On 17 Mar 2005, at 19:51, David Zanetti wrote:
Maybe I misunderstand what Telecom is allegedly doing, but mucking about with TCP won't do much.
I don't know anything more than what was in the article, but I presumed that the author had used "TCP" when in fact "IP" would have been more sensible. If "TCP" is just shorthand for "TCP/IP", then your analysis is probably over-literal.
Unless they're mucking with latency on _all_ packets, but that'd kill a ton of other stuff off as well.
A 500ms delay is easy to pick up on a telephone, and is about the right amount to make a conversation stilted and annoying. It's probably not obvious in many other (mainstream) protocols, though (although it'd hurt TCP performance, which people might pick up on). How about a differential queuing approach, whereby voice calls are normally fine, but suddenly sound like crap as soon as someone uses a web browser? You could always tunnel voice over something else, and if you were running a small, enterprise-scale service you'd probably get away with it. If you tried to do that for a commercial, residential SIP service, though, I have a feeling that your traffic would become classifiable fairly swiftly. Anyway, it seems odd that Telecom New Zealand was singled out for mention. Maybe that was just the name that came up when Cringley clicked the random-telco-name-generator, and it's not a reference to any leaked plan after all. Joe