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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?"
Hi, mom? How're you doing? All is well wi....
What kind of bandwidth would this require?
"Sorry, but your call could not be connected at this time due to a 404 error. Please reconfigure your phone line and try again."
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
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
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..
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
I used to have to yell at my roommates to get off the phone and stop hogging the phone line.
Now I'll have to yell at them to get off the phone and stop hogging the bandwidth.
Just because it's VoIP, it doesn't mean it has to flow over the "public" IP network. They can simply point the VoIP over their own network and still see massive savings.
For the VoIP/PSTN imparied, VoIP traffic can be optimized (that's compressed) down to 8K (or more, but a cost of clarity) as opposed to 56K for traditional circuit switched telephony traffic.
And yes I have worked with the technology.
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
This method certainly can't make them go out of business any faster than the other Canadian telcos.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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?
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
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.
They should drop calls and overcharge customers too to complete the picture.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
They're not going to go on general IP network but with a carrier-class MPLS network. Lets see who they will choose for their backbone, Cisco, Juniper or perhaps Chiaro or Hyperchip??
Will the software used for this transition support IPv6? Will it be BASED on IPv6? I mean, the point of IPv6 is to give us more IP addresses than the initial 256 * 256* 256 * 256, and moving an entire phone network would only make the IP addressing problem worse (if not using v6...), right?
Informatus Technologicus
From what I can see everything is heading toward one device - the PC. The PC of the future, as many of us know, will be compact enough to put on a table top (or under your TV) and will be a compliment to your lounge/living room as it may be well designed and stylish.
So, what's going to come through this little wonder? Well pretty much everything. People will have wireless digital phones which connect to this 'base unit' via bluetooth or other wireless tech. All this telephone traffic will travel across a VoIP system and additional features will most probably be video links through built-in cams and possibly a text message feature to send info such as telephone numbers or addresses through on-the-fly without having to talk it out loud on the phone.
Also coming down the high speed net links will be television on demand. No more arial/satellite systems, just pure internet provided media. It could be argued that radio is very much internet based already - I for one have no arial set up for FM signals.
The international network coupled with a micro-PC in every home is the way of the future. Faster internet backbones will provide a media-rich lifestyle.
By treating voices and video like any other piece of data, such as e-mail
Soon Canadians will be getting enlarge-your-penis and invest-in-nigeria phone calls.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The main VoIP standard is H.323 - Check out OpenH323, an open-source implentation of this technology.
" To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. "
I'm going to have to call her later on. She's like, into Lord of the Rings and other geeky stuff. BTW, what's Linux???
Karma whorin' since 1999
..I use Vonage for my phone at home. I do not even have a land-line installed in my apartment. I find the features to blow any phone company away, and the price and service is excellent.
Besides the overall geekness of being totally VoiP, I have had nothing but good experiences with it.
And I get to have an LA and NY number....
Rob
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.
Damnit! Damnit! Damnit!
I was going to use a modem over VoIP! Curse you, Telus!
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.
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.
I am writing this letter to request ISP service from you. After that is completed, I will be able to telephone you to arrange a domain transfer.
Incidentally, do you know to whom I can write to arrange for water service so I can watch CNN?"
As a few posts have already descibed, VoIP is not the same as voice over the internet. The VoIP that Telus is using is actually being carried over dedicated data circuits which offer, not only high speed (OC-12 +), but also end to end Quality of Service control. Indeed, these dedicated data circuits may well carry some internet traffic as well, but Telus is able to run the voice traffic at a higher priority than the less time sensitive data.
In fact, this is already being done by several carriers including Sprint, MCI, Intermedia, Verizon and probably others.
I have also installed numerous private networks utilizing Nortel or Cisco equipment to carry VoIP over dedicated private networks, usually frame-relay WANs. These VoIP calls are 100% reliable and are perfectly clear.
In two cases standard internet connections (cable, xDSL, frame-relay) were used to carry calls between several different offices in the United States, Canada, Europe and Mexico. These connections are not always as clear as those running on private WANs but, they have proven to be 98% reliable and are indistinguishable from regular land lines, in terms of clarity, 85% of the time.
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.
Meanwhile, in hockey news, the Ananheim Mighty Ducks face the Newn Jersney Devils.
(I see the upcoming pot de-regulation is having it's effect)
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
you'll get my old black rotary phone with the real metal bells and indestructible hard shiny plastic and nice neck-cradling handset when you pry it from my cold dead hands.
No electricity? no problem, it still works. Plus, analog has nostalgia value, too!
Maybe there's a cool mod someone's done for old phones like this so that we can convert them to VOIP...
Damn those pesky terrorists
The article is not technical, and this is pure market speak. What they were adding was probably "comfort noise." Comfort noise is placed in the dead air where you aren't actually sending sound (to save bandwidth).
Another thing normally added is near-end echo. This is the sound of your own voice piped back at you with reduced volume, something that happens in the standard phone system naturally. People have become so used to hearing the echo that they think something is wrong if they don't get it. Because of this, you see a lot of people yelling at their cell phones.
Try learning more modern stuff than whatever antiquated VoIP crap your company was using.
As an example, I was working with VoIP stuff 3 years ago with Cisco, T-Mobile and Level 3: we had a project that took a GSM signal, put it onto a local (in building only) network, and from there to VoIP and onto the Cisco Call Manager system. This allowed the cell phone to be your internal company phone extension while on campus, but automatically switch back when off campus. We faced many of the same problems you cited but all were solved by the end of the "beta" test.
Also we deployed a nation-wide softswitch infrastraucture that allowed us to hook Cisco VoIP phones at any point in the network and make toll-quality calls out from the main PBX back in Broomfield. This saved the company from having to drag a copper pair to each and every little regeneration site onthe fiber right of way, which is not an inconsiderable amount of cash when you figure the extent of Level 3's network.
Update your knowledge base. IP is starting to be picked up now that the private IP networks Like Level 3, Genuity, plus parts of AT&T and Sprint have worked out the problems. Draft Martini (Read the IETF documents) has been delivering standard phone services like ATM and FR over IP for a year. And Level 3, where I used to work, has had an all IP infrastructure for several years now, using the old XCom (Now VIPER) sofswitch. Want to know where those cheap long distance calling cards are coming from? They probably travel over Level 3's all IP network, converting at the edges on the softswitched architecture. And a good percentage of Worldcom/MCI long distance moves on Level 3's all IP network as well.
Secondly, the VoIP mentioned here is primarily in the backhaul, behind the CO switches (RTFA again!). For Inter and Intra-LATA carriage, VoIP is highly reliable, and much less expensive than the TDM stuff.
As for the "silence", RTFA. Seriously, they solved this one a long time ago with a little echo back on the reciever side, as well as "comfort noise" from the IP switch. This technique goes back several years.
Seriously, you need to learn more - and RTFA, because you are "mistaken about a great many thing"....
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
Read my subject again, you know what "!=" means right?
The article *title* "Canadian Telco Telus Moves All Call Traffic to the Net" implies that Telus will be using the public Internet.
The *article* says several things but doesn't clearly state for non-technical readers that the network that Telus will be using for this VoIP service is their *private* network. The article talks about the poor quality of previous Internet phone call implementations without qualifying that assertion with something like "but Telus will use their own network instead of the Internet."
Others have pointed out the same thing. The title is misleading.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Indeed, the title is misleading. The traffic will flow over TELUS's national Private IP network which, incidentally, happens to be the fastest optical/IP network in north america end-to-end.
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
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. ;-)
ehintz
Why not start by moving youre entire long distance network over to IP?
Quite simply Large monopoly Telco's have invested large amounts of cash in the already existing (and out of date) telephone network, and would rather blow up the planet than see that change. Have a look at this .
Bell , AT&T will start whining to governments for compensation or tax immediatly.
All I'd like to know is when did the government make it a priority to start protecting large corps from the consumers, instead of protecting the consumers from corps.
I assume that eventually they plan to run some kind of IP service to peoples houses, and use VoIP phones. What would be nice if you could use say, some kind of VPN, to get to a internet router, and obtain a public IP.
Theres your broadband......
So I suppose you still can not slashdot the phone network..
Actually you CAN slashdot the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Netowork). And you always could. The equipment is sized to handle the expected peak loads with some slop. But there is nowhere near enough equipment in place to handle every phone being connected to another phone.
You can slashdot it at several levels. The commonest is the "all-trunks busy" level - where all the routes from the calling phone to the called number (that the switching equipment knows how to use) are busy. In the older exchanges that produced the tones that sounded like a busy signal but twice as fast. Modern stuff gives you a recording.
You can also tie up all the equipment that gives you a dial tone and collects the digits you dial, by getting enough people on the exchange to try to make calls at once. Usually this just means you wait a second or so for a dial tone - and maybe not even notice it. If it's REALLY severe you might wait seconds, or minutes, and then it is really noticible. But it's also really rare.
The last time I recall that actually happening where I lived was the Loma Prieta earthquake, and the time before was the assassination of JFK. Before that was at an old relay-based exchange (using line-finders rather than registers) where the line finders didn't time out, and a tornado had shorted out enough lines - which made them look "off-hook" - to busy out all the line-finders that could give my phone a dial tone.
Again, modern equipment is more informative: When things get hairy the people operating the network can switch it to a mode where, when you take your phone off the hook, it first connects you to a recording asking you to hold off unless it's an emergency, then giving you a delay followed by a fair chance at a dialtone. (I THINK it actually deliberately delays you a bit even if it COULD have given you a dial tone right away, both to throttle you and to give you a chance to hang up if it wasn't urgent.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way