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.

Comments

Hope they're using QoS

[mfearby]

We've got ip-tel at work and it's a right bitch at times - almost like talking to someone over on a mobile. There's nothing worse than having the beginnings and endings of someone's speech cut off!

Even with QoS, ip-tel is over rated. "It should do that"... yeah, right!

Re:Hope they're using QoS

[Anonymous Coward]

What speed is your network running at? I'm fortunate enough to be in a research institute with pervasive gigabit networking. People very occasionally complain about glitchy video conference calls when the network is heavily loaded, but audio is "solved" as far as we're concerned...

Re:Hope they're using QoS

[Anonymous Coward]

We use IP Telephony extensively over international leased lines and have absolutely no problem, and we're using it for critical customer-facing systems.

VoIP is great when things are configured correctly... problem is QoS is like a chain - one weak link in the path of a packet and the whole thing is useless. Priority queueing doesn't help much if you have serialization delays or duplex misconfigurations - there are an awful lot of components to ensuring good QoS.

Just like with network security, you don't want to trust QoS configurations to a novice.

If the exchanges are going to be rebuilt then..

[t_allardyce]

While they're at it can they just give us all built-in broadband net access? free? if thats not worth paying taxes than fuck knows what is. Most people would use it, probably more than some other things tax goes to (ive never had a go with the parliamentary hooker!).

Lifeline POTS

[green pizza]

Despite my UPSes, I still find it reassuring that I can pick up my telephone at any time and get a dial tone. If I'm away from home for 5 days, and the power has been out the whole time, I can still come home and pick up the phone, expecting it to work.

I live in a rural area where the power co-op often doesn't know about outages until someone reports them. I'm at the end of a line, and I've had outages that have only affected me.

It's also nice to know that in an emergency, someone can come into my house and make an emergency call. It's also nice to know that I could probably make a call from another farmhouse too.

Cell phone coverage is awful here. We have three competiting technologies with very few towers each. Hooray for lack of standards in rual America! Thankfully we do have 1 MBit "Reach" (Paradyne Hotwire MVL) SDSL! :) I can't complain about 768/768 that works fine 8 miles from the telco shed.

Now, I don't mind if telcos upgrade their aging first-generation DS1 and DS3 gear for the longhaul trunks. But where I live that's already been done. Lots of fibre connecting the hick towns, gotta love RTC grants!

Insider corrections

[satguy]

BT, like Telus in Canada (and many other tier 1 PSTN carriers), are simply converting their internal circuit-switched (DS1-DS3, T1-T4) fat pipes (microwave/fibre links) to a more bandwidth-efficient packet-switched transport and routing methodology.

The links in question are completely internal within the PSTN, and the change will be invisible to ordinary home or business subscribers - the same provision for the last mile to subscribers (POTS, Centrex, CAS or ISDN T1/E1, whatever) will remain in service for the foreseeable future.

Those services are provided by the CO ("Central Office") switch, and it takes a while to depreciate a PSTN CO's DMS-1000 or similar switch (up to 17 years in Canada, I believe), and that switch is viewed by the beancounters as "the multi-million-dollar machine that prints money", so you can probably guess their opinion of forklift upgrades ;).

The change to a packet-switched PSTN network backbone will improve bandwidth usage on long-haul and other fat pipes between Central Offices (cities/states/countries), reducing the need for further infrastructure builds (saving more trees, for those so inclined), and should sooner, rather than later, help make the provision of "gee-whiz" new services more economical and available for end users.

So why VoIP?

[Lars T.]

VoIP makes sense when you have access to an IP network (Internet or Intranet). But when you want to packet switch telephony over a dedicate network, why the hell use IP instead of ATM?