VoIP mangling

Slightly boring to normal people but I enjoyed the read.


A patent application from German company Infineon reveals a technology for deliberately interfering with internet telephony transmissions - or "voice over IP" (VoIP).

The application doesn't expand on why it would be used. But it could conceivably come in handy for any company that operates both phone and internet services and would like to protect their phone business from the growing popularity of VoIP.

According to the application, a machine on a computer network would analyse passing "packets" of information, distinguishing between data and voice ones. After identifying a series of voice packets, it would add extra "pseudo-packets" to the communications stream. These packets would be labelled as voice but actually contain nothing useful.

Next, a filter within the same device would let the data packets through unhindered but create an artificial bottleneck for anything labelled as voice. The mix of genuine voice packets and pseudo-packets would thus be delayed as well. The delay should be more than VoIP software can cope with, meaning the resulting speech flutters and warbles when decoded at the other end.

Ingeniously, the pseudo-packets could be filtered out before the leaving the network machine, providing no evidence of why speech quality is so poor. Infineon has filed another patent in Germany that covers methods of degrading speech sent via a WiFi hot spot, too

and i was thinking they were going to say they can listen in to the voice packets thus hearing the conversation..