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Sprint Moves Phone Network to IP
Ryan Barrett writes "Sprint announced that it has 'begun transforming its telephone network so voice calls are transmitted in packets.' AP article here. Combined with a recent /. story about Telus doing the same thing, this sets an interesting precedent. Many telcos already use packet-switching to handle a significant chunk of their calls. Is this the beginning of the end for circuit-switched networks?"
h0h0!
Er, unless they really fuck up the QoS, it should be
transparent to everyone.
The article didn't state that Sprint was switching to an IP based network, just a packet switched network. Is this actually going to use IP? A quick google search brought up no mention of IP (but I'm also lazy, so I only read the first page of links).
"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
Well, that's what we have DNS for, isn't it? :) You could easily rig up a service like DNS (say, .phone) and have (country).(areacode).(exchange).(number).phone just like we have now. For IPV6, I'd imagine you have to. The human brain gets really confused when numbers get longer than 7 or 8 digits; as in you start transposing digits, forgetting parts, etc unless you can come up with a mnemonic device to remember them with. So I think it's safe to say it'd have to closely resemble the system we have today. At least from an end-user perspective.
Not so fast. This is Sprint's long distance network. If your local telco's still using tin cans, it's not going to enable any of this. What it does mean is that the next time there's a SQL Slammer or other bug clogging the web, you're phone service is down too. I bet they're getting funded by corporate IT and helpdesk staff.
There is a really good article on the economics invoved by Clay Shirky. Recommended reading.
That is sort of the point of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act .
That particular battle was fought and lost 9 years ago.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Gee! Isn't it amazing that countries that don't have an infrastructure would be building one using current technology and a country that has a huge, solid, working one would be a little slower to convert to something new. Because the US was an "early addopter" of telephone technology, we're a little slower upgrading but we've been talking all over the country for a loooong time.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
But probably not in this case. To "leverage existing infrastructure" this will not be a user visible voip application. One or more endpoints and transport networks involved will use existing circuits for quite some time.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
My uncle is an old-timer, circuit-switch technician for at&t -- he keeps the things running and is the lead tech across several states. He tells me packet-switchin' ain't all that, and although at&t is "looking into" going packet-switch over circuit, for the volumes they do, it's just not ready to replace it yet. To back up that claim, he's taken me through "the node" he works at and the majority of it is housing the nortel, circuit-switch racks. Of course, no one has stated at&t is going packet-switched, but I found this story interesting based on the conversations I've had with him.
His blurb on the issue is that voice, unlike data, requires a dedicated connection, and packet-switched doesn't give ya that -- circuit-switching can/does (the packets can arrive out of sequence). Now, I'm prolly mutilating his take on this since this is me (who doesn't understand all of this) trying to regurgitate conversations in the past with him (and maybe my DIMMs have been polluted by searchnetworking.com and reading this forum too).
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
reading /. tends to make me think in this way :-b
However, there's a new component here: the "legislative" layer.
In the ZapMail scenario, individual businesses could replace the FedEx service simply by buying a fax machine; but that's only because of FCC rules which a) demanded that common carriers (the phone companies) could not discriminate against different users of the network, and b) allow any non-destructive device to be connected to the Public Switched Network. In other words, the fax machine revolution was sparked by FCC rules which created an open and equal (Lessig would call it "flat and end-to-end") network on top of which others could build and innovate.
However, the FCC has chosen a different path with "broadband" these days. The FCC has already begun to rule (and appears ready to go whole hog with more rulings) that companies which provide broadband services own their network. If we were replaying ZapMail today, that means the phone companies would be allowed to prevent individual businesses from using their network to transfer documents via fax. Customers who wanted to deliver a document would have to use either an authorized corporate partner (in this case, FedEx) or the services of the telephone company itself.
We're already seeing manifestations of this in the Internet today; Most ISP's won't allow individuals to use port 25 (SMTP) so if you want to send email, you have to use the server provided by the ISP. That service is no longer available to customers, even the ones who have already bought equipment capable of sending and receiving email direrctly.
Consider AOL's position concerning mailing lists: If you want to provide a mailing list (free or fee) service to AOL subscribers, you must either a) run your list from an "approved" (read: corporate partner) server, or b) trudge through a lengthly approval process to get your mailing list onto the "whitelisted" list. It's not a far stretch to see the day when there will be a fee to mailing list managers in order to service AOL subscribers, and that will be the end of the free mailing list.
So, the next thing to fail will be the "free" services currently offered on the Internet.
We're already seeing pressure on major business sites to get an AOL keyword associated with their site. For all I know, getting that keyword cost money. If it doesn't already, it soon will. When that starts to happen, I wonder if Slashdot will be pulling in enough revenue to maintain contact with it's AOL customers, or if Slashdot will become another site AOL subscribers have to jump through hoops (or pay and extra "access" fee) to access?
Will we see a day when on-line gamers will be required to use only the "service provider approved" gaming server, because ports to other servers are blocked? Isn't Microsoft doing something like this already on MSN requiring a Passport to access their Gaming server?
Will we soon see the day when trying to access any "terrorist" news site (like Al Jazerra) will be impossible, and accessing any "liberal" (read: non-corporate/administration partner) news site will be slow and unreliable at best? And if you're trying to get to the campaign web site of the non-incumbent candidate, well, you can just forget it.
There's more at work here than just simple economics. Without on open networking layer as we had with the PSN, there won't be the kind of telecommunications revolution we say after the AT&T breakup in 1984.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Nowhere in this article does it say they're doing anything over IP. If I had to take a shot in the dark, I'd guess they were using something like ATM, which has all sorts of wonderful properties for real-time communication, and more closely resembles circuit switching (in the good ways) than any kind of IP connection. I've heard rumors to the effect that IPv6 allows for some of these properties, but no form of IP will ever do what ATM does, for lots of very good reasons.
I think Telus is nuts to use IP. I hope they succeed, but I still think they're nuts.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I presume the insertion of "IP" in the title of this article was a mistake or assumption made by a naeive author? You don't use IP to carry telephone calls on a phone network. Ever.
Umm... no. Many telephone companies are moving AWAY from circuit switched networks to packet switched ones (whether that be IP or some other protocol). Why? First, it's cheaper (you can use more commodity hardware, especially if you're using IP). Second, it can be more efficient, since traffic can be re-routed to make better use of your network resources (ie, real-time QoS and traffic engineering). Third, a packet-switched network can be more reliable, since there are no single points of failure... if a node goes down, just route around it (which also means less need for incredibly expensive, massively redundant network nodes). Fourth, since data (as opposed to voice) is becoming more and more important, a packet switched network makes it FAR easier to move data AND voice through the same backhaul network. Fifth, if there really are scenarious where you want a "circuit-switched-style" transport (for whatever reason... perhaps to provide a guaranteed pipe for, say, telesurgery), you can achieve this using things like MPLS, meaning you can get the best of both worlds.