Re: [SLUG] Slashdot

From: Robin 'Roblimo' Miller (robin@roblimo.com)
Date: Sat Apr 19 2003 - 18:58:30 EDT


>
>
>Despite that, the idea of site filtering was the first thing I
>had thought of. In that part of the world I'd think it
>is more than just "unlikely". Why not traceroute those
>IP's and see how far it goes?
>

I have several email correspondents in Vietnam and Thailand. None of
their connections go through China. Their primaries are through the
Global Cable & Wireless equatorial "word girdling" undersea fiber
network. I sort of know (we're on some email lists together) some
people in the Vietnamese communications ministry, and they say no one in
that part of the world - government people anyway - trusts China.

>Remember the story of Panama's national telecomms
>authority port filtering all the ports that VoIP etc runs on because
>of complaints from their national telephone provider? And this
>is stuff that TRANSITS as well as ORIGINATES there.
>

This story was not entirely true. Again, that big GC&W link was
unaffected, ditto MCI/UUNet north/south connections. I know people who
do maintenance for GC&W in Panama, and LinuxJournal publisher Phil
Hughes now lives in Costa Rica and does most of his business by VoIP
phone over a link that runs through Panama. The Panama guys bitched
about their local stuff - they want to set up their own ISP now and are
bribing... err... lobbying to get some laws changed so they can - but
had no trouble with passthrough traffic. I'm sure none of them have
circumvented Panama's laws by tapping directly into the GC&W link. No
way... fine upstanding citizens. mostly US Army veterans.

When I was in Jordan last December, it was the same there - couldn't use
VoIP, had to pay huge l/d rates. Was amaingly expensive to use my
tri-mode cell phone, too. (Need tri-mode there because all of the
mideast including Israel runs GSM.) A lot of countries are being held
back technically by monopoly-level comm rates and restrrictions. I'm
sure that would never happen here. Our FCC would never let telecom
companies consolidate and and allow burdensome restrictions on customer
uses unless we voted a bunch of corps-bought greedhead politicians into
power, and we Americans are far too smart for that (he says jokingly
but sadly).

- Robin



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 18:15:55 EDT