John Linton
....and wonder what age group these sorts of people belong to.
By these sorts of people, in this instance, I mean the writers of this article and the 'audience' they wrote it for:
http://apcmag.com/optus_threatens_customers_over_voip_calls.htm
Unless I'm misreading it, and I may well be, it appears to be saying that it is wrong for a carrier (Optus in this case - also the carrier this particular 'magazine' never loses an opportunity of attacking every time it can) to try and ensure its services aren't used to give a free ride to third parties.
My understanding of the background of providing mobile services, Australia wide, is that it takes well in excess of $A5 billion in capital investment and a pay back period of greater than ten years - a pretty significant investment in an Australian context and one that only three, possibly four, companies have ponied up the money to do. My further understanding is that the mobile carriers devise their convoluted "capped" and "unlimited" plans as marketing devices to make people with less numeracy skills than they should have lock themselves in to paying a lot of money each month for 24 months or so.
The 'unlimited" and "capped" offerings are, of course, not "unlimited" or "capped" at all in any real sense being 'ameliorated' by more ts and cs and 'excepts' than any averagely intelligent person can get their mind around - however that is how mobile marketing in this, and other countries, has developed so few if any people either "read the fine print" or actually check on the 'excepts'.
One thing even the most mentally challenged person should be able to understand is that it isn't commercially possible to make a call from a mobile in Australia to another country at NO CHARGE. Surely even the dumbest of the dumb would understand that there is a cost for making ANY phone call and that cost has to be paid? All that the "free international call" companies listed in the article are doing is to try and exploit the service offered by a mobile/wire line carrier for their own profits and now one of the carriers they are trying to exploit has closed one of their loopholes by pointing out it breaches their published ts and cs. It really doesn't matter that any individual believes the specific restriction isn't "fair" or "reasonable" or any thing else - they agreed to it prior to signing up to use the service and it's contractually binding.
Whether or not Optus is in fact able to 'refuse' to provide interconnect to a third party (who almost certainly doesn't hold a carrier license) is not something I can comment on but I would be pretty sure that Optus' lawyers were sure before permitting the action to be taken so I'm not going to make any comments on "legality" based on my almost complete lack of knowledge of the Telecommunications Act and it would seem to me, personally, that anyone else without such detailed and specific knowledge should do the same.
Apparently the article's author and the article's audience aren't expected to be able to understand either basic commercial imperatives or contract law which is why the article's writer felt free to make the comments in the article.
The tricky issue for all mobile and wire line carriers for the past 3 - 4 years has been how to accommodate VoIP in terms of their then and current tariffs and how to deal with the fringe rip off entities that will try and exploit their services based on 'loop holes' that VoIP has 'exposed' in their services and processes put in place in a 'pre-VoIP era'. Doubtless other mobile and wire line carriers will consider how/if their own services are being misused and if they are they too will take whatever actions they deem appropriate to protect the "cost/price equations" they have based their own 'capped" and "unlimited" plans on.
My only interest in the article was to see if any "facts" were relevant to Exetel's current use of VoIP over the Optus mobile HSPA service. At first reading of the article they don't appear to be - but then an article in a magazine is not exactly legal advice on a specific contract. Exetel encourages it's HSPA users to use VoIP on their mobile hand set to reduce mobile call costs within Australia or internationally if they wish to do that. As they are using an Optus data service to make those calls (rather than dialing in to another entities service using an Optus mobile voice service) I can't see that there is any problem as the end user is paying for the data they are using and it is irrelevant that the packets are being used to carry 'voice' rather than 'data' to and from the user's handset - the tariff is the same as set by Optus to Exetel via the supply contract.
It seems to me that a growing percentage of mobile telephone users will use VoIP over the coming 12 - 24 months which is why Exetel has gone to a lot of trouble (and expense) to put in place our own VoIP switches and has taken so much time to ensure we can deliver a constantly reliable VoIP service over HSPA. How Optus, or any other mobile carrier, is going to come to grips with how such usage is going to effect their mobile tariffing in the future is not something I have to worry about. I'm currently assuming that it isn't something that would overly concern them ASSUMING they don't make the same errors in 'constructing' "free" and "capped" data plans that have just been exploited by the "loop hole abuser" fringe entities that will always be a part of any marketplace.
One more thing to worry about.