Source of Vonage blockage revealed

Damn, it turns out that there was a
local telephone company that was blocking Vonage. The FCC
has just fined North Carolina-based Madison River Communications, the nation's "17th largest phone company", 15 grand for blocking ports used for making
Voice over IP phone calls. By blocking those ports Madison River was effectively able to stop its DSL subscribers from using Vonage's phone service,
something Vonage obviously wasn't too psyched about, and we're stoked that the FCC came down on the right side on this one (to be honest VoIP seems to be just about the only thing the FCC is progressive about these days, though maybe that's only because it'd be hard to start censoring phone calls). A positive development, but don't be shocked to see port blocking become a bigger and bigger problem as more and more telcos start to feel threatened by VoIP (and just wait until they wake up and discover
Skype).