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::

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]

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.

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.

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.