Slashdot Mirror
British Telecom Plans to Ditch POTS Network
Samurai Cat! writes "Yahoo news has a story up regarding British Telecom's plans to scrap their traditional circuit-switched telecom network in favor of an IP-based system." Their press release has more information.
make that clear, there is absolutely NO shortage of ipv4 addresses.
i just received the APNIC (asia pacific) address report for this week. here's a few fun numbers:
60% of the allocated ipv4 space has been allocated (yes you hear it right, 60%). that leaves us with 40% still to allocate. 40% of 32 bits. now:
2**32 = 4 294 967 296
4 294 967 296 * 0.4 = 1717986920
that's 1.7 billions address NOT ALLOCATED
but here's the kick, only 50% of that allocated 60% (30% of the total) are advertised (that means routable on the internet), which in turn mean much less than that are actually used (advertised does not mean it is in use)
>1. What are the odds of this actually being pulled off?
Its quite possible. Major long distance carriers already do this. There are some technical issues, but they can be addressed, and VoIP uses bandwidth way more efficiently than a circuit switched network, so long term, the cost benefits do appear to be there.
>2. How much will this effect me, a regular dialup and telephone user of British Telecom?
As a voice user, there may be initial problems with echo, garbled voice, and delay if BT doesn't do their homework. Those problems can usually be quickly alieviated in most cases by properly employing the QoS features typically provided by high end routers.
A bigger issue is high speed modem use over VoIP, particularly if low bitrate codecs are used. Its possible that they could effectively cripple dialup ISPs without affecting voice quality in any perceptable way.. I don't know how the british communications regulations work, but here in the US, telcos can (with very few exceptions) do whatever they want to the lines so long as voice quality isn't affected (although they do have to support 9600bps data rates, who wants to surf at that speed.) Hopefully, they will keep in mind modem users, but they may decide this is a good time to force customers into broadband.
VoIP isn't as exotic as people may think--you've been using it for several years on most long-distance calls for at least part of the circuit. And all of this traffic is H.323 and not SIP.
Actually, it's not 1.7 billion addresses. Because of the way the address space is allocated, not every potential address is available, and that's before you take into account things like CIDR (classless interdomain routing not this)
1. What are the odds of this actually being pulled off?
It shouldn't be that difficult. BT's telephone network is based on System X (and it's competitor System Y). The national network is completely digital. Each customer line would be analog (unless you have ISDN) until the local exchange, where the signal would be converted into 64 Kbits digital. Advances in technology allowed a single circuit board (A4 sized) to handle up to 4 customer lines, so the entire telephone exchange for a small village could be inside a shed. BT would probably start with upgrading the national network, then do a local exchange trial in London, and then roll out across the country.
2. How much will this effect me, a regular dialup and telephone user of British Telecom?
You probably wouldn't notice anything. For each exchange, they would do a gradual switch over. They'd start by adding the new links using IP packets, test them, then allow customer calls to use them, and finally disable the old system.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
That's the greatest promise of IPv6 - ISPs will no longer have to divide their customers over a couple of hundred individual address blocks spread over distant areas of the IPv4 space - it's kinda like running defrag over the address space, only that this time it won't become fragmented again after just a little extra use.