You hear the most interesting things over lunch in Panama, so I'll report this more or less as I heard it.

It appears that I together with many other people were a bit to hasty to come to conclusions about what happened around the Panamanian ban of UDP ports for IP Telephony.

First of all while Cable & Wireless have a decidedly dodgy history in this business, it apparently wasn't them that pushed for the ban.

The story is that in reality it was one of the new telecoms licensees, TeleCarrier Inc. who made the complaint and pulled the strings. I'm not 100% sure that it was TeleCarrier as I'm just trying to get verification of it, so take the name with a grain of salt.

Apparently this newish telecoms company, which is owned by one of the most powerful families in Panama. These newcomers to the business, saw the potential for loosing money and called their pals at the government entity regulator, who decreed the resolution in October.

Cable & Wireless were apparently hurt by this as well, as they have agreements with several voice over IP companies including Net2Phone. In my article yesterday about C&W's results you can see how important the IP business is to them. After January I think even more so when the voice market is liberalised.

The second interesting thing I learnt about this yesterday was that when the government realised how damaging this was to the reputation of Panama, they were up in arms about it. I believe the head of the Ente Regulador has been called in for questioning by the national assembly and both sides of the assembly are united in being against the block.

What does this mean for the future? It's probably pretty safe to say that the Supreme Courts suspension of the block will be upheld and we wont see this again. It also hopefully means that the government will in the future be a bit more careful about how innocent sounding local laws and decrees can affect their reputation world wide.