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.
