Something that will probably squash my cost-effective dreams of running my own VOIP system is Net Neutrality. If the big hogs like AT&T, and Comcast have their ways with good effective lobbying and legislators in their pockets get their way, the concet of Net Neutrality will be over for users of the Internet. To explain it as simply (probably oversimplifying...)as possible, Net Neutrality allows users to connect to whatever sites and resources they choose with out authorities inbetween such as your own ISP to choose their own preferences first. Nerds such as myself hate this concept mostly, because what it will inevitably do is make people who host their own services, like me to pay more for that traffic to pass on a network, such as Comcast. The effects of this are already prevalent, as I just recently lost my mail traffic on the Comcast network because they are running some sort of transparent proxy which catches my SMTP traffic, and they attempt to resolve it on their network. I have yet to call and discuss what I have to do to get mail traffic to pass, but I am sure that it will involve some sort of business-class pricing. Of course this rule is not new to Comcast, apparently, I have been getting away with pasing mail traffic for a long time, and it shouldn't have worked from the get-go... This type of restriction will not be the last one they ever pass, wait until they try to regulate SIP....
My workaround for mail is to run Dynamic DNS, and redirect it into another port. It irritates me to do it, but I am sure Comcast won't offer me a cheap resolve to this either....
