Service interruption.
• The customer recognizes that any information, product or service available through the INTERNET, different from those provided by TELMEX, are provided by other users or other parties, which are responsible of supporting or maintaining their information, products or services.

Since all telecom operators face this kind of challenge, many of them are using the same trick against VoIP traffic growth. The ones who worry the most currently are mobile operators, with the coming of 3G/UMTS: this enables customers to convert their expensive and limited voice traffic into cheaper data traffic, and the cost of data traffic is expected to drop sharply in the future as competition increases. For example, SFR in France is doing pretty much the same as Telmex for its users : it detects VoIP users by detecting typical traffic patterns, then introduces random delays / bandwidth variation to degrade the service.

Ror, how sure are you about SFR? actually can you send me more details on this?

thanks

I use Telmex and though I’m not happy with their service nor support, I haven’t had any problems over skype.

Do the cable internet providers generally allow VOIP connections?

I didn’t had any problems in Telmex before until today. I’ve call once or twice a week to ukraine, every week, all this year.
Today, the call was hanging after one or two minutes on a call.
Then I decided to call Skype-to-phone, it was the exact same thing, (so, it was not a problem in the other end), the call hanged in 1-2 minutes.
Definely something wrong is going on.

Help!!!
We have Vonage. We are in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico.We got it hooked up in late November of 2005. It worked like a dream! It is now 1 February and the quality is so awful and garbled it is virtually unusable! It just ggot REALLY unusable a few days ago when we discontinued our Telmex service. I s this a coincidence or the reason…..
If not , will the Vonage quality return as mysteriously as it vanished or are we screwed?
Please respnd…this is the pits!
Thanks, Wendy E

I am in Zapopan(ie Guadalajara metro area) and using Skype over Telecable and have not had problems. However I want to get hooked up with Vonage when I travel back to the US in July. But before I go though the effort I want to know how it works with Telecable or ego(At&T). If anybody has experiance with these other providers or with Telmex in the GDL area please let me know.

This TelMex blocking Vonage is not a surprise for me.
TelMex: Carlos Slim are a monopoly that work together wit government…ALL ARE TRASH

I also use Vonage a lot and having a good service here in USA. I am returning to Morelia, Michoacan to join my wife and kids. Anybody can recommend a good DSL / ADSL / T1 service for usage of Vonage. Some say Telmex is blocking Vonage. Can somebody recommend a good High Speed service provider at Morelia.

I am using Telmex DSL service in Pátzcuaro, Mich. My Vonage phone worked fine for several months, then suddenly stopped working. Vonage support finally recomended that I open certain ports through the hardware firewall. Instead, I in effect moved the Vonage IP address completely outside the firewall. This restored service, and Vonage now has no problems.

It is unclear why it suddenly became necessary to do this, but at about the same time, Web service via Telmex became very unreliable — lots of disconnects and connection reset errors. It is now almost impossible to download any large files; some Web sites will not connect (the browser just sits there waiting for response), and I often cannot connect to the AOL POP server (i.e., will not ping). On some days, I only get an email download once or twice all day, even though Outlook checks for mail on the server every five minutes! SMTP seems to work almost all of the time. I have run all of the diagnostics (both mine, Telmex’s and 2Wire’s) and none of them show a problem on my LAN or with the DSL connection (I am about three blocks from the CO, and my DSL signal is very strong), except that I get an indication of suspicious Impulse Noise Comp. Tones. Telmex support agreed there was a problem of some kind, and promised to send a field service tech. three weeks ago — so far, no show!

Anyway, I can assure you that whatever problems Telmex may have, they do not block VOIP.