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AT&T Migrating Phone Network to IP

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the keeping-up-with-the-jones dept.

prostoalex writes "Following the lead of Sprint and Telus, who are moving their telephone networks to IP, AT&T will spend $3 billion to migrate to an IP-based network. By the end of 2005 about 270 legacy systems will be retired." The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1.

6 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Bandwidth? by AustinTSmith · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This is quite true, I hope the national networks are ready to lay the fiber to compensate for their $3billion dollar investment or upgrade their existing network.

    A possibility is to convert the current fiber framework to support fiberoptic dense wave division multiplexing which takes light, bends it through a prism to split it into 32 seperate colors and alternate the sequence of flashes to produce a on/off 1/0. This is technology that can be applied to current fiber lines, and can expand their bandwidth by a factor of 32!

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    austintsmith.com
  2. Re:This brings back memories by Sevn · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sure, if at the time everyone had the option of hopping in a time machine and going 3 or 4 years in the future to use that 20 dollar a month long distance. As things were, we would have been the first kids on the block.

    --
    For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
  3. Re:This brings back memories by demonbug · · Score: 2, Insightful
    If things had gone the other way, I'd more than likely be selling a lot of you unlimited long distance service for 30 bucks a month, and expanding worldwide.


    Just as well you didn't then; for $30 a month I get all the local and long distance I need on my cell phone. Sounds like the company would have failed anyway (not that it didn't sound like a good idea).

  4. Re:Outdated infrastructure? by Kallahar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with POTS systems is that you have to have the entire country wired with copper. A place that doesn't have the same huge investment in infrastructure that the US has is probably better off buying a used cell phone system and just running fiber between the towers. We may think of cell phones as being a luxury but that's only because we have 70 years of investment into copper to every home.

  5. Re:Bandwidth? by secolactico · · Score: 2, Insightful

    a decent 10-12kbps codec will sound fine compared to the 64kbps that G.711 uses

    Indeed. However, the services that will suffer the most are legacy data over voice lines, such as fax and modems.

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    No sig
  6. Re:What about VOIP by convolvatron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    you didn't live through networking 'revolutions' like ATM. at that time we were told repeatedly that IP may have been a nice playground, but the telcos, who really know how to run a service, were going to take over now. IP and TCP were never going to be suitable for large scale business deployment.

    'at&t moves voice service to ip' would have been a hilarious gag article 10 years ago, now no one even blinks.