China’s Shanghai Telecom has become the most recent telecom company worldwide to block VoIP calls. The company now joins a roster spanning from South America to Europe and Asia.

The Associated Press reports that, “Shanghai Telecom, with 6.2 million land lines, will use a system developed by the US-based Narus Inc to block VoIP calls.

China is not trying to block VoIP because of the governments fears about VoIP’s inability to be wiretapped, but rather, Shanghai Telecom doesn’t want to lose revenue.

The company isn’t alone, however. In the US, telecoms aren’t pleased about the success of VoIP. But at the moment, these companies can’t legally block it.

Narus in the mean time, is making major gains by helping other companies in countries that allow VoIP blocking. The IEEE Spectrum magazine reports that “Vodafone has announced a plan to block VoIP calls in Germany and the French wireless carrier, SFR, has announced it will block VoIP in France.”

Narus has also announced that it has provided a system to block VoIP in Egypt, along with various other countries. It’s also selling a system in Brazil which will allow Brasil Telecom to identify VoIP packets that traverse its network, a possible first step to charging VoIP providers for access, or shutting them out.

Telecoms are headstrongly ignoring the modern era, failing to see that VoIP, along with other IP-based communications, is here to stay. Instead of competing, and making profit out of a potentially dangerous new era, telecoms are merely trying to completely erase VoIP.