Telmex Sabotaging Skype/VOIP Again

[kasugie]

For the past couple of months, I imagine many have been experiencing the following problem with Skype, Vonage, or other VOIP service.

After making a call with one of these services, after around 20 to 40 seconds, your call is suddenly dropped. If on Skype, your bandwidth icon turns red (no bandwdith) for a few seconds and then black (good) again. You run Speedtest on your connection, and everything looks great. You then try to make the call again, and you get disconnected again.

Here is what seems to be happening. While Telmex and Telcel can no longer legally block these services, they've managed to find a way to sabotage them. As soon as the filters on their switches and routers detect these calls, they temporarily slow your bandwdith to about 8 kpbs for a few seconds, and that kills the call.

If you complain to Telmex about this, they will deny any wrongdoing or knowledge about this, while admitting that Guanajuato is oversaturated and they are working hard to upgrade the infrastructure, yada, yada. Basically, covering their butts in terms of the new telecommunications laws to promote "competition" in the marketplace.

So far, I haven't seen any workarounds. With my Skype Premium account, I signed up for a Skype-to-Go number in León, and even though I have unlimited national long distance with Telmex, that exchange is blocked.