Slashdot Mirror
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?"
What kind of bandwidth would this require?
Turnabout is fair play it seems. No more than 5 years ago, I was using a phone line to access the internet. Soon i'll be using the internet to make telephone calls.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
In fact it was just a matter of time. At last, telcos are realizing that technology is a helper and not a foe. Probably 3rd generation as designed is not going to generate the expected revenue and some side paths need to be found.
I wonder how much bandwidth they are going to allocate to a phone call once it's pure VoIP? and will it change according to load? what will be the effect on modem/fax data?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Dude, using IP dosn't mean they are transfering call trafic over the general internet. I really doubt they are going to give each phone line a real IP address rather then a 'local' one.
:P probably not).
It would be pretty cool if they did. Imagine an RFC standard phone protocol that was implemented on lots of telephone like devices. In conjunction with DHCP you could have an internet phone that worked as simply as a regular phone. And you could talk to anyone with a PC and/or another phone (maybe by typing in the IP address?
Well, I can dream, can't I? (or is this not that far off? I know you can buy IP phones today, but I don't think that they can work with both the general internet and the general phone system)
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
a bit outside of Québec City (I no longer work for them), I would say this is a generally good move. Most of the equipment, at least in Québec is shoddy stuff late 1950s. Needs constant maintainence. I can definitely see why they're upgrading.
Remarkably enough, telephone technology hasn't really changed all that much since it's invention. the infrastructure has changed vastly, but for the most part, you can still use a first generation telephone over copper, with the exception of the cellular model. This is probally why it's no great shock to me that mobile phones are the first to actually experiment with adapting.
My first reaction to this move to tcp/ip based voice communication is great, dispite the fact that the telephone it self has a remarkable level of simplisity to it. Speaker, amp, microphone, even without a touch tone generator most networks i'm familar with still permit the rotery system, a call can be placed by touching wires together in that rythmic fasion.
So what is there to be gained by TCP/IP transport for telephone use, assuming we are talking about the classic land line as well as the mobile, a great deal i'd say. Fax machines for one thing will no longer be barred by that pesky 9600/14000 bandwidth issue, color faxing can be an option. A "mobile" could in theory be jacked into a land line and calls can be recieved regardless of reception, eliminating the need for features like call forwarding. A push to upgrade to this cheeper form of transport could push the telcos to actually upgrade way out of the way regions to this new digital system, so even Farmer Joe miles away from the CO could get reliable network access. Let alone the boom to the deaf community.. even with present mobile text and instent messaging it has practicaly rendered ye old TDD terminal obsolete.
But... there is a major downside. It puts control of network access back to the telcos, well not like they don't have it already. We create a dependence on high technology, requiring all homes being essentally wired for network. We also create a dependence on power, not that classic telephone doesn't take a bit of juice, but imagine if everyone's house had additional DA converters, and essentally hubs rather then splitters. Privacy could be made a think of the past, as packet sniffers could be employed to actually track specific people without the physical access that is presently required.
But I'm leaning more tward the side of the fact that there is just so much crap I want rendered obsolete, and a level of digital intrigration I would like to achieve. I no longer want to be barred by the limits of dialup service being the only thing that can be actived on demand, I want phones to be TCP/IP ready.
And yes... I want mobile phones to actually provide high speed internet and I want it everywhere! And if this means I can't use my circa 1970's phone that I bought specificly to be compatable with my first acustic(sp) modem and so be it.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
The most widely used VoIP protocol is H.323. H323 allows negotiation of a compression CoDec. The base (worst) codec which must be supported is G.711 (64kb/s - this is what goes down an ISDN line - this is regarded as lossless digital encoding).
Latency is dealt with by using QoS. I make calls from Australia to Europe through a VoIP carrier at a cost of about 3cents/minute. The round trip delay appears less than 0.2 seconds. The recommended CoDec is G.723.1 which is 5.3 or 6.3 kb/s (switches dependent on complexity I believe). This CoDec gives speech quality better than a mobile network will give you.
The bandwidth is only required in the direction of speech - when there is silence going the other way the bandwidth drops to near zero (just comfort noise generation and control signals send down the line). Comfort noise generation is done by a funny little algorithm that tells the other end the type of "silence" (static) to produce.