Voice calling has been the engine of profit for the telcos for a century, and most of it has been old-fashioned switched voice -- what’s called “plain old telephone service,” or POTS. When VoIP was first introduced, everybody predicted that voice on the Internet would destroy the old POTS model. Now, with even service providers buying VoIP companies, it looks like that’s about to happen.
And the changes on the Internet could be profound.
Imagine for a moment that your voice services were all replaced by Skype or a similar service. If you open your calling to everyone, you can expect zillions of telemarketing calls with no hope of relief, because regulators can’t trace or even authenticate the user names.
Same with harassing calls. And if you call 911, maybe somebody will come -- maybe even to the location where you made the call -- but you probably can’t be certain. Forget wiretaps on criminals and potential terrorists, because there’s no guarantee lawful intercept will work.
Nobody is going to tolerate this sort of thing, but that’s what the future would look like if we simply transferred our voice calls to current IP-based services without additional steps and safeguards. To get some protection, we’d have to regulate these new voice services.
That might seem easy, a matter of regulators just broadening voice service regulations to cover VoIP. It’s not that easy. After all, we have regulations on some online behavior, including spam and malware, and much of it turns out to be unenforceable because either we can’t identify the source or the source is out of our legal jurisdiction. How is VoIP going to be different?
Shifting voice services to a data model will also have a major impact on mobile wireless services. With VoIP, for instance, can operators stop carrying over-the-top voice? Probably not, considering they are already being pressured not to do that. Look at the Skype or Google Voice-on-the-iPhone debates.
Some operators could just throw in the towel and offer data-only plans. If that occurs, will texting replace mobile voice? How will that impact our already-depersonalized culture? How will it impact our driving safety, considering most people can’t talk and drive, much less text and drive?
Speaking of operators, do they now have to prioritize voice traffic so that when Johnny is streaming HD to some of his many screens, he doesn’t stop mom from calling grandma, or maybe the doctor?
If we are saying that operators must prioritize voice, we’re getting into traffic management on a per-application basis, which is exactly what net neutrality principles are supposed to prevent.
Lots of bad things could happen here, but we may still have a chance to prevent most of them. For almost a decade, there’s been growing interest in the notion of service overlay networks, or SONs. A SON is a kind of VPN that is designed to keep traffic and connectivity for a specific service separate from other traffic in that it’s identifiable and can be secured and managed, but not segregated in the sense that it travels over different facilities.
By using SONs for VoIP networks, we could create the same kinds of rules we now have for voice without forcing constraints on our Internet experience. We don’t lose the benefit of a universal Internet, but we don’t create anarchy in a service experience we’ve all literally bet our lives on at some point or another.
SONs are advancing as a standard called the “Next Generation Service Overlay Network,” or NGSON, promoted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) , which has created a working group Website.
Presently, the focus of NGSON seems to be more on advanced services than on voice. This may be the time to push for NGSONs as a way of separating, regulating, and securing VoIP service before the greatest technology win of all time -- the victory of VoIP over traditional voice -- doesn’t become a big risk and loss to us all.
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