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.

Re:Better be IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

"The battleground in the 21st century is about who has got the best network from the edge-to-edge of network," Eslambolchi said. "To be able to access directly to customers is a fundamental strategy for AT&T."

I'd take anything spewed by Eslambolchi with a grain of salt. He's correct about the migration to edge-to-edge (e.g. doing away with old technology) but at the same time he's the champion of the "concept of zero" (e.g. lay everybody off) which doesn't exactly sit very well with the people who are being paid to put themselves out of work.

Eslambolchi was a bright guy that became too successful for his own good. He's now more business droid than technology geek. He's more interested in laying people off using lackluster automation tools (that create more work than they automate) than actual technological innovation.

The gist of the article is fairly accurate but the AT&T messenger delivering it is a quack. The technical people at AT&T are incredibly talented and adaptable and they're always trying to find new ways to route around Eslambolchi's schemes which require you talk to a dain-bramaged computer when you have a problem.

Re:Better be IPv6

[d34thm0nk3y]

By the end of 2005 about 270 legacy systems will be retired.

I am just wondering if they are going to be availible as surplus. It would be really fun to play around with that old shit.

Re:Better be IPv6

[illumina us]

Perhaps with IP phones instead of adding new phonelines you will be able to assign IPs to each phone in your house and then have an extention to that phone so if someone calls xxx-xxxx they will get your house, then xxx and get the designated phone. Yes many companies do this already, but it's not widely used. Would be nice for people to call my parents and call their phone instead of call the house and ask for them when I pick up.

Re:Better be IPv6

[Mikeytsi]

Let me tell you something about AT&T's "ticketing system". It's quite possibly the most worthless piece of crap in existence. In fact, I've memorized the key sequence to skip it so I can talk to a real person. (Not much better, since AT&T replaced the workforce with poorly trained, non-union employees, but still better than the damn automatic system).

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

[silentbozo]

Depends on which phone companies you're talking about. The incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) make their money by charging customers outrageous monthly fees, and by charging long distance companies for terminating their calls at the local subscriber's telephone. They hate VOIP.

Carriers like AT&T, which sell primarily long distance, like VOIP since it saves them money, and could eventually allow them to bypass the ILECs entirely, since it turns voice calls into another internet data stream. They like VOIP.

Re:What about VOIP

[Tmack]

And how does VOIP change this??

VOIP is just another protocol. Most people seem to not realize that by the time their phoneline reaches the edge of their neighborhood, it has become a digital signal. The transition to VOIP is just natural progression. It allows more flexability, but will still require routers and switchtes to operate. Through these switches and routers is how the phone companies will keep track of calls. VOIP does NOT mean an end to phone numbers, providers, etc... Remember that most of the internet is carried by the ILEC networks on the same loops used to carry voice, just reonfigured slightly to allow pure data traffic. VOIP providers merely use these loops in the data configuration with routers that convert the analog voice signals to packets closer to the customer end than normal voice lines. VOIP merely abstracts the traffic type from the physical layer more than current SS7 and other protocols. VOIP is not simply PC-PC calls placed by IP address. VOIP is only a different protocol, central switches are still used to route calls and keep track of things, they just run more efficently (ie: 1 VOIP switch about the size of a 10k cisco can handle the entire call volume for a decent sized city (or 2) where currently several switches are required by the ILECs). Per-minute rates and such will still be acounted for. Phone providers will switch to VOIP mainly due to the relative simplicity and flexability of its stucture. VOIP is NOT what alot of people percieve, it is simply a new method of routing voice traffic that does not eliminate the need for routers/switches/etc...

TM

Re:What about VOIP

[cmowire]

Aye. I think the discussion about the phone companies not trying kill VoIP was more referring to the VoIP long distance and local phone services. So perhaps we were talking about Vo-the-internet. The phone companies, of course, will do VoIP behind the covers if it works for them.

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

[convolvatron]

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.

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

Bandwidth?

[lord_paladine]

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.

Re:Bandwidth?

[Abcd1234]

Too bad your link refers to corporations using VoIP on their LAN/WAN as an alternative to traditional telephony. What we're talking about here is telephone operators using IP as a backbone transport (as opposed to voice over ATM VCs, etc). For telephone providers, VoIP has some excellent advantages, the most notable being consolidation of existing infrastructure (ie, being able to use the same lines for both voice and data).

Re:Bandwidth?

[AustinTSmith]

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!

Re:Bandwidth?

[phliar]

I used to work at a VoIP added-services provider. Received wisdom was that packet telephony was definitely the future, but 50-50 on whether or not IP was the right protocol for packet voice networks. One thing for sure is, in H.323 there's no point in using G.711 for voice -- a decent 10-12kbps codec will sound fine compared to the 64kbps that G.711 uses. I think that H.323 is sensitive to all kinds of parameters like comfort noise and silence suppression, you need to tune it to your network. In practice, it looks like well-tuned VoIP does take more bandwidth that good ol' PSTN, but the difference is not significant enough to justify running two kinds of networks.

However I worked at the software end, not VoIP network operations -- what do I know?

Re:Bandwidth?

[AustinTSmith]

here's a link to that:

DWDM

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?

[secolactico]

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.

Re:Bandwidth?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

A possibility is to convert the current fiber framework to support fiberoptic dense wave division multiplexing

Nah, most backbones already do DWDM.

Re:Bandwidth?

[tzanger]

I thought everyone was settled on G.729a since that's what all the cell networks tend to use and the IP cores and whatnot are there, refined, tested and debugged thoroughly.

Re:Bandwidth?

[Ziviyr]

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

Ogg Speex is actively developed last I checked.

Re:Bandwidth?

[madbastd]

I would seriously hope to see some more advanced algorithms or better yet, more bandwidth installed, before these systems become more heavily adopted.

More efficient algortithms are not needed. It comes down to economics, more than anything else. Yes, VoIP algorithims are inefficient. They use more bandwidth than PCM voice. The extra bandwidth used by VoIP will cost money (and other resources). Call this the "excess bandwidth cost" of VoIP. You are also correct that more bandwidth is needed, but that is not driven by voice requirements: it's driven mostly by broadband data. As the proportion of voice traffic in a network decreases (it's already less than 12.5% of AT&T's traffic according to the article), then the excess bandwith cost of VoIP decreases as a proportion of the network cost. AT&T will have calculated that sometime shortly after 2004, it will be cheaper to pay the excess bandwidth cost of VoIP, than to maintain a separate voice network. Cisco sum up this economic situation as "the voice rides for free" on the IP network. That's a marketing over-simplification, yet captures an essential truth.

Re:Bandwidth?

[DrRiffic]

i remember when this was called WASTE

Re:Bandwidth?

[phliar]

[a decent 10-12kbps codec will sound fine]

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

That could be seen as a feature: the crappier the modem and fax quality is, the sooner people will move off them! (Although real-time fax with H.323 doesn't seem to be there yet, and apparently faxed documents are legally OK but scanned and emailed documents are not.)

Re:Bandwidth?

[danila]

Another thing is that you theoretically can use high compression on the calls, when it's needed, like when another skyscraper is blown up or another state loses electricity. It's not like people would complain about quality then. And it would also help with benign events, like New Year or something, when people want to make a lot of calls, since you can do with less extra capacity. Lower costs for telecoms, lower prices for customers.

You know

[loraksus]

I . . . loveusin. . . gIPtelephony. . . . Lagis . . . notreallyanissue.

Re:You know

[Talinom]

I . . . loveusin. . . gIPtelephony. . . . Lagis . . . notreallyanissue.

Yeah, and c3ll.....u....lar phone co......nvers....ations over that liiiiii.....neare going to be great!!!!!!

I wonder how my USR Courier v.Everything will handle the line? Will hardware and Xon/Xoff flow control flake out enroute to my ISP? Hmmmm

Re:You know

[mcpkaaos]

How would an IP based network cause greater latency than existing legacy networks? Ever try talking to someone oversees with current technology? Last time I spoke to someone in Germany there was a noticeable 4 to 5 second delay. I'd be willing to bet that the latency oversees would be vastly improved, as well as just across the US. I'm speculating, but I highly doubt that an IP based network would be anything other than an improvement.

Just a thought.

Re:You know

[vegetablespork]

It's not so much the latency that's bad, but the variance of latency.

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. :-)

Re:You know

[mcpkaaos]

That is so much cooler than my speculation. :)

Re:You know

[loraksus]

it was meant as a joke, and if you are using something other than your home dsl line it will probably be ok. OTOH, I know a bunch of fax machines have issues sending stuff over ip based services like net2phone. . .

Things can evolve

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1

The day the RIAA will be such a threat to peaceful P2P that people will start reading aloud file hex printouts byte by byte over the phone to share data, I think the trend will reverse. But I might be wrong ...

Re:Things can evolve

[Josh Booth]

How fast of a modem is that? Hmm, maybe around 20 to 30 bit/s? How many times can you say EF or A7 a second? Or will people resort to moving to a larger base to say it faster? I'm sure someone could match a 300 baud modem eventually.

Re:Things can evolve

[Asmodean]

Don't laugh, I once sent a 3k Mechwarrior save game file to someone by reading it to him in hex.

Re:Things can evolve

[Sevn]

hehe, awesome.

A long time ago I got a new compaq server with a free copy of NT4. I had no use for the NT4, but a friend of mine across the country did. So I emailed him the prod key, and from IRC I used DCC file transfer to send him a zipfile of the i386 directory off the cd. He was on a 14.4 modem so it took something like 72 hours. Shout out to my homey criZasher.

The IP attorneys will have a field day.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if this means that all phone conversations will become the intellectual property of the phone company.

Re:The IP attorneys will have a field day.

[NanoGator]

"I wonder if this means that all phone conversations will become the intellectual property of the phone company."

I wonder if this means I'll be able to set the copy protection bit on my phone convos.

*Sticks his tongue out at the local law enforcement HQ*

an easier way

[Anonymous Coward]

i've found a much easier way to do this. just set up the text-to-speech component of your favorite IM program. now all my friends sound like stephen hawking!!! : p

Re:an easier way

[vidnet]

All my friends _are_ Stephen Hawking, you insensitive clod!

Phreaking

[Pro_Piracy_Guy]

Does this mean I am going to have to adjust the frequency of my Kaptain Krunch whisle when I use the pay phone?

Re:Phreaking

[Anonymous Crowhead]

if you don't get it

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 don't know much about qwest do you. :) I'll leave it at that.

Re:This brings back memories

[Phroggy]

You couldn't even lay the fiber for 250 million.

He didn't say they could. He said they were buying dark fiber - the billions of dollars to lay the fiber had already been spent by someone else, but it wasn't being used, so they would buy it from them cheaply.

I'm not disagreeing that it's BS; I don't know.

Re:This brings back memories

[ethaz]

Gee, $30 a month? AT&T sells unlimited long distance for $20 a month. Looks like your little company would have gone belly-up fast.

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]

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.

Re:This brings back memories

[demonbug]

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).

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.

Re:This brings back memories

[dickens]

Well, if you figure your local service costs 20 bucks with all the features turned on (caller id, call waiting, 3-way, etc) then yes, you can get unlimited long distance for 30 bucks a month right now, in 46 states. Check out this site.

Re:This brings back memories

[Sevn]

Ok, I'll bite.

VoIP can suck. Ours didn't though. We had an exclusive license on a very slick compression technology. If I'm not mistake, the IP holder has since licensed this technology to just about every telco he can. We also had a very impressive and more importantly PRETTY proof of concept rig we toted around with us to VC meetings. That part is very important if anyone is going to actually take you seriously. We also had partnership agreements with all the big names we were using. We actually had an agreement to set up a lab with Qwest to do developement on technologies to increase the amount of bandwidth we could push across fiber because we saw that as very important to our future. We made an insane effort to address every single issue we could think of to address common areas (competition in the market, emerging technologies, any potential show stoppers) before we made our first presentation. It obviously went well. It's just that the thing that can sink your business plan faster than anything is when you potentially have someone huge poised to take you out at every turn. Nobody is going to put money into something with a big bear on it's back. The news spread rapidly. We tried to put a positive face on it for a few weeks and simply gave up. Fortunately it wasn't so much a finantial loss for any of the original 12 of us as it was a loss of time spent. We did find ways to make some money out of the ideas in the end, but nothing substantial. Perhaps just enough to justify the time we had spent on the project.

Re:This brings back memories

[gl4ss]

Phone in the home is going away. Gone, going, outta here. Once cellular carriers start to provide adequate service, it's gone over there too in few years.

Re:This brings back memories

[Sevn]

Possibly. But what about the phone(s) in the business? Don't assume that the phone on the desk in the cubicle is going anywhere anytime soon. Don't assume that the enormous infrastructure in place to provide phone service for the business market will go away for a very long time. That would have been a very viable market for the startup I was involved with. I think you are being slightly naive about how quickly the phone in the home will disappear also. Until such time as reliable and fast Internet service can be provided wireless for people that can't even get broadband. Until it is feasable to send faxes over a cellphone. Perhaps the phone in the home is going away in the cities. But in rural america, it's going to be around for a very long time.

Re:This brings back memories

[gl4ss]

the companies are indeed a place to see them in use, but even there it's getting phased out in places where you don't just sit around answering the phone.

**Until such time as reliable and fast Internet service can be provided wireless for people that can't even get broadband. Until it is feasable to send faxes over a cellphone** that is already here too, covering the are that gsm covers(whole finland basically, gprs ain't bad compared to dialup hell, when there's no free local calls dialup gets pretty expensive pretty fast).

what i was basically saying was that that getting a phone for a new home is often not done anymore here(landline phone at home is going away, even when you have a traditional phone at home you often end up choosing to call with the cellular because all the phone numbers are in it anyways and chances are you would end up calling into a cellular phone anyways, so there's not even that much of a price difference), because all the family members already have cellular phones there is little point in getting the phone line even for crappy dialup vs. some gprs solution in the case absolutely no broadband is available. in 1.1.2000 65% of total population had a cellular, 29.8.2003 there were 4.5million gsm subscriptions in finland, with population of roughly 5.3 million or so).

the wires for phone are used though, for *dsl mainly, and not too many cancel their landlines just for the sake of it, just keeping it doesn't cost too much and it would be a shame if telemarketers couldn't call that line.

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?

Re:Outdated infrastructure?

[Kallahar]

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.

Re:Outdated infrastructure?

[Raindeer]

nack

The problem with your statements is that you only look to telephony. I want to be able to do alot, alot more at home (like reading Slashdot and watching movies) all that should come over a nice line. Fiber is the fourth utility...

Re:Outdated infrastructure?

[ruvreve]

countries like Somalia and the rest of Africa could make use of this supposedly outdated hardware.

They could....except for that fact that no copper wiring exists in these countries. It is much more economical to use wireless solutions for almost everything then to try and run wiring in these war torn countries.

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.

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

[madbastd]

The other providers obviously use packet switching as evidenced by the intermittent delays as much as a couple of seconds.

Packet switching allows this sort of thing, but fortunately doesn't require it. A well-engineered packet network, with a known traffic pattern, will rarely drop or excessively delay a packet, for much the same reasons that a correctly engineered Frame Relay network will rarely do either. AT&T have a pretty good record at network engineering.

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

[i.r.id10t]

If the bandwidth for good VoIP is available at my house, I'd be dammed pissed if I had to use dial up 'net service.

As far as dialup to bbs, etc. it should be possible. We recently put 2 buildings on a VoIP system at work, and they still have the old fax machines, etc. Whether the Big Carrier would keep those lines maintained, etc. is a different story.

Re:Dumb Dialup Question

[Detritus]

It should be transparent to you. There should still be a 64 kbps full-duplex pipe between the end-points of the connection. The difference is how the bits get transported.

Re:Dumb Dialup Question

[UserGoogol]

It's IP, but it's not the Internet.

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.

This should keep some people employed...

[tekiegreg]

with millions of American households running Telephone equipment, you'd have to almost sweep house by house to pull out all the old Analog equipment. I shudder to think of the cost...

Re:This should keep some people employed...

[Abcd1234]

Uhhh... they aren't planning on pulling out analog to the home. That's just plain ridiculous. They're replacing major backbone-type infrastructure with VoIP.

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?

Re:Will IP telephony work during a blackout?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. RBOCs generally know how to create systems that still work after multiple failures.

You need to be worried about the new CLECs. Some of their connections into RBOCs are not even redundant - can you say outage?

Re:Will IP telephony work during a blackout?

[tuomoks]

Recent blackout ?? Remember 9/11 - Sonet networks switched in seconds - when did the pure IP networks come back ? IP is just a protocol, sometimes nice and sometimes not so. Anyway - IP over something to trust is not bad, just a pain (IMHO). A notice - trying to build wireless IP switching, roaming and all, what can you do? have a nice day.

Re:Will IP telephony work during a blackout?

[42forty-two42]

Just because it's analog dosen't mean it needs no power.

Dialup Users

[jasontwarnock]

Hmm, I wonder what this will do to dialup users. TCP/IP over PPP over VOIP.

Re:Dialup Users

[venom600]

Ummm....I think that would be VOIP (Voice OVER IP) over IP over PPP.

Re:Dialup Users

[porky_pig_jr]

Amen, bro. That was my first thought as well.

On the other hand, if other comments are correct and VoIP takes in fact HIGHER bandwidth than the 64Kbps POTS, things aren't that bad after all. Of course it sounds funny - with potential compression of about 8-10Kbps, how come it takes higher bandwidth overall? Apparently, some protocol overhead. AT least this is what Tolly group claims, and I know Tolly quite well, their tests and conclusions are normally well founded.

So the best case scenario - nothing will happen.We still connect our PCs to the analog voice line, with V92 protocol and get somewhere between 40 to 50Kbps throughput.

The worst case scenario is that we'll get nothing, but then hopefully low-speed ADSL type connection will come down say to $15 a month, so it shouldn't be such a big problem.

Re:Dialup Users

[jc42]

TCP/IP over PPP over VOIP.

Heh. I already have a situation like this in my pocket. I have a cell phone (kyocera 6035) that runs PalmOS, and has a real web browser. To do something on the Web, what it does is makes a phone call and brings up a PPP connection on the "line".

This means that I have IP implemented on PPP over a voice line, which is emulated over a digital packet network. The resulting IP network probably runs at least 1000 times slower than just doing IP on the low-level packet network would run.

Why don't they do it the logical way? Well, if they did that, they'd only be able to charge for the traffic, which for a typical web page is only a few packets. But the way they do it, they can charge you around half a minute of air time to make the connection, and then charge you air time for the full time of the connection, even though most of the time you aren't sending packets at all because you're reading. And if you forget to hang up, they charge you the full price for your idle time.

I can see them doing VoIP by implementing it on top of the PPP link that is on top of the voice line that's on top of the packet network. It's no mystery why it's slow, when you realize all this.

Re:Dialup Users

[loraksus]

assuming, of course, that lazy ILECs even want to roll out new DSL service. My neigborhood - the dslam is full and no plans for expansion until 2008. What can I say, people want it, but it just isn't available. Cable just came into the neigborhood, so I got it. Faster downstream AND upstream (verizon will give you 15k and nothing more in my area, paying more wont help here). . . People want it, verizon says, sorry, we can't help you. . . .

Re:Dialup Users

[suss]

Hmm, I wonder what this will do to dialup users. TCP/IP over PPP over VOIP.

It means they'll probably be lucky if they can get a CONNECT 9600.

Our national telephone service already pulled this crap over 15 years ago. When you complained about the low connect rate, they'd either say "speeds are not guaranteed over 2400" or "oh, sorry, we didn't know you were going to use this for a modem line" and they'd give you a dedicated line (what you paid for in the first place!).

Re:Dialup Users

[porky_pig_jr]

Yes, cable is faster, no doubt. ADSL is really two tin cans and a wire. BUT ADLS is being sold cheaper as well. Also - this is fairly important point - IEEE is currently working on defining DLS version 2, for twice higher distances and of course much lower rates -- but this should give fairly decent coverage to most of the users, don't remember all the details, so the article in EETimes (they have a web site).

So one of the possible scenarios is that when the switch from 64Kbps POTS to VoIP takes place, provider may include cheap low-rate ADLS into the whole package.

Incidently, concerning you remark that DSLAM is full already in your area -- this is what many folks don't understand -- that not only you can oversubscribe cable-based network, but ADSL as well since it is after aggregated at DSLAM. Oh wel ... I was one of the early implementers IP over Cable, by the way. Worked for BBNPlanet, and we worked with CableVision (or was it 'Continental CableVision?) on that project. We've used cable modem of a small company which was subsequently purchased by Bay Networks (now part of Nortel).
Internally, at BBNPLanet we've also did some ADSL related tests and saw how unreliable ADSL can be compared with Data Over Cable.

Re:Dialup Users

[vidnet]

RTFA, they plan to retire all 270 dialup users by 2005 :)

Re:Dialup Users

[evilviper]

Nah... The big change will be that you will have to get a new modem. This modem will send a signal to the telco POP that says not to do the VoIP compression thing, and instead, allow the endpoints to send raw packets.

This has two distinct advantages.

1. It allows Modems to use the full bandwidth available, and doesn't waste processing power at the POP doing something that is unnecessary, and unwanted.

2. It would allow more aadvanced things to go on. If the phones at each end support a newer VoIP codec, or public-key encryption, they can more readily utilize those features on the new network.

Oh, great.

[AJWM]

Now when the next sobig.f or whatever hits, we'll lose the phone service as well as the electicity.

Re:Oh, great.

[sean23007]

I think the next sobig will be .g, because .f already happened. At least, that's how the naming scheme has gone so far, but I could be wrong. Who knows, maybe they'll try to throw us off by using the same name as last time...

Good!!

[moehoward]

I, for one, welcome our new packet-based overlords.

Now. About this encryption thing...

Re:Good!!

[soliaus]

I, for one, welcome our new packet-based overlords.

They already exist, and have been observed gathering yearly for the overlord ritual, here

Re:Good!!

[Tim Doran]

Encryption? Hell, come 2005 I'm buyin' my own 5ess from ebay at a bargain. Wanna talk to me? Gotta interface to my private POTS network!

Now I just need a few hundred more amps and 5 tonnes of air conditioning in my basement...

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:Does AT&T get to avoid regulations now?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, absolutely not.

As some say, Voice is Voice, regardless of how it's conveyed. I don't necessarily agree, but 911 *is* an essential service and yes, we need the five 9's we already have with legacy voice service.

The Vonage case bothers me. On one hand I think VoIP shouldn't be regulated, but on the otherhand, what happens if a small community of 500 people experiences a catastrophic emergency and their only life line to the outside world (the telephone service) is disrupted for whatever reason.

Who's accountable?

Is Vonage accountable because they offer VoIP service over the Internet? No freaking way I say, the Internet isn't a high availability service (sorry, it just isn't).

AT&T? Hell yeah, they're the ones providing the underlying infrastructure that the 911 call might go over.

Remember people, IP does not mean the Internet. The Internet uses IP, but an IP network isn't the Internet.

Re:Does AT&T get to avoid regulations now?

[evilviper]

As a long-distance service, they should be unregulated. As a local telephone service, who still uses public lands to lay their lines, they should continue to be regulated.

Vonage, who uses no public lands for lines, should be completely unregulated (although I do think they should have to pay their share for 911 services).

Re:what are they using on the VOIP servers?

[tokar321]

Actually I used to work for a company called Alphanet we did use an ancient version of unixware for the VOIP servers, a crappy OS a real hassle to use but it worked well enough for the purpose I suppose.

Nathen

Backbone upgrades?

[agent dero]

Hopefully this means AT&T will really upgrade their bandwidth capabilities, such as bettering that "last-mile problem"
With luck Verizon will upgrade theirs too, which _may_ benifit EVERYBODY.

(By the way, at school they use Cisco ip phones over the 100Mbps network, which seems to work fine.)

So, hopefully they'll upgrade their bandwidth capabilities (use that fiber optic already laid!), if not, they're smoking crack, and should be run outta town,

Skype

[westlake]

CNET has posted a Sept 11 newsmakers interview with Kazaa's Janus Friis promoting his P2P telephony app, Skype: Why VoIP is music to Kazaa's ear. The download (for Windows 2000 and XP only) can be found here: Skype beta.

Re:Skype

[suss]

CNET has posted a Sept 11 newsmakers interview with Kazaa's Janus Friis promoting his P2P telephony app, Skype

Hmm, i wonder if we can expect spyware/gator crap with that...

"Hi, mom, i'm ready to move, i'll just have to call *[WHEN-U]* to ask them when they'll be here"

"But i thought you were going to use U-HAUL?"

"That's what' i said, *[WHEN-U]*!"

"aaaaaaarghhh!!!"

Spam

[FeloniousPunk]

The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1.
I wonder how much of the packet traffic in that ratio is accounted for by spam?

Yes, i realize this

[nurb432]

I know we are talking protocol here.. Im not a newbie..

My only concern was if the effective analog bandwidth at the wall jack would be enough to get decent speed via analog modem.

Ive never actually tried doing analog data transfer across an IP voice network..

From what others say, it wont be any less bandwdith then we have now.. So I'm not too worried.

I can see a day soon when broadband is under too much restriction ( and surveillance ) to be useful for some of us old-timers, and a slow migration back to more secure point-to-point uucp type of communication.. Modernized of course..

The 'masses' may end up back on dialup PPP connections to their isp as well before the smoke clears.. Between spam, viruii, worms, popups, pay per use, law suits, bla bla.. why bother?

A=1/V=8

[Citizen of Earth]

The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1.

That's because video porn takes so much more bandwidth than audio porn.

What benefit of first to market?

[tjstork]

Certainly didn't help MS to be number 2 to Lotus, Novell, Apple.... etc...

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.

Re:What benefit of first to market?

[MegaFur]

No it didn't. MS got by in spite of it. Partly because B.G. is paranoid (i.e., he's always looking for the next threat so he saw these coming), and partly because they already had quite a bit of money built up then thanks to good ol' DOS licensing.

Don't even bother with a Netscape / IE comparison either--same thing--MS didn't have "First Mover" advantage (B.G. terminology I believe) but it did have 1E50 lb. Gorrilia advantage, which, generally speaking, is enough to crush First Movers into itty bitty little pieces of uninteresting rubbish.

They took a while

[snero3]

I work for a farley large world wide 3G mobile phone company Hutchison and we have had VOIP since 2G, how slow are these guys?

But seriously this makes sense. As you no longer have to have specialized hardware as well as software now you just have to have specialized software (a lot cheaper).

Re:They took a while

[soliaus]

and we have had VOIP since 2G, how slow are these guys?

The best explanation/example for this is the fact that we still use the imperial measurement system
Americans do things in their own damn time. Ya!

Concentration

[Daishiman]

It seems to me like this is a continuation of Systems to attempt to concentrate all the information infrastructure for the sake of all these technological benefits, not to mention the organizational advantages (concentrating phone services with IP is excellent synergy). But like all concentration efforts, the more you centralize operations, the more vulnerable they are to other flaws. Electricty's already been pointed out, but what about handling calls with computer servers that are also handling packet data? You lose one and you lose the other; and I think we're all far more used to losing the internet than the phone (at least that's the way for me). Perhaps they should utilize a simlar protocol but keep the whole thing away from the packet data handling stuff so as to make it all less vulnerable.

Security risks?

[jms1]

Any bets on how long it will be before script kiddies (and other unsavory characters) start recording, disconnecting, cutting into, and otherwise interfering with telephone calls for fun?

Re:Security risks?

[satterth]

Any bets on how long it will be before script kiddies (and other unsavory characters) start recording, disconnecting, cutting into, and otherwise interfering with telephone calls for fun?

The script kiddies won't be doing any of that until the real phone phreakers do it and publish their findings.

What I want to know

[ThisIsFred]

What I want to know is this:

Will this make it faster and easier for AT&T to transfer mobile phone numbers from other carriers? (Are they even going to cave on this one?)

Will this make long-distance call costs lower?

Will this enable small- to medium-sized organizations to get package deals for long-distance like the big dogs get?

Will this trickle down to the remaining teenaged Bells, so I can get a new phone line set up immediately, or get a new circuit activated within a normal 8-hour business day?

Will this have any effect whatsoever on the outrageous cost of bandwidth?

Re:What I want to know

[MCZapf]

I thought it was just wireless to wireless LNP. If true, then this is good news; I'd like to take my landline number and make it my cellphone number.

Successful VOIP anyone?

[wfrp01]

Has any actually successfully deployed VOIP in a campus setting? (I realize the article is about long-haul backbone stuff, so I'm a little OT.)

If you've been successfull, describe your topology. Do you have trusted end-nodes? I don't. So I need to either VLAN or run a separate physical network, right? Even w/ VLAN, that means separate wires for phone vs. data from the room to the closet. Yes this is conservative. Do you trust you can call the police/fire department etc. on an IP phone on a campus network that just got hosed by Nicha or equal?

Anyway, I really am curious if anyone has a VOIP deployment they'd like to brag about.

Re:Successful VOIP anyone?

[taped2thedesk]

The University of Michigan is deploying a VoIP system... all the (public) details are here. I'm not sure if it's as technically specific as you'd like but it gives a good overview of what they're doing.

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:Cold day in hell...

[neBelcnU]

There are two groups that must change to adopt VOIP: Those who buy it and those who maintain it.

We agree that publibly-traded, (more or less) profitable companies are endorsing VOIP. It is clearly advantageous for a major communications entity to focus on one specialty. IP can do both data and voice, so why not? For the Big Guys, the second problem is simply a matter of time. Culture change is a fact of business, and part of their plans.

For the smaller companies, they now see the Big Guys spending on VOIP, so their bean counters will start to listen. But their culure-change is not merely a problem, it's a show-stopper. The 30-year veteran of the telco dereg who's got 5ESS down pat is not going to sit happily in a classroom and learn Cisco's command-line for adds-moves-changes. And a mouse? Those are why they put glue-traps in the switchroom.

I may have a myopic view from the switchrooms I've sat in, but while we cheer the financials coming to favor VOIP, the inertia is going to take a lot longer.

PS: Don't curse your telecom guys, even the cranky one I depicted above is a hell of a good resource when troubleshooting the last mile. Can't beat experience when it comes to problems that appear to "fix themselves."

For some reason...

[MegaFur]

this running gag still gets a chuckle out of me, whilest all the other ones quickly became stupid. Maybe it's 'cause the Simpsons people thought it up (originally) and they're really cool.

Re: I hope this doesn't mean what... see NoATT.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry it already does. See NoATT.com ATT is now just another telecon company than uses legalese, marginal interpretations etc to run wild. I have been fsckd twice now *quitting* ATT. First silently double billed for a year on a credit card for a terminated long distance account then, second, ATT didn't want to terminate a discontinued credit card account billed 4 more months (after 20 months autopay 12 month contract). Fscked with credit rating. Leave home without ATT! ATT Am.Thieves & Thugs backed by too many lawyers.

Overheard in the Elevator

[trolman]

in the BellSouth building three years ago;

Technician: Did you hear that some company is going to sell dialtone over the Internet?

Engineer: Yea, that will never work. Who do these people think they are?

Geek (Me): What a great idea!

Today;I have Vonage over Cable Modem and no BellSouth.

Great

[VAXGeek]

When I dial 127.0.0.1 do I get a busy signal?

What about ATM?

[chiph]

What about their investment in ATM?
Can you run IP over ATM reliably?

Chip H.

Re:What about ATM?

[psyconaut]

Of course. People have been doing IP over ATM since pretty much it's inception!

-psy