Vonage's Citron: cable co. makes VoIP customers pay more
How do cable companies — many of which offer their own VoIP services — deal with customers who use Vonage or other VoIP providers? The answer, according to Vonage CEO Jeffrey Citron, is not well. Citron, who has previously dealt with ISPs that have blocked VoIP altogether, now says that one unnamed major cable company pushes customers that use Vonage to a higher-priced tier of service, and tells them that it's required by federal law. Of course, no such law exists, but Citron would like to see a law to protect his company from retaliation by broadband providers eager to market their own competing services — or just keep their all of their bandwidth from being sucked up by a handful of VoIP-using customers. Not surprisingly, cable and phone companies are against such regulation, preferring to let the market sort things out. While there's some logic to the providers' argument — that they built out the infrastructure for broadband and should be able to get a decent return on their investment — we have to wonder what they expected people to use broadband for. Text-only email? Web-browsing with lynx? The fact is, if you offer customers a fat pipe, they're going to use it every way they can, whether it's for music and video downloads, or for VoIP. And, as infrastructure providers, they're going to have to learn to be neutral about it. (Besides, if Skype doesn't kill Vonage, Google Talk just might.)
[Via Techdirt]
