Canadian Telco Telus Moves All Call Traffic to the Net

justice0x1 writes "An article on the Tornonto Star about Canada's Telus making a large scale motion to move all call trafic over to IP caught my eye today. 'Telus will become the first dominant phone carrier in North America to make the risky transition, a move much talked about and which Telus will make happen on a dramatic scale.' Since I work in the Telus Internet Service department, it will be interesting to see exactly how this new technology fares. Seems almost premature to me, but I guess it's all or nothing with telecomunications these days; you need to get an edge on the competition somehow. Why not start by moving youre entire long distance network over to IP?"

Comments

Here we go again.

[professorpoole]

Some of us *require* real-time transmission (or as close to it as we can get) - in broadcasting, where I work, just to name one. Ethernet is more efficient for an office network because it allows many machines to share resources. At times when the network gets really busy, people notice a delay; annoying, but not the end of the world. The same principle applies here: if the circuits get really busy, there might be a delay (or even a brief dropout) before you hear Aunt Lona say "hello" at the other end of the line. Again: annoying, but not the end of the world. But now imagine that the connection is being used to control a piece of equipment many miles away. Or, to transport a real-time signal, say, a ballgame from a distant city. Both are true in our case. We need real time, or as close as you can get. When you can't get a satellite channel, the method of choice for a quickie audio remote is ISDN. The telcos hate these nowadays: technically, because you're tying up one "slice" of a T1 group. They'd much rather distribute packets on that T1 like a card dealer in Vegas; if the table is full of gamblers, it just takes a little longer, is all. More efficient. You folks in Canada: don't be surprised if your internet service suffers as a result of this. You're gonna be sharing bandwidth with the call to Aunt Lona ... :)