Carriers Blocking Vonage? > Have we thought this through?

Have we thought this through?

Many routers now examine the content of the packet to determine if it's a VoIP packet or a P2P, etc... The functionnality is called NBAR.
Cisco routers are now able to recognize Skype traffic, even though the data in the IP packet is (I think) encrypted.

I find it hard to believe that an encrypted packet on any random port can be "recognized". I read Cisco's claims and it still appears to be tightly coupled with the port used by the particular protocol. Cisco further claims that "new" applications can recognized by updating rules using a new "packet description language". This can be done without an IOS upgrade.

If the FCC doesn't step in, VOIP should immediately begin improving their router and back-end software to use a wide variety of random ports until the call can be successfully negotiated. Although this might be tough, given the processing capabilities of the early VOIP routers, they should also consider encrypting the packets with random keys to ensure that the contents of the packets remain ambiguous.

In my opinion, these actions would make it much more difficult for an ISP to classify and deny such traffic. So much so that it's probably not worth the trouble of going to such extremes. If they do, it would be much more obvious that the ISP is explicitly attempting to block such services. If the ISP's routers are busy, the strain of trying to investigate every packet that's not on a well-defined port might be counter productive.

If VOIP providers can do these things, I think it would be far easier for the ISP to just change their TOS and let customers know that they don't guarantee that these services will operate properly over their network.