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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?"
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.
There is a really good article on the economics invoved by Clay Shirky. Recommended reading.
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.
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.