Quote:
Originally Posted by tw
Comcast (who denied and then were caught subverting Skype packets
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Not responding to tw, but to the rest of you;
Here is a terrible example of how tw's mind has gone. A DECADE ago I debunked that, and then some time later debunked it again.
IIRC some company (that wanted to sell to Comcast) released a press release saying they have the ability to detect and change voice traffic on networks, suggesting that this would be useful for these companies to "manage" voice traffic, perhaps by subverting it; and tw fell for it, assumed it was perfected and happening every day. And now he has it cemented in his brain, so every few years he makes the error again.
It was just a press release, and nobody actually showed that anybody was doing anything; I imagine we could even find the post and show that the company that issued it never went anywhere; I don't believe they were a current vendor for Comcast but I may be wrong on that part.
Well, well, well... now
I have wound up working in the VoIP industry. Surprise, I have become a call-over-IP engineer. So now I am no longer a layperson to that conversation. And now I can see how insanely stupid it was. And how right I was to declare that Comcast was not subverting any voice traffic and never would.
ALLLLL of telephony is transported over data networks. A huge amount of it, maybe a majority of business traffic, goes over the public internet. Any subversion of these packets is EASILY and IMMEDIATELY detectable and considered network failure.
These days, Comcast will be thrown out of a building for not providing a network that can handle call traffic where they aren't a call trunk provider. Even if they ARE a trunk provider, call traffic will go through their network constantly. Different buildings connecting to each other, forwarding of calls that came in one network and go out another, etc.
There's a whole protocol that manages this. You can detect and debug all of it with the press of a button in open-source software. Nobody subverts anything; in fact, they spend all of their days making sure the network supports it.
In short, expect tw not to remember any of this and bring it up again in three years.
ETA: search google for "comcast subverts skype" and the second result is our old thread. The first result is a PDF from Comcast explaining how to use Skype on their service.