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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?"

8 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. Let's Call Mom!!! by yoey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hi, mom? How're you doing? All is well wi....

  2. Hmm.... by watzinaneihm · · Score: 1, Insightful

    In fact, the quality of the transmission was so good, so much like being there, that Telus engineers added a bit of noise to make the call sound, well, more normal.
    Just wait for the Slashdot effect to strike...., then you an have dropped packets, shift in time and all sort of digital noise... No need to add analog noise to it.

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    .ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
  3. Not the public Internet (I hope) by Zarhan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It should be noted that altough everything is transporter over IP, they are (probably :)) not transferring their voice over public Internet and it is not even connected to Internet in any way.

    It's still a private network, they are just shifting to a more generic and cost-effective infrastructure. So I suppose you still can not slashdot the phone network..

  4. It's worth a try by GMontag · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This method certainly can't make them go out of business any faster than the other Canadian telcos.

  5. Having read a little deeper by SkArcher · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The benefits, however, are enormous and noticeable, particularly on a carrier's balance sheet. Telus stands to substantially lower its operating and capital costs with the new infrastructure, and will be in a position to offer customers new business services that can combine voice, video and data. "We literally have three infrastructures," says Pathak, explaining that separate networks exist today to carry phone calls, Internet and data services, and video. "The goal is to merge into one simple platform.

    So their ultimate plan is to have Video, Phone and Data linked into the same system? An Extreme bandwidth use, but one that would raise some hopes of breaking down the current 'methods of communication' fragmentation and simply leaving us with one single, integrated, communications method.

    Now that raises all sorts of possibilities in terms of remote conferencing, especially as the younger, technically proficient generations move into higher echelons of the decision making process in government and corporations.

    Any ideas on what OS is used to control this?

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    An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of /.
  6. Lessons fron SQL Slammer? by imag0 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    didn't Bank of America lose about 14,000 ATM machines to the SQL Slammer worm?

    moving data across a public network isn't safe or intelligent. Let's hope they open their eyes before this foolisness gets any further.

  7. IPv6 by Luguber123 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Are they using IPv6 for the voice transmissions? It sounds like a good idea to me (not beeing a field expert tho..) since there are a lot of QoS features and security features in v6, wich would require a lot of extra hassle with v4.

    Anyways I'm moving as far away from telco business as possible. After 20 years, as a customer, I'm less than satisfied with the 'competitive' pricing of services.

  8. Hell, use the inet for phone today... by ehintz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I already am. Vonage runs $40/mo for unlimited calling within the US and Canada. I did the math, and found that I could double my DSL upload speeds (which was needed as the 1.5/128k ADSL connection I had was not quite enough upload) and slightly reduce my monthly telco/internet costs. Since I'm on DSL, I still had to keep a landline, but it's the uber cheap one ($13/mo), had I been on cable the savings would've been even better. I'm totally happy with it. I did need to setup queueing on my outbound router to prioritize VOIP (so somebody hammering my webserver wouldn't kill my phone) but on a normal home network the thing would be plug and play. For that matter, if your home servers are low load you probably wouldn't need to bother prioritizing at the router; I found packet loss in testing (having a freind hammer the server while we were on the phone) but it took me 3 weeks before I got around to setting up the router and we never had a problem in actual use. But I was more than happy to have an excuse to play with altq. ;-)

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    ehintz