Panama Government Threatens Internet’s Integrity

November 4th, 2002 at 2:00 PM - News by Daniel Miller

The Panamanian Government has recently issued a document (in Spanish) intended to end all Voice over IP (VoIP) operating both on and through its networks. A Sunday report in Linux and Main states that:

...the Panamanian government requires "that within 5 days of publication, all ISPs will block the 24 UDP ports used for VoIP and any other that could be used in the future (which could end up being all UDP ports)," according to a reporter and computer consultant there, and that "the ISPs will block in their firewall or main router and in all their Border routers that connect with other autonomous systems."

This "unequivocally decrees that all routers, including those not carrying traffic from Panama, but that might be traversing Panama, have the 24 UDP ports blocked."

The action will not only disrupt popular VoIP applications like NetMeeting, Dialpad and Net2phone but also services such as telnet and the NFS lock manager.

Linux and Main goes on to speculate that the reason for the government action is to protect telephone company revenue from IP-based long distance calls which are billed at local rates.

The decree is apparently rooted in complaints by Cable & Wireless Panama (Motto: "If youire worried about your data, voice, or Internet service provider, weire here to help"), which says it is losing money due to users employing the Internet to make otherwise expensive internetional telephone calls -- calls that would otherwise be listed on Cable & Wireless bills.

Affected ports include: 1034, 1035, 2090, 2091, 5000, 6801, 6802, 6803, 9900, 9901, 12080, 12120, 12122, 22555, 26133, 30582, 35061, 38000, 38100, 38200, 47563, 48310, 51200, and 51201.

More information can be found in the Linux and Main report.