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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....
Call me on 3ffe:0501:0008:0000:0260:97ff:fe40:efab, see you soon.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
A friend who used to work for Nortel (didn't many) mentioned this. Worldcom did most of their long distance stuff on top of IP6.
See my journal, I write things there
If they get rid of dedicated circuits then how am I going to get out of the Matrix anymore?
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.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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/
Consumer benifits....
1. One phone number for multi devices (I think this was covered in the article).
2. Phone numbers not tied to physical location, but rather device or authentication. Would be most nifty for mobiles to go landline. (this was covered)
3. Multi communication... end users could in theory have two telephones, and place two calls on the same line. No further need for an alarm wire from your telco.
4. No D/A loss when you copy your CD over your phone.
5. Everyone is highspeed internet ready... in theory you need 32Kbit for decent voice, perhaps 64K / 128K bit just to be safe. Pay more money to throttle you up to internet speeds... no more waiting for low paid installers.
6. Networked appliances no longer need "internet access" but rather phone access, and no gay ass 300 baud modems in your digital cable box.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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.
There is a really good article on the economics invoved by Clay Shirky. Recommended reading.
I beg to differ.
Voice over IP is already standard part of corporate IT. It is rapidly leaking into the consumer space.
Historically, Big Dumb Pipes have continually displaced managed bandwidth type systems. Voice over IP is just the latest example.
I did a consulting project for Qualcomm as part of my classwork last semester studying whether 802.11b has the potential to disrupt CDMA networks. People might find the paper interesting, since it indirectly addresses many of the same issues.
http://web.mit.edu/~rwilley/www/Qualcomm.pdf
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.
So, I'm a very recent ex-nortel person who did a lot of packet stuff. If I recall correctly, Sprint's network is an ATM one, either AAL1 or AAL2. AAL5 is IP-over-ATM, and isn't as common.
Note that in general, these are all behind-the-scenes private networks. You will still be circuit-switched to a point (inside your local office, typically). Then there'll be a TDM-to-packet gateway which converts your circuit-switched connection into ATM (or IP).
From an IP point of view, one of the side effects of this is that you don't need a seperate IP address for every phone, or even a seperate address for every house. All you need is an IP address/port number combination for each end of an active call in any given network. (And there are ways of getting around that restriction too.) Since these are all private networks cut off from the internet, IPV4 provides more than enough addresses.
Packet telephony all the way to the home, at least from the telcos, is some ways off. You'd either have to have a gateway inside your house to which you connect all your legacy phones, or you'd replace all the phones with IP phones. As you can probably see, there's a lot of inertia behind that *not* happening -- try convincing your great uncle Bert that he needs to replace all the phones in his house.