Thursday, April 26, 2012

Telco's starting to charge extra for VoIP traffic

TeliaSonera has declared that it will start charging users higher rates for VoIP traffic according to the WSJ. AFAIK this makes them the first ISP to do this. Now, I've said it before that I would really like to see ISPs start to introduce quality of service management for different traffic classes on their network. This will be an integral part of the NBN, but it is not seen in many residential offerings and I have yet to see it anywhere in mobile networks. Now, if TeliaSonera started to differentiate the voice traffic AND used packet marking and adjusted queues on routers etc. to optimise the call flows then they could possibly justify charging extra. However, it is hard to justify charging extra without some sort of service differentiation. In order for people to accept the charges you need to give them a carrot, otherwise you're just beating them with a stick and pissing them off in the process.

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