VoIP blocked by some telecom companies

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VoIP customers around the world are discovering that their calls cannot be connected because telecom companies are blocking the movement of such traffic across the net. Jane Dudman finds out why

Theodore Peckler lives in Monrovia, California, and is one of the 1.5 million people in the US who uses Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems to make cheap phone calls via his cable modem connection. But last year, after five months using the VoIP service from the US provider Vonage without problems, he noticed an abrupt deterioration. "The line was choppy, very choppy and you could not understand any words spoken," he recalls. Puzzled, Peckler ran pingplotter - a program to detect problems such as packet loss and latency (delays in sending over the separate "packets" of internet traffic). It revealed major latency between his cable modem and local internet service provider (ISP).

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