From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Apr 12 01:00:18 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i3C50Ir22186; Mon, 12 Apr 2004 01:00:18 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 01:00:18 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200404120500.i3C50Ir22186@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #179 TELECOM Digest Mon, 12 Apr 2004 01:00:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 179 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Who is "VOIP News"? (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) Re: CRTC: VOIP is Just Phone Service (Fred Goldstein) Re: CRTC: VoIP is Just Phone Service (John Levine) Re: Spam Issues (SELLCOM Tech support) Re: Spam Issues (Tom Betz) Re: Spam Issues (jmeissen@aracnet.com) ACD Software Solutions (Saravanan) Who Needs a Spam Trap Address (TELECOM Digest Editor) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 22:59:38 GMT From: joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) Subject: Who is "VOIP News"? Organization: Excelsior Computer Services In light of the recent spate of postings from "VOIP News," I'm wondering of this is really a news service. So far, it looks more like a propaganda campaign designed to promote certain aspects of VoIP. (I also note that there is a website, "www.voip-news.com," which is, in fact, a "technology marketing and lead generation" website, and not a news service. Any connection?) I have no problem with anyone posting ideas, of course, "propaganda" or otherwise, but so far it seems like the "news" aspect is a bit misleading. Just wondering. -Joel [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I work from Jack Decker's VOIP News in Yahoo Groups. It arrives here in my mail each day with a 'From:' line of 'Jack Decker@someaddress.yahoogroups.com'. At Jack's request, I do as follows: I bash the 'From:' line to make it read 'VOIP News' and so that it meets other technical requirements I add the phrase '' as the 'email address' of the sender. And hopefully people reply to the 'Reply to' address. He has this digest address as a 'subscriber' to his group, getting daily messages. I do not know anything about a site called 'www.voip-news.com'. Maybe Jack Decker knows about it. Jack, could you help us out here? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 22:04:16 -0400 From: Fred Goldstein Subject: Re: CRTC: VOIP is Just Phone Service John Levine wrote on 11 Apr 2004 14:47:26 -0000 > On the contrary, it's the most sensible ruling about VoIP I've ever > seen. > VoIP advocates have a bad habit of talking out of both sides of their > mouths. On the one hand, VoIP is fabulous, it's amazing, it's > disruptive, it's going to be so cheap it'll drive all the dinosaur > telcos out of business. On the other hand, VoIP is so delicate and > fragile that unless it gets a special exemption and doesn't pay the > taxes that real telephones pay, it'll shrivel up and die even though > it already gets a huge free ride on top of Internet connections that > cost between $30 and $50 per month, but nobody seems to think are part > of the cost of VoIP. Indeed. The CRTC tentative position is perfectly sensible, because it isn't about VoIP at all. It simply says that if you're selling telephone service, it doesn't matter if you're doing it with VoIP or TDM or ATM or anything else. If you're a dominant provider (read: ILEC), then you're regulated as dominant; if you're not dominant, then you're subject to very little regulation. And if it's computer-to- computer VoIP, not touching the PSTN, then it's really hands off. So what's to complain about? But then John got a reply from a Mr. News, who so loves VoIP that he apparently took it as his first name: > From: VOIP News > John, in my opinion the flaw in your logic is that you think "VoIP > advocates" want special treatment for VoIP, even though what we're > really asking is that it be treated like any other *Internet > application*. VoIP gets no more of a "free ride" than e-mail, web > browsing, instant messaging, streaming audio and video, usenet news, > or any of the other thousands of applications that people run over > their Internet connections. That is the case with "computer to computer" VoIP, which both the FCC and the CRTC have given the hands-off to. Indeed Jeff Pulver's snide remark comparing Canada with Panama totally missed that distinction. Panama has tried to ban computer-to-computer VoIP because it does threaten their huge international call termination revenues. Not the same thing at all, and indeed probably futile. Mr. News misses the point: > Think about this: If you try to tax Internet telephony, what's to stop > people from making an "Internet walkie-talkie" application (there > actually was such a thing once, I don't recall the name offhand, but I > think it went belly-up in the big dot-com bust. But a similar program > could easily be created). Now you don't have telephony per se, you're > just shipping audio files back and forth. Where, exactly, do you make > the distinction between "audio files" and "telephony", and do you > really want government officials trying to draw that line? Nobody in the USA or Canada is trying to tax such applications! The ONLY question concerns what happens when you interface to the PSTN, or offer a PSTN-attached telephone service. > I find it interesting that on your web site you (correctly) conclude > that e-postage for e-mail won't work. I wonder why, then, you are so > comfortable with the idea that voice communications over the Internet > should have taxes and fees applied. In my opinion, like e-postage, it > simply won't work, primarily because people won't accept the higher > costs. Well, I disagree with John about e-postage, though I don't think it should have anything to do with the government. But it's a red herring to talk about the Internet. The question concerns telephony. It comes down to this one question: How much should Verizon, SBC, or Citizens charge when you call one of their subscribers from across the country? And the problem the current system of telephone pricing, which is permitted but not required by the Telecom Act of 1996, and which was created in 1983 as a substitute for the old pre-competition Separations & Settlements process. It's based on call classification. The *wholesale* price that a carrier gets or pays for one leg of a call depends on how the call is classified. There are three classes in the USA: * Telephone exchange service. This is the legal category that includes local calls. * Exchange access service. This is what long distance companies are supposed to pay the local exchange carrier at *both* ends of a toll call, to cover the local carriers' costs when the LD carrier does the billing. It is generally set high enough to create subsidies to support local carriers, especially rural ones. In other words, it's an entitlement given to LECs. (It's not nearly as important to SBC as it is to Citizens and the rural cooperatives, whose access rates are much higher.) * Information access service. This is when an ISP or other such provider is at one end of a call. The FCC, uh, discovered this one hidden between the pages of the Telecom Act in 2001, in order to take away reciprocal compensation from CLECs serving ISPs. But Information Access has a long, tortured history. In 1983, such calls (to "Enhanced service providers") were viewed as not quite local, but "exempt" from switched access charges, because frankly everyone thought they were local, and they weren't long distance calls, which is what the access charge system was designed for. In 1987, the FCC proposed dropping the exemption, in other words reclassifying ESP-bound calls (remember, they weren't ISPs yet) as if they were toll. This caused a BIG STINK and got cleverly nicknamed the "modem tax". The Bells wanted it, but Congress didn't, and the FCC backed down. The Bells tried again in 1996 but by then the Internet was "In" and thus the idea was politically untenable. A rather important reason that the Modem Tax didn't happen -- that ISP-bound calls are NOT viewed as LD -- is that voice and data are different! We argued, quite convincingly, that the nature and value of ISP-bound calls are very different from toll calls. The "communication" may be worldwide, but the "telecommunications" tends to be local, just to the modem, and the ISP does a lot of processing in the meantime. Lots of "oversubscription" of the interstate bandwidth, too. The argument stuck, and ISP-bound calls are not LD. But some VoIP fanatics, like Mr. News, are ignoring that history and view the exemption as if it were the most powerful entitlement. So rather than have no modem tax because voice isn't data, they want voice to be exempt because it's kind of like data, sort of, in that it's possible to run them both over IP. A lot of VoIP doesn't touch the Internet. It's plain old LD where the trunks between the switches use IP rather than TDM for multiplexing. What makes this so Special? Where indeed do you draw the line between "Internet" and "telephony"? As far as I'm concerned, the only tenable answer is to do away with the classification system altogether. But not to give favorable treatment to one technology (VoIP) over others (TDM, ATM, Frame, etc.). That declassification is, in fact, encouraged in the Sununu bill now before Congress; I think that bill is basically a hint to the FCC, more than serious legislation for this Session of Congress. But who knows? The CRTC never, so far as I know, had the same rules for "information access", so the context is different. Their access-charge equivalent scheme is different too. But they are clear about not favoring one technology over another. Hardly a reason to insult them. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You refer sort of disparagingly to a so-called "Mr. News" which is simply an alias Jack Decker uses here for the output of his VOIP newsgroup so as to not get his personal email address all spammed up. I do not control Jack Decker and his editorial policies; I simply use his stuff because I also happen to feel VOIP is the way telecom is going. If anything, I am sort of sorry I did not 'think of the idea first' (of a VOIP specialty news group) before he did. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 12 Apr 2004 02:54:50 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: CRTC: VoIP is Just Phone Service Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA >> VoIP advocates have a bad habit of talking out of both sides of their >> mouths. ... > John, in my opinion the flaw in your logic is that you think "VoIP > advocates" want special treatment for VoIP, even though what we're > really asking is that it be treated like any other *Internet > application*. ... Then you should be a very happy guy, because all of the proposals I've seen do just that, treat VoIP like any other Internet application. If you have Internet-only VoIP that connects only to other Internet users, it's not subject to phone taxes. If you run VoIP over a broadband connection, that doesn't make the broadband subject to phone taxes. (The weird politics of DSL make some DSL subject to phone taxes, but that's unrelated to whether there's VoIP in the picture.) But if you use VoIP to connect to the network that provides access to the other billion phones in the world, that makes it a real phone, and that's what makes it subject to phone taxes. This is so obvious that it's hard to believe that the anti-tax people are so dim that they don't grasp this. > If U.S. providers are forced to impose these taxes, what's to stop > some VoIP company from setting up shop in Mexico or Bermuda or > England and offering tax-free calls to U.S. customers? Other than the fact that Mexico, Bermuda, or England charge their own phone taxes, which are probably higher than the ones in the U.S., and will apply them to anyone who interconnects with their phone network, nothing. What's your point? > Think about this: If you try to tax Internet telephony, what's to > stop people from making an "Internet walkie-talkie" application That's what Pulver's FWD is. If you're satisfied with a phone that can only talk to the other 4000 people on FWD, tax-free, that's fine, go ahead. If you'd rather have a real phone that can talk to the billion other real phones in the world, you owe the same taxes as any other real phone, be it ILEC, CLEC, mobile, or VoIP. Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY http://www.taugh.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: At what point, John, should an application which was designed primarily for computers (as VOIP is) become part of the telephone network? When it has *any* interchange with the phone network, some interchange with the phone network, or exclusive interchange, or what? We talk about Vonage as if it were somehow different than Pulver/FWD for example, but the only real difference is that Vonage 'defaults' to NANPA-style telephone numbers and is mostly used on the public telephone network. I suggest that is only because most folks are still not signed up with Vonage. Just like Pulver/FWD where non-NANPA numbers are assigned and the default condition is computer-to-computer you can hop off to the public telephone network if desired, by appending a star * before the dialing string, but he does not advertise it much. My copy of his software, however, allows *16203306774 to ring the my cellular phone just as 290756 rings my Windows 98 computer. His 'default' is a five or six digit number to get another computer, add the star in front to get a NANPA phone. Vonage gives free calls also if you are calling another Vonage customer computer to computer. Vonage does not touch the telephone network either in that case, except to 'borrow' the NANPA numbering system. So who is and who is not the 'primarily computer application' in that case, Pulver/FWD or Vonage? Vonage *advertises* call anyone with a phone. Pulver advertises 'call other computers'. But both of them can do either way, but with Pulver you have to put the asterisk at the start of the dialing string; with Vonage the call never goes near the phone network if there is any way around it (another Vonage subscriber.) I suggest the intention of the software author should be the way the application is defined. Both Vonage, and Pulver/FWD and several other programmers claim to be serving people through Voice Over Internet. If one kind of service cannot coincidentally use the network of another kind of service without an issue being made of it, then what are we to do? We all agree that just because modems of necessity have to use the telephone network that the idea of a 'modem tax' to the phone company (or government) is uncalled for. Why should VOIP which happens to frequently use the phone network be any different? So you want to have a 'VOIP tax' since they touch the telephone network but don't want to have a 'modem tax' for much the same reasons? PAT] ------------------------------ From: SELLCOM Tech support Subject: Re: Spam Issues Organization: www.sellcom.com Reply-To: support@sellcom.com Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 03:18:06 GMT jmeissen@aracnet.com posted on that vast internet thingie: > While you may be frustrated with the list maintainers, your complaint > should be with the administrator of the site you're trying to email. > It's their choice to use the list that's negatively impacting their > email system. At the least you should be able to get them to whitelist > you. If the site administration has left themselve unreachable email > or phone then they are truly irresponsible. The administrator of the site was quite cooperative and generous with his time. The point is that many administrators just see "spam blackhole lists" and apparently don't know how to evaluate the quality. The admin had no idea what "FIVETEN" was. When I first set up our servers I really had no clue about blackhole list quality (till one went berserk and blocked our main supplier). > It's a shame that spammers have caused site administrators to feel that > it's necessary to use such drastic and draconian measures. Oh, I use several blackhole lists on our servers and it blocks a lot of spam. That is the more reason that I am concerned about lazy or incompetent people running them irresponsibly and advertising them like "FIVETEN". These trash are willing to wholesale interfere with legitimate companies and to some their greatest concern is that I call them "trash" rather than what they are doing. Irresponsible trash like FIVETEN may well end up mucking things up for the legit blackhole list providers. I know about the standard "disclaimer" that only the admins make the decision to block email yada yada but I really don't think that would hold up in court since they KNOW that their list will be used by third parties to block email. How do you spell "negligence"? (Remember here that my sympathies lie WITH the legit black hole operators!!! and other anti-spam utils etc.. We use several of them.) I also don't think a spammer could prevail in court against one. But you let some legitimate business suffer some real damage because of irresponsible trash like FIVETEN and sue and win that could have a dampening effect on what is a very valuable resource against real spammers. FIVETEN has us blackholed because of spam from X.X.208.x and we are x.x.22.x. Think how you would feel if your email to customers was being blocked without cause. BTW, we spend way more time out of the day that we should taking the time to report spammers. We also don't even use email advertising to our own customers since the environment has been so trashed by spammers. Steve at SELLCOM http://www.sellcom.com Discount multihandset cordless phones by Siemens, AT&T, Panasonic, Motorola Vtech 5.8Ghz; TMC ET4000 4line Epic phone, OnHoldPlus, Beamer, Watchguard! Brick wall "non MOV" surge protection. Mini-Splitter log splitter! If you sit at a desk www.ergochair.biz you owe it to yourself. ------------------------------ From: Tom Betz Subject: Re: Spam Issues Date: Mon, 12 Apr 2004 02:44:32 +0000 (UTC) Organization: XOme Quoth Tom Betz in news:telecom23.178.8@telecom- digest.org: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If I made you look better than you feel > you deserved (to look) then you are quite welcome. PAT] Note to confused bystanders: I didn't intend that e-mail to Pat for publication, but I was thanking Pat for combining two separately- submitted posts into one, so it looks as though my response was better thought out it realy was. The second question didn't occur to me until several minutes after I had already submitted the first. "I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection." - W.S. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: To further confuse bystanders (not really!) I do that a lot and did not think that was what he had in mind. If I get two or more messages from the same person responding to the same topic to go in the same issue, I attempt to batch them all up, run them in sequence and cut out the sigs and dashed lines (---) in the middle and the envelope header on the next message (from the same writer.) I do that a lot (some of you have seen it here) and it did not occur to me *that* was what he was thanking me for, thus the sort of confused and bewildered very generic reply I gave him in print in that issue. **Do me a favor, people! ** Something you are writing to me personally (not for the Digest) should be marked plainly 'Not For Publication' in the subject line or maybe the first line of text. You notice how I batch all the replies on a given topic next to each other for your ease in reading and replying; I do the same thing with more than one message on the same topic from the same reader usually. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jmeissen@aracnet.com Subject: Re: Spam Issues Date: 12 Apr 2004 01:30:29 GMT Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com In article , Barry Margolin wrote: > In article , jmeissen@aracnet.com > wrote: >> Fortunately, or unfortunately, blackhole sites are nothing more than >> publishers. > Isn't this similar to the argument given by people who operate web > sites that list abortion doctors, when they are included as > conspirators or accessories when these doctors get murdered? Hardly. One advocates murdering doctors, the other preventing spam. I fail to see any similarity at all. John Meissen jmeissen@aracnet.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And when I used to run my 'business directory'-- remember those? -- chock full of spammers toll free numbers (when spammers were foolish enough to have those; a few still do), I guess the same thing could be said about me; my 'express intention' was to encourage people to abuse the spammers by bankrupting them on their phone bill. I wish someone would build another of those 'business directories' for me to use here; they were a lot of fun. PAT] ------------------------------ From: gvanan@yahoo.com (Saravanan Govindasamy) Subject: ACD Software Solutions Date: 11 Apr 2004 21:19:22 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi there, I need ACD software solutions for a Ericsson PABX and NEC's Aspire PABX. Please let me know if you have the solution. Thank you. Regards, Saravanan Govindasamy ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 23:23:07 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Who Needs a Spam Trap Address? I was reading through John Levine's new web page on the technical aspects of filtering or trying to eliminate spam. He mentioned that there are email addresses used specifically to 'trap spammers' (or I guess, identify them). Well, I would like to volunteer an address I have here at the Digest (through massis.lcs.mit.edu) -- not my own, but another one I do not use at all -- as a spam catching/trapping service. It receives at least a dozen pieces of mail each day which are nothing but spam, As I said it has no human owner at all. Anyone running a trap who wants these addresses each day can just let me know where to pipe them to your spam-trap filter, and I will start delivering them daily or more often. I am not talking about what the spam assassin finds (another 80-100 items each time I do a Digest. These are items that just go to that other address. Please advise if you can use them. By the way, John, those are all very good pages. Did you write them all yourself? For a very good tehnical education on spam I recommend everyone look at http://www.taugh.com PAT] ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. If you donate at least fifty dollars per year we will send you our two-CD set of the entire Telecom Archives; this is every word published in this Digest since our beginning in 1981. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #179 ******************************