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The Sky(pe) is no longer the limit: Beijing attack VoIP in its newest media crackdown
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News and Politics :: Human rights and personal freedoms :: Sino-Hong Kong :: News and Perspectives ::
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posted Sunday, 11 September 2005
Calling your friends and family in one corner of China has just become a lot more expensive. In a shock move, Shenzhen Telecom, the Guangdong division of China Telecom, has announced that it has banned users of its network from using the Voice over IP telephony services provided by the European company Skype, and that it has put in place technology that prevents people from communicating with Skype. Forcing many off the free of Voice over IP service, and onto pre paid state sponsored long distance call schemes.
The banning of Skype services by the state controlled telecom group came with no warning and is feared may herald a wider blocking of VoIP services in China.
As yet, the block is thought to be limited to Skype services, and has not been applied to voice messaging services that allow two computers to connect directly to one another through MSN and other voice messaging services.
According to Beijing Business Today, China Telecom is aiming to place a blanket ban on all Data-Voice communications, including voice message services and pier to pier voice networks, and has been experimenting in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
This report has yet to be confirmed as accurate.
When asked for comment on the blocking of Skype services, a representative for the Guangdong telecom interest said that service center staff had been only instructed to tell consumers that Skype and other Internet telephone services were illegal, and that they were prohibited under regulations introduced in 2004 to preserve “market order”. The representitive also said that the downloading of Skype software over the China Network was also prohibited.
Although no firm figures are available, analysts estimate that the January-June period of 2005 saw users of SkypeOut, and other VoIP, services making over 200 million minutes of called valued at a total of $US23 Million. Putting low cost voice/data services in direct competition with the long distance voice services provided by China’s telecomm companies.
Two of the firms that are believed to have suffered most are China Netcom and China Telecom. Both of which are state controlled, and both of which are of sufficient importance to Beijing for to launch crackdown to protect them from competition.
The blocking of Skype in an area populated by a large number foreign/cross border businessmen, and others who may be communicating information that Beijing may want to be aware of, has however raised a number of other possibilities in the minds of China watcher. Including the possibility that the blocking of Skype services in Guangdong may be related to ongoing efforts by Beijing to increase its censorship and monitoring of the flow of information into and out of China
Who Will be Hurt?
Though still an emerging technology Skype, and other similar services, have proven popular in China among those making long-distance long-duration telephone calls, particularly long term foreign residents of China with families outside, and Chinese families split by distance.
Groups who are most likely to be harmed include
- Chinese families communicating with relatives overseas
- Foreign residents of China communicating with families overseas
- Domestic Chinese families split by distance
- Chinese families spilt across the Hong Kong-Mainland border
- Chinese families split across the Taiwanese-mainland divide
Although its ability to compete with state owned firms is likely to make Skype and other VoIP technologies a concern for Beijing, another of their concern is likely to be that data based voice services are harder to track and tap than traditional telephone systems.
Where as a conventional telephone signal uses a standard form of encoding that is publicly known, uses a single circuit between two fixed points, and can be tapped directly through the use of a wire tap or indirectly through monitoring equipment built into telephone exchanges, Skype uses AES - Advanced Encryption Standard - block cipher encryption, and its messages are split up and routed over multiple paths and through multiple servers, making Skype calls more difficult to track calls back to those making them and exponentially more difficult to eavesdrop on.
China currently demands that all businesses using encryption to transmit and protect data in China hand their ‘keys’ over to Beijing. As Skype does not have an official presence in Mainland China, but instead allows users to subscribe externally, it has not complied with Beijing’s demands.
Do You Believe in Coincidences?
Coincidentally, the block on SkypeOut comes hot on the heals of prospecting by Hong Kong based corporation Tom Online, Skype’s Chinese partners group, to provide a fee paying VoIP service on the mainland.
VoIP services provided by Tom Online do not use the Skype software package and are likely subject to direct censorship and monitoring by Beijing. Skype services are not currently subject to such intrusions.
China Telecom is not the only company to block VoIP. In a recent incident, a US based communications firm fine-tuned its system to block out all VoIP traffic across its network by closing access to the ‘Port’, a form of computerized doorway, that certain VoIP services use. Shortly afterwards the decision was deemed to be in violation of US competition laws and the company was forced to allow VoIP services to resume.
It was not announced exactly what method was deployed by China Telecom to block Skype, but it thought likely that some form of selective port/packet blocking system was used to cut access channels or to ‘filter out Skype calls to prevent them from connecting.
Some reports have indicated that the blocking system may be conected to a through-put regulation system that detects the high-volume high-density traffic generated by VoIP systems.
View Comments/Add a Comment (5)
1. David left...
Monday, 12 September 2005 12:23 am :: http://jujuflop.yule.org/
You missed one important group of people who would be hurt: Businesses.
2. ACB left...
Monday, 12 September 2005 12:38 am :: http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com
I did give businessmen a breif mention when it came to industrial
espionage, and I believe that Hong Kong businessmen in Shenzen are one of
the groups being targeted, but as this is conjecture I didn't put in very
much about it.
3. jamal left...
Monday, 12 September 2005 3:10 am :: http://opinionated.blogsome.com/
I didnt know china tried so hard to regulate these things. What are they
afraid of?
4. ACB left...
Monday, 12 September 2005 3:24 am
I can write you a very long list if you like, but put in the simplest and
easiest terms to understand Beijing is afraid of not being in control.
5. Will left...
Thursday, 19 October 2006 7:49 pm
Any update on this subject? I live in Guangdong (not Shenzhen) and have no
problem using SKYPE now in 2006.