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.
posted like 3 days ago.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/09/190247 &mode=thread&tid=126&tid=137&tid=187&tid=2 15
Only 2 days ago!
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!
Considering the "impending doom" we keep hearing about of the lack of available IPv4 numbers... one can only hope they intend to roll out their new network with IPv6. Heck, even a few class A's and NAT'ing each one to 254 usable addresses wouldn't help them...
...I have only two questions.
1. What are the odds of this actually being pulled off?
2. How much will this effect me, a regular dialup and telephone user of British Telecom?
Bring it on, BT! The power of a national telephone monopoly is insignificant compared to the power of the Slashdot effect!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
when asked if the U.S. would like to do something similar, Bush replied, "Asia makes all the cool cell phone advancements, Europe wants to can POTS and truly enter the digital era, and we have Microsoft. Why would we want to change anything?"
self-mod: -2 for flamebait, +2 anti-M$, result mod=0
so, like what, i need a 2.4GHz whistle for that?
what it doesn't mention in the summary at least is that BT are also moving to fiber in their new developments, especially in areas like around london; while the move from POTS won't directly affect users, the move to fiber will make the intarweb a whole fuckload faster for those who are lucky enough to get it.
unfortunately they will not be moving already laid lines to fiber for any time in the forseeable future.
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(Think Duke of Earl)
Be nice when modding me. I know it's lame.
British Telecom Plans to Ditch POS Network.
They wanna ditch their POTS while I wanna ditch our POTUS! :-)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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!).
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It's nice to see that the UK is finally kicking its POTS habit.
"We're sorry, the number you are calling is currently experiencing a distributed denial of service attack. Please try your call again..."
. ht ml
Even worse if you were calling 911 or 999 or similar number...
on an aside if you want to know the emergency numbers for different countries check out:
http://www.911dispatch.com/web_graphic/graphic1
nice graphic shows emergency numbers from around the world.
An elderly lady phoned her telephone company to report that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called - and that on the few occasions when it did ring, her pet dog always moaned right before the phone rang. The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic dog or senile elderly lady.
He climbed a nearby telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring right away, but then the dog moaned loudly and the telephone began to ring.
Climbing down from the pole, the telephone repairman found:
1. The dog was tied to the telephone system's ground wire via a steel chain and collar.
2. The wire connection to the ground rod was loose.
3. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current when the phone number was called.
4. After a couple of such jolts, the dog would start moaning and then urinate on himself and the ground.
5. The wet ground would complete the circuit, thus causing the phone to ring.
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 can't complain about 768/768 that works fine 8 miles from the telco shed.
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!
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!
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.
For a company the size of BT, I see the following scenario as being faily likely:
BT switch detects modem/fax carrier.
BT switch toggles from rather-compressed g.723 to uncompressed 64kbps g.711 . g.711 is is either aLaw or uLaw, depending on pond-sidedness, just like ISDN, and also just like things are switched "normally" today.
Modem communication happens normally; BT writes off increased bandwidth (vs. g.723 voice) by saying to themselves "Well, at least that one g.711 modem call didn't cost us any more line capacity than it did before, and we got to packet-switch it instead of channelize it. Cool."
Everyone's happy. And your modem doesn't even know the difference.
Kid-proof tablet..
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?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck