I was told something that I find hard to believe: Supposedly Vonage and the other VoIP telcos perform a traceroute and if they determine that the SIP phone's IP address is outside the US (and that's VERY hard to determine), then the service is not provided.
Any truth to that?
-Ramon
Determining the geografic location of an IP address is not that hard, unless special precautions (VPN, proxying etc.) are taken: there are several methods providing reasonable guesses. For example,
The question is: why should Vonage decline to serve a new customer, provided that the bills get paid? In no case would they have to bear a bigger cost for non-US customers, given the way the Internet works.
Enzo
they would not use traceroute to do that; there are other means of making an educated guess to the country of origin of an IP address. This said, I remember Vonage explicitly mentioning on their web pages the option of using their phone service while travelling outside the US. They just mentioned that they would not take subscribers with non-US postal addresses, i.e. did not maket their service outside the US. I do not know whether this is still on their web pages. In any case I think whar you heard is not true.
taxation and regulatory issues perhaps. If for example they were required to provide a 911 service with some sort of location data, or if a jurisdiction banned VoIP or applied a tax or USO fee - I could see why they might not want the hassle of subscribers in Nepal or wherever.
Phil
This is true, but I seriously doubt that US regulations could apply to subscribers outside the US territory. This both if we accept a "benign" view of regulation (to protect own citizens from abuse -- hardly applicable to citizens in other jurisdictions) and a "realistic" one in the spirit of the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas (who once said he'd never seen a regulator who actually gives a damn about consumers). I personally suspect that mandatory 911 services etc. are just expedients to protect the incumbents (conventional telcos), so why should a US regulator bother and do anything to prevent a US company from competing with a foreign telco?
Enzo
P.S. This case of less-than-honest motives is quite enlightening:
No, of course not.
1) A traceroute? They'd look at the AS number.2) They specifically say in their support pages that you can take it with you when you travel overseas.
3) I've done it.miguel
no reason, however requiring them to produce 911 location data for all theri subscribers could be an issue if, for example, a European subscriber declined to provide it.
Also Vonage charge differently in different markets, so they don't want to compete with themselves for example in the UK.
Phil
Right, the point is that it's much faster.
miguel
which is not 100% accurate either, BTW (but admittingly worth a good guess)
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