by , 8:00 AM EST, November 5th, 2002
The Panamanian Government has recently issued a document (in Spanish) intended to end all Voice over IP (VoIP) operating both on and through its networks. A Sunday report in Linux and Main states that:
This "unequivocally decrees that all routers, including those not carrying traffic from Panama, but that might be traversing Panama, have the 24 UDP ports blocked."
The action will not only disrupt popular VoIP applications like NetMeeting, Dialpad and Net2phone but also services such as telnet and the NFS lock manager.
Linux and Main goes on to speculate that the reason for the government action is to protect telephone company revenue from IP-based long distance calls which are billed at local rates.
The decree is apparently rooted in complaints by Cable & Wireless Panama (Motto: "If you're worried about your data, voice, or Internet service provider, we're here to help"), which says it is losing money due to users employing the Internet to make otherwise expensive internetional telephone calls -- calls that would otherwise be listed on Cable & Wireless bills.
Affected ports include: 1034, 1035, 2090, 2091, 5000, 6801, 6802, 6803, 9900, 9901, 12080, 12120, 12122, 22555, 26133, 30582, 35061, 38000, 38100, 38200, 47563, 48310, 51200, and 51201.
More information can be found in the Linux and Main report.
Another equally disturbing factor in this case is that Panama will not only be disrupting services being used by its own citizens but also by people from other countries whose data may flow through their networks.
The blurring of the line between private business and the Panamanian government in this action shows clear bias and reflects well on neither. It's a short sighted attempt to find a problem for a solution, and that is the built-in problems of the business model of a state-wide monopoly.