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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 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.
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.
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
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
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.