Qatar blocking VoIP

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Back in December 2005 there were reports that Qatar was blocking VoIP. When people tried to contact the Qatar ADSL provider Qtel they were told that as a result of some cables being down VoIP had been temporarily blocked to save bandwidth. However stories received from Qtel employees were often inconsistent and the issue is still not resolved 4 months later.

A press release covering the issues of Qatar blocking VoIP was released by Qtel at the end of 2005 stating that "VOIP have been operational since the launch of our internet services".

However this appears to be far from over with Qtel customers still reporting VoIP blocking in Qatar. VoIP does not seem to be the only thing being blocked, some online games are also being adversely affected.

If you feel you are being effected by this then you should post in this >Vonage Discussion thread which has being trying to resolve Qatar blocking VoIP for some time.

As with other similar cases Qtel are being accused of blocking VoIP in an attempt to maintain revenues from their existing telephone services.