AT&T Migrating Phone Network to IP

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.

Comments

Better be IPv6

[Thinkit3]

Well I suppose they're smart enough to go to something much more expandable. Just wonder how much legacy (ick) will still be stuck there.

What about VOIP

[rock_climbing_guy]

Is this any indication that with the proliferation of IP technology, even the phone companies will eventually start working with VOIP instead of trying so hard to kill it?

If so, maybe they should spread the good word to our frinds at the RIAA. ::/me wakes up::

Re:What about VOIP

[cmowire]

Not a chance.

Phone companies want to itemize and per-minute and allocation and whatnot anything to death. They will stop working with VOIP when they are forced to, not a second before.

Re:What about VOIP

[PatJensen]

Try again. Even with the proliferation of Centrex adoption for most Gov/Ed and small commercial customers, and those that can't afford to deploy a PBX or KSU - IP Telephony is being deployed at breakneck speeds, by your favorite local exchange carrier's. Breakthrough new products like Cisco ITS make this even easier and much more cost effective, within a year you will see even smaller border routers handling voice calls end-to-end with voice messaging integration and fax relay. This is all over the same data LAN that you use and maintain today.

Obviously the core LEC business is to prevent the loss of business lines and local service, but what is lost is made up for with high-cap voice circuits like PRIs and channelized T1s and high density long distance calling solutions. The LEC's have over 20 years of experience with these products. They are the data hardware vendor's largest partners for deploying voice over data networks, because they already have the experience set to design, maintain and deploy them.

-Pat

Re:What about VOIP

[Tmack]

Exactly my point. Most true VOIP solutions will still probably run over the existing physical infrastructure, which will most likely use prvate/unrouteable subnets ala 192.168./10./172.16.128. as does the VOIP company I happen to be employed by. Not only does this make it alot more difficult to breach from the outside net (besides being firewalled specifically among other things), it allows building custom neworks to handle the low-latency required for VOIP. I do see the end of interstate long-distance being different from in-state coming soon, followed closely with the complete abolishment of long-distance, as there is no difference in cost to the providers (since most already have backhauls across the nation), and is only in existance because of FCC regulations (the only reason intra-state is more expensive is because FCC regulations allow it). The article as posted will most definately be referring to the method of switching between cell towers and the ILEC-POTS network which Im supprised wasnt designed as VOIP in the first place (or already converted).

TM

This brings back memories

[Sevn]

A few years ago I was involved in a startup company. We had talked to qwest about buying a bunch of dark fiber. We had secured an insane amount of capital from Phoenix, E-Street, and MSDW surprisingly as they normally wouldn't be interested in a startup as they don't normally cater to incubator or angel type projects. So what were we selling? We had sat down and figured out that with some very expensive sycamore or juniper routers and DWDM and a bunch of dark fiber, we could roll out a nationwide flat rate VoIP long distance service for about 250 million dollars. We had an awesome business plan. A solid year of work. All the right buzzwords and an executive summary that would make the most hardened VC blush. We were a few months from starting. Qwest was excited. Everyone was excited. Then *poof*. All gone in an instant. It seems that AT&T had issued a statement to their stock holders that they would not be paying out dividends that year to anyone because they wanted to warchest that money in case someone like us came along. So the business plan was instantly invalidated. 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.

Re:This brings back memories

[Sevn]

Almost. We were going to lease it from qwest. They had already done the work. I think the way things ended up, we had a 20 year lease agreement that kinda would have screwed us down the road. But we would have had a decade or so to figure something out. Qwest was trying very hard to sell us a managed solution. They initially didn't like the idea of parting with any unlit fiber. You should see the difference in prices between a managed fiber solution and leasing dark fiber.

Re:This brings back memories

[Sevn]

You are overlooking the benefits of being first to market with something. That and the phone in the home isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Who is to say that we wouldn't have eventually been able to offer transport on our network to a t-mobile or similar company? That and advances in the past 3-4 years with fiber technology would have meant we could have easily doubled the traffic we would have been able to push across our fiber. It wouldn't have been hard at all to stay ahead. Granted, a great deal of our profit would have ended up going towards FCC lobby and other legal expenses because we knew the telcos would not take something like this sitting down. That's why we had provisions for such things in our business plan.

IP telephone service has come a long way

[joel8x]

A few years ago I was part of a deployment of an all IP Siemens phone system at this place I used to work at. The voicemeail was actually part of an MS exchange server, and you recieved all of your voicemail in you inbox in Outlook. I loved it because I could set up a PST and easily archive phone messages on my hard drive. Unfortunately the system suffered from horible sound quality (there was a lag when you talked to people and it echoed like crazy) and was just not ready for prime time. I got a great taste of the future of business IP phone systems, though.

Outdated infrastructure?

[RobertB-DC]

From the article:
AT&T plans to retire 270 legacy systems across the world by the end of 2005. Approximately 130 legacy systems were retired over the past 18 months, with another 140 systems slated for phase out over the next two years.

The article didn't define exactly what "legacy systems" were (switches? entire local networks?), but that sure sounds like a lot of high technology that's heading for the dustbin. We're talking technology that's currently in use creating a mobile communications system that would have been unimaginable just 15 years ago.

Will it all be scrapped out? Will barges full of misc parts be shipped to third-world scavenging companies to recover the precious metals? Or is there some way to move the equipment to areas that need it -- Afghanistan and Iraq come to mind right away, but I'd think that under-served (and under-reported) countries like Somalia and the rest of Africa could make use of this supposedly outdated hardware.

Of course, we're back to the same old question -- when it costs more to recycle than to dump, how do you justify doing the Right Thing to shareholders whose only interest is in doing the Profitable Thing?

I hope this doesn't mean what I think it will

[donutello]

I make a lot of international calls and I've experimented with Sprint, MCI, AT&T and a whole bunch of phone card providers.

Without question, AT&T has been miles better than the rest. The other providers obviously use packet switching as evidenced by the intermittent delays as much as a couple of seconds. Sometimes you can get half-way through a sentence when you hear the other guy starting a sentence that he did when there was silence - it gets very annoying because both of you have to practice random backoff which can either result in empty silence or both of you speaking over each other.

I hope AT&Ts service doesn't go that way.

Dumb Dialup Question

[nurb432]

Does the conversion to IP on the backend help or hurt the poor dialup, and direct point to point analog modem ( read: old style bbs courier ) users out there.

It may effect nothing, just wondering.

Re:Dumb Dialup Question

[cfulmer]

This is actually one of the funny problems with VoIP. If you just take a standard phone call, you can packetize it and if you haven't tried to gather too much audio into one packet, the additional latency won't even be noticable on the other end. Heck, you can even drop an occasional packet and chances are nobody will notice.

Modems, however, do not handle either latency or packet loss well -- part of the initial V.(90??) standards take a latency measurement at the beginning, expecting it to be some small number that doesn't change. In VoIP, not only isn't the number small (closer to 100ms than 20ms), but it can vary over the life of the call.

So, what ends up happening is that your local gateway (the thing that converts between traditional phone and packet communications) listens for your modem tones and kicks in a V./G.whatever codec to convert it into packet. Then, at the far end, the same thing happens.

Will IP telephony work during a blackout?

[Anonymous Coward]

IP telephony may be cheaper, but there are other considerations to be taken into account here.
At least the phones did function during the recent blackout. Can you say the same for IP-based telephony?

Does AT&T get to avoid regulations now?

[geekee]

According to this slashdot post VoIP should remain unregulated. Now that AT&T is using VoIP, do they get the same treatment?

Re:Bandwidth?

[doogles]

As this article states, the bandwidth required for VoIP can be huge. I would seriously hope to see some more advanced algorithms or better yet, more bandwidth installed, before these systems become more heavily adopted.

Ah, but with packet telephony, we are only "burning up" bandwidth for active calls:

Take a traditional circuit-switch T1 carrying 24 DS0, sitting idle making no calls, and you still have a T1 that can be used for nothing else.

Take the same scenario in a packet-switched world, and you have a T1 100% usable for other data until such time as the circuit is needed. QoS (LLQ, or PQ/CBWFQ in Cisco-speak) ensures that when there IS a voice call it gets priority treatment.

Last note, on IP overhead: Enterprises with smaller links can leverage compressed RTP headers (cRTP) to reduce the 40 byte IP/UDP/RTP penalty down to 2 bytes across point-to-point links (Frame Relay PVC, leased lines, BRIs, etc). This concept doesn't really apply to a carrier because of the CPU impact header compression costs, but considering all carrier networks are currently severly underutilized I do not think this should be a reason to shy away from packet telephony.

Re:Bandwidth?

[Ziviyr]

How about all the stuff the Xiph, umm, org, is working on.

Ogg Speex is actively developed last I checked.

Re:What benefit of first to market?

[Sevn]

Ok, I'll give you an example. MindSpring Enterprises was the first ISP in history to purchase customers outright from another ISP. They paid $499 per customer to buy all of PSInet's dialup customers. Because of that, from that moment forward all ISP's were valued by the number of customers they had times 499. If the startup I was involved with had succeeded, things right now would be very different. You couldn't be sure that 20 dollars flat rate is what someone could get for long distance. The market would have been effected by our 30 dollar a month offering. If anything, a pricing war might have ensued and we'd be at 10 dollars a month now. So it's silly to say "well, it's like this today so you'd be screwed" or any other comments in that vein for that reason. The whole landscape would have been altered earlier in the timeline.

Cold day in hell...

[neBelcnU]

...when all the banks, law firms, hospitals, and other multi-site businesses will toss their 5ESS's for IP telephony.

Remember, we heard this before, and my then-employers couldn't have sold a VoIP GATEWAY with a gun. But we employed FULL TIME three retired and semi-retired switch-wizards to take care of all those AT&T^H^H^H^HLucent^H^H^H^H^H^HAvaya switches.

We've got to wait for a LOT of retirements (human) before we will see wide adoption of packet-telephony. It's homo sapiens sitting at the very end of the last mile that's hard to change. ("I've memorized 'ADD STA...' and I don't want to learn something new...")

That all said, I applaud AT&T's move to change their backbone. It's theirs, and it's just a protocol (as mentioned waay above). A publicly-traded company getting on this bandwagon will be a Good Thing (TM).

Re:Cold day in hell...

[Sentry21]

On the contrary, a lot of companies nowadays, especially those with branch offices and the like, are moving to VOIP. In Canada, for example, many Ontario (or Vancouver) call-centres are realizing that all they need is an internet connection to be able to route all 'Poussez 2 pour service en Francais' to a smaller French-only call centre in Montreal. Other companies are finding that they can (relatively) seamlessly integrate branch offices into their extension system ('324 for Joan in accounting in Toronto, 524 for Jacob in legal in Vancouver'), making things easier for everyone.

It's not going to happen for 'all' such companies, but for a lot of them, it makes sense, it's good enough, it's fast enough, and it'll only get better. Especially in Canada's broadband-equipped long-distance cross-country environment, it's easy and getting easier. Whether or not that will happen in the US (where bandwidth is apparantly expensive) or not remains to be seen.

As for a publicly traded company getting on the bandwagon, is Sprint not publicly traded? (hint: yes, it is). Or Telus? AT&T is just another large phone company to start, but it's hardly the first of the big guys to start.

Re:You know

[ericman31]

Well, here's an example based on one person's experience. My organization is converting its TDM PBX system to IP Telephony and VOIP. We are completely packet switched IP for voice from the phone across our entire WAN to the PSTN circuits connecting us to our ILEC. We have not implemented QoS at all at this point. My phone is separated from the PSTN circuits by a T-1 point to point circuit that also carries the traffic of about 65 developers, sys admins and DBA's back to the main data center. We have about 1100 phones in our voice network, spread across 5 different locations. We only have PSTN circuits in our data center. 300 of those phones are in a high volume call center.

So, here's what I've observed over the past couple of days since we implemented. There is no noticable lag or latency. There is no jitter or echo on the line. People I speak to who are outside our network tell me that the call sounds like a very high quality cell phone call. I expect that as soon as QoS is implemented even that slight lack of quality (compared to PBX telephony) will be gone.

My practical experience is that packet switched voice is going to work like a champ. It's only a matter of time until all voice travels that way. Of course I may be biased, since I am the system architect who drove the project to replace our current PBX solution for voice. :-)