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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?"
Hello, Sprint? This is Telus. You stole our idea you son-of-a-bit....
Reminds me of that old Dogbert Joke about having a Tilde in the phone number. I wonder how long it will be till them move to IPv6, won't that be a joy to dial.
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The beginning of the end started when the equipment manufacturers started producing boxes that allowed VoIP calls to have the same quality as circuit-switched ones. We all probably make a lot more IP calls than we are aware of.
The quicker companies do this, the better it will be for their margins - this news from Sprint probably doesn't mean much for their users, but their shareholders should be happy. The cost of carrying VoIP is much lower, which is what allows those calling card companies to stay in business.
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."
..will make it cheaper for Sprint to grow its network..
, unfortunately, monthly fees will rise with 25% due to the *better* services that'll be provided....;o)...
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
Call me on 3ffe:0501:0008:0000:0260:97ff:fe40:efab, see you soon.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
I really can't see an end to circuit switched networks any time soon. The switch to Packeted data is fine for most commercial traffic, but there are a few areas that will continue to require "locked in" circuits as opposed to packet buffering systems.
There is a lot of value in the use of packetized data. More "lines" over fewer trunks is just one of them, and for your average, everyday user, they will not notice the difference.
On the other hand, certain timing based encryption schemes will have to remain on locked in circuits to function. The latency caused through the use of packet buffering regardless of how slight, may be enough to cause a "handshake" failure, or just spew unintelligable garbage.
Of course, as encryption systems become more and more robust the need for "hard lines" will start to dissipate.
I for one welcome our new packetized telephone overlords...
krystal_blade
It will be easy to motivate our fellow man; there is hardly anything people treasure more than not being annihilated.
The network will still be switched at a local level, I suspect (even if the future telephone exchange, instead of switching analogue circuits, works more like an Ethernet switch). With so much copper going from the home/office to the exchange, it's likely to continue to be in use for the last mile for some time to come.
Trunk switching has been multiplexed for decades already. Previously, it might have been multiplexed by FDMA (frequency division), and now it looks like they are moving to IP based (or similar) to route calls through exchanges. The end user won't notice the difference. It's unlikely that the call routing will be done over the public Internet.
The trunk network can already run out of capacity - you do not now have dedicated bandwitdth and never had dedicated bandwidth over the trunk network (ever got the 'All circuits are busy' message?) A packet based trunk network is no less secure than the existing trunk networks. Packet switching != routing over the public internet.
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there is nothing new to this kind of thinking.
there is a paradigm shift going on through out the telecom voice/data industry
such a move is already being made in the "test-bed " countries like CHINA and INDIA where the telco network is newly gaining great importance in infrastructure.
already in INDIA the BhartiGroup and RELAINCE (2 main telco operators) have their backbones as IP based traffic.
it seems strange that such a move made in such "developing " contries is only being taken up in the US.
... I still doubt I'll be able to make calls on my Sprint PCS phone between 9-10pm. Once 'nights' kicks in in this town the network is perpetually busy.
nah you don't want fibre running to your door.
Otherwise you won't be able to get DSL services (well at least that's the pathetic excuse the use in the UK when you request aDSL and you have fibre to your door!)
If they get rid of dedicated circuits then how am I going to get out of the Matrix anymore?
They will probably be switching to an isdn network over glassfiber as backbone. Most of the world did this years ago. (You will have a hard time to find an circuit switching telephone network in the Netherlands, although most actual connections are still analogue it gets digitized the moment you reach the central)
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
It seems that technology moves in cycles...
"Serial is slow, let's move to parallel."
"Now parallel is slow, let's go to serial."
It all started with central, time-sharing systems, then switched to distributed computing when the technology permitted, and there now a trend torwards centralized administration again.
Batch processing was popular, then on-line processing replaced it, now many things are going back to batch processing because of the time/cost advantages it provides.
It seems that as technologies disappear, even newer technologies come along that remind everyone of the (still) very valid why they were using the older technologies in the first place.
Just wait, in 5-10 years, CRTs will be popular once again, and I suppose circuit switching will probably find a new foothold as well.
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Will Sprint use the Evil Bit?
You can compress voice down below 20kbits and get a quality comparable with analogue phone lines.
I believe GSM uses 13kbits (or in that neighbourhood) and I have used the speex codec in 8kbits mode recently and it give good enough quality to make conversations.
If you use uncompressed audio you need about 32kbits.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Part of my major complaint in the 21century is the fact that modem technology has not really improved a whole hell of alot. Sure we have Cable and xDSL service if you are lucky enough to live near a place where they saw fit to actually upgrade.
When I see stuff like this, I get this warm happy feeling inside when it seems like it's actually a *good* idea to actually upgrade from our old vintage phone system to something that can do a hell of alot more useful things. Datapackets can be uniquely identified as "voice" "fax" or "data", which could in theory make a whole slew of things possible...
Though it makes me wonder, if the telcos are going for packet based voice communications, why the hell would I bother placing a long distance call through them when I can use VoIP software. Don't get me wrong, i'll all for the idea digital packet based phone service, if for nothing else but making all phones with that service high speed internet ready.
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Nice idea and all that but how will the consumer benefit from this ? will we get lower call charges or will the CEO just get another 5million on his paypacket ?
What happens if voice IP traffic gets mixed with, say, a few Quake deathmatch packets? What happens if a bot starts taking railgun shots at bits of your conversation with your Mother? Or if a L33T D00D pulls down the grid for an entire city with a strategically placed rocket? I want answers, damn it!
Sprint Moves Phone Network to IP
Why, was property in the real world too expensive?
[rimshot]
Thanks, I'll be here all the week.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Part of what you are describing is called virtual circuit switching in which a 'circuit' is established over a packet switched network. In real circuit switching there is a dedicated electrical circuit between the two endpoints, which indeed can be both digital and analogue.
TDM is sort of a strange thing in that there is no real electrical circuit but you do get a dedicated time slot on the line. ATM definitly is packet switched.
Guaranteeing bandwith (QoS) is not hard at all, the routers simply need a table of active circuits.
Only packets for those circuits and in only a certain amount get through.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
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. IP is no good for carrying voice data and there are many better protocols around which were designed for this purpose. I presume that they really mean ATM or some other voice protocol? You need a small packet, circuit based protocol to handle large numbers of voice calls efficiently. Although IP could be made to work, it would be pretty difficult and is essentially rather like trying to put a sealed bus in a sea to try and make a ferry - why not just use a boat?
Nick...
The really fun thing about this means that any router can be told to simply copy every packet in a particular conversation to law enforcement.
Add to this that a traditional switched network gets really noise after a few switches and digital networks will....
This kind of switching hasn't been done for years. Electronic phone exchanges have existed for decades, and digital phone exchanges (at least where I live) have made up the entire network for over 10 years.
The electromechanical exchanges did manage to hang on into the early 1990s in many places though. Good old Strowger. (An excellent site about the phone network in days gone by is Light Straw. If you are ever in a position to visit the London Science Museum, they have a good-sized portion of a Strowger phone exchange that you can play with - makes lovely clattering noises!)
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Although they will probably use IP to transport voice data between their switches, that does not mean that any of the data will travel over the public Internet or that the end users will use IP. All this does is change the design of the subnet used to transport voice data in between toll switches, not the interface between the toll switch and the end user.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
British Telecom's main fibre optic backbone is a packet-switched network. It's only the "last mile" that's truly circuit switched these days. We have a fairly modern telephone system in the UK, only hampered by stupid area codes based on centres of population rather than numbers of people as in the US (so the big towns such as London, Bristol, Reading and Leicester ran out of numbers quickly and had to have their codes changed). To be fair, no-one anticipated fax machines and data connections when the coding system was decided.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I found it interesting that Telus, a Canadian telco, will use equipment from American companies Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks whereas Sprint, an American telco will use equipment from Canada's Nortel.
I have nothing particularly insightful to say right now. Talk amongst yourselves ;-)
Sprint with packet switching. So clear, you can hear a pin drop...twice.
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered circuit-switching community when slashdot.com community didn't care that the use of circuit switches has dropped yet again. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that circuit switches are boring, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Circuit switch use is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in the recent Cowboy Neal polls.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict circuit switching's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Circuit switching faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for circuit switching because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for circuit switching. As many of us are already aware, the circuit switch continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Fact: Nobody cares Timmy.
The Sprint Press Release states that they are going to use ATM, not IP.
RFC1925
1. This is only going to help drive down cell phone prices, helping to make land lines obsolete once again. (This was likely to happen eventually anyway, right?) If the article is right and you can forward your conversations to any IP address (at an extra cost), the primary advantage cells have are mobility, such is the case now. Until, that is, when you think about wireless solutions and VoIP. Mmmmm...DHCP + VoIP :)
2. A brief search of the web suggests VoIP can be more secure than traditional telephony. To what extent will government fight this? Effectively having an SSH tunnel to the other caller wouldn't be appreciated by the gov't given the present modus operandi of the US.
3. VoIP is certainly a logical progression, and I don't see the big telcos going out of business soon. Where I live, there are just a few DSL providers but only one company (SBC) owns all the wires into the area. Their only real competitor is cable TV whom they are fighting tooth and nail to gain marketshare. I imagine access to wireless frequencies has very little competition (think: 802.11), but will there need to be legislation to keeping it open?
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I have been installing VOIP, VOFR, and IP Telephony for years now for many businesses, I have lots of 99.999% uptime systems, no complaints in almost two years for quality of voice, I can't believe /.ers are amazed and puzzled by such simple things as a forty year old idea being used by a carrier. I guess /. isn't what it used to be.
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.
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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).
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reading /. tends to make me think in this way :-b
That is not an excuse, it is simply the truth. *DSL needs a pair of metal wires. If you do not have that, no *DSL for you. You may have to make do with STM4. The US equivalent of STM4 is OC12, by the way.
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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.
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See Nortel UEMG9000 for info.
I used to work on this, and can say that its quite a robust system. Runs about 8000 POTS lines or 2000 xDSL, and also supports DS1 and TDM lines. Backbone is OC3 ATM with other options available. VOIP should be done now/soon but I don't believe Sprint went that route. The system has Echo Cancellation and all the other required perks to ensure good quality.
Used to.. Anyone need an embedded driver dev in RTP?
In my office for the last few years I've had a Cisco VOIP phone - the only connections it has are power and network. It works pretty well, and that's an older phone.
Voice over IP is the way voice traffice will be handled in the future. The article talks about sending IP traffic over ATM, at least for now - it's more expensive that way but the cost of new switches is also quite high.
You might want to read more on the "Martini Draft" and MPLS to get a sense of how ATM will be replaced by IP technologies.
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Boy, does this take me back. One of the better articles in Wired magazine's history, in my opinion, was the one on "Netheads vs. Bellheads" highlighting an internal battle at Sprint as a microcosm of a bigger battle of packet-switching vs. circuit-switching. It's long but entertaining and worth it, talking about philosophical differences and ATM and IP.