Security of public network?

[Matthew Gillen]

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> Of the various "Landline" phone methods (though there are likely others):
> 
> - fiber (i.e. FIOS)
> - POTS (copper)
> - VOIP (vonage)
> 
> Do they have equal weight when it comes to security of residential
> communication, and the customer can boil it down to price?

Depends what kind of security you're talking about.  None of those use
encryption, and all can be "wiretapped" by various means.  For someone who is
not law-enforcement, there may be different severity of penalties for someone
illegally snooping on the different classes of wire (supposing they get caught).

The CALEA law (and subsequent ammendments to it) updated the Wiretap Act and
the ECPA to include the non-POTS options on your list.  So from a
law-enforcement point of view, they should be equivalent: if the police tap
any of those without a warrant, any evidence gathered will (should?) be
inadmissible in court.  There's an interesting discussion on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception

This also has some good info:
"http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/privacy/Statutory Summaries for Module IV.htm"

To the last part of your question ("[can] the customer can boil it down to
price?"), you also have to consider link quality.  I've used all three of
those, plus Comcast's brand of VOIP (note that Verizon patents mean that
vonage and comcast avoid the term "VOIP" like the plague).  I've got FIOS now,
and the Verizon box connected to my house telephone wiring doesn't seem to
have enough juice: I can't have two phones active at once in the house (i.e.
multiple people sharing a line so that both my wife and I can talk to my
parents at the same time).

Comcast's internet-phone stunk.  It would often cut off the first word you
said, so if you were trying to answer questions with one-word answers, it made
for a difficult conversation.

I used Vonage (over Comcast) for a while, and that wasn't too bad.  A little
bit of the same issue that Comcast's phone service had, but not as bad (it
only happened occasionally, versus every single call for Comcast).  Cheaper too.

Note that some of the bandwidth shaping technologies that Comcast wants to use
would really kill vonage, because of the specific way they implement bandwidth
limiting (the latency increases would be disasterous for third-party
phone-over-internet providers like vonage).  I stopped paying attention to
what Comcast was doing as soon as I could dump them for FIOS, so I'm not sure
how that situation has panned out (or how it's been evolving).

Matt