SBC, Verizon Quickly Claim They Have Nothing To Do With Vonage Blocking
from the it-wasn't-us! dept
Earlier this week, we noted that Vonage was claiming that some rural telcos were blocking Vonage traffic on their broadband offerings in order to force customers to stay on their phone network, rather than jumping to VoIP. However, it wasn't entirely clear who was blocking the VoIP calls, and there was some speculation that it might have been some of the larger players. However, Verizon and SBC both have publicly claimed that it's not them and Qwest made a cryptic statement about how they have a relationship with Vonage (so would they block them if they didn't?). Of course, it's not like SBC hasn't tried other tricks to make life difficult on VoIP players in the past. However, the good thing about all of this is that even the big players are getting a taste of what the public reaction would be if they ever tried to block VoIP. That's not to say they won't eventually try to do something, but they should have fair warning that it's a strategy that's likely to backfire in a major way.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
