They already have. They're called DSL, Cable, and Wireless ISP's.
And they're being deployed everywhere they're economically feasible. It just takes some time.
Someone in the Bush administration has a good-old-boy somewhere paying them a lot of money to push BPL. Guaranteed. FCC Commissioners don't say things in public meetings like "BPL will be Broadband Nirvana" without someone promising some bling bling in return.
Add in the fact that in order to receive distant stations over BPL noise would probably require good sized antennas on high structures (towers) and that most neighborhood's pseudo-environmental "I'm on the homeowner's board" soccer moms gasp in horror at the thought that someone's hobby might include a large metal tower in their yard, because of some stupid perception that they're "ugly" (even though her 1 MPG SUV does more harm to the environment than anyone's tower ever did) and the FACT that over 95% of all new home construction in the U.S over the last five years had coventant contracts attached to those homes stating they can never have antenna structures attached to them....
Ham Radio's already one of the hardest hobbies to enjoy in this country. And yet we still keep doing community service.
Perhaps the answer is for all hams to stage a walkout weekend. Perhaps the weekend of the NY Marathon? (I bet you didn't know a large piece of the communications of that world-renowned event is provided by Ham operators, did you?)
Of course, we're all much too good to do that. We'll just die a slow painful death in our hobby trying to enjoy it until the day they ruin all of our spectrum and tear down all of our antennas. And the world will be a worse place for it.
But all city-dwellers will have broadband over powerlines so they can receive e-mail and porn 24/7. (I say city-dwellers because an informal but direct survey of all of the rural power companies in my state shows that they have neither the networking expertise or the desire to support BPL... and BPL's biggest proponents say it's going to bring broadband to the farmers. Most farmers I know are busy on their damn farms from sun up to sundown. They have a dial-up connection for weather, crop prices, and a few notes to their families on e-mail and wouldn't spend $40-$60/month on broadband no matter how it got to them.
I only disagree with one of your statements. BPL as it's implemented today is not "good technology".
It's shoddy engineering that will cause interference to all HF users. These users are not the intended recipients of the signal in the slightest, therefore, it's an application of a technology to power lines that doesn't belong there.
I'd love to see my power lines bring broadband to my home faster and cheaper than my DSL or Cable connections. But not at the cost of trashing the radio spectrum. Find another way. Wireless ISP's using much higher frequencies and Part 15 devices are doing a much better job of engineering. 2.4 GHz, 5.3 GHz, and 5.8 GHz are all bands where a lot less people are inconvenienced by additional usage, and the use of spread-spectrum technology and the need at those frequencies for directional antennas alleviates many of the problems that plague BPL.
So far both Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (the folks that allocate spectrum for most government agencies) have both turned in official comments to the FCC about BPL saying that it would greatly disrupt their communications also.
This is not just a Ham Radio thing. BPL is bad engineering, pure and simple. It's placing RF on huge spans of unbalanced feedline and somehow expecting it not to radiate. Any college student in engineering with an RF background can see that it's wrong.
The only thing pushing it is deep pockets and Bush administration backers. The administration is pushing on the most non-technical of FCC Commissions we've ever had in this country to embrace new technologies, whether they're sanely engineered or not.
Meanwhile, in the real world, thousands of mom and pop Wireless ISP services (WISP's) have sprung up whereever there is broadband demand in only two years. These people also operate as Part 15 devices but in portions of the spectrum that are high enough in frequency that they're much more useful with directional antennas, and with much lower effective power.
An example: A friend of mine helped build a large WISP that has over 2000 subscribers and is still growing. The adoption of BPL by a large power company in the area would kill him off. Is that the administration's plan? Allow small business to flourish only long enough to give that business to the power line companies who pay their campaign funding?
Let alone the fact that most of the BPL trials are failing -- not because of technology reasons, but because it's not financially feasible. There are a number of failed BPL businesses already.
Let the market regulate itself is a good option for quite a few things, but when it comes to bad engineering practices and interference, the FCC needs to start listening to their field engineers and less to politicians -- and realize that BPL is a spectrum nightmare. Not just for Hams, but for anyone attempting to use HF communications systems.
Let the WISP's and the folks doing community broadband projects and hotspots do their thing for a while and back off on the push for this bad technology.
If you don't want the job, don't do it. The company will find other people. There's plenty of good people out there if they're willing to hunt hard for them and pay for them.
Don't feel like you have to be a victim of their inability (emphasis on the word ABILITY) to find good people. Make them go do it if you don't want the job.
Working any job you don't really want to do is never in your best interests if you already had a job you enjoyed. You'll burn out and corporate politics will steamroller you. I've seen it before.
At least tell them the situation is temporary and get them to say that out loud. You act like you're obligated to do a job you don't want, which is ludicrous.
Morally obligated... snort... that's the best one I've read in a long time.
I'm sure the company at the highest levels always looks at their "moral responsibility" before the bottom-line, too.
And monkeys might fly out of my butt.
Actually now that I think about it, they would feel morally obligated to their shareholders to lay your ass off in a heartbeat if times get tough.
Don't be a rube. You either want the damn job or you don't. (Or you want the money and don't want the job, but will grimace and bear it all the way to the bank.)
Get real. You'll suck at any job you took for the wrong reasons, every time.
Yeah, buy the right RJ45's for the job. Amphenol and others make both solid and stranded core RJ45's, and having been through the hell of cleaning up a telecommunications project where some jackass used stranded ones on T1 (solid) cables, I've been there, done that.
Just buy the right tools for the job. If the connectors aren't specifically labeled for one use or another, the manufacturer is clueless.
Buy Amphenol or one of the big brands that has a clue and labels their boxes.
Don't get suckered into buying a cheesy-assed plastic crimp tool either if you're doing more than about 20-40 connections. Buy a high-quality tool just like you would for your garage workshop or any other tool you plan on using for a lifetime. (Amp also makes the best crimp tools out there... you push the cable in from the front of the tool instead of from the side so the tool crimps all the connector pins evenly as you compress it.)
Oh for god's sake... buy a handful of bridge clips!!!
What is with all you morons that don't know that bridge clips for 66 blocks exist exactly for this purpose?
This is like the fourth post I've seen where someone recommends "jury-rigging" a 66-block when at any reasonable store there's a box full of bridge clips right next to the damn 66-blocks on the shelf.
Proper dressing of cables *includes* a little "slack". It's called a service loop and it's there for when you find out one of those cable ends is screwed up and you'd like to attempt to repair it without pulling out the entire damn bundle.
100BaseT only uses 4 wires also... so much for your grand-plan of convincing him to lower his bandwidth. In case you hadn't noticed he already has his cables installed too... RTFA.
Look into a device called a "bridge clip" for you 66-blocks... no more "jury rigging" at all when you actually know how to use the damn block correctly.
Aww, c'mon. Go old-school and use 12-cord. (Waxy string for you young'uns.) Learn to lace in the cables all pretty with the string and fiber paper... make it look like a 1960's Central Office in your basement!
Or maybe we just haven't learned yet to only use computers for the things they're good at and to drop the hype about them being good for everything in life. PDA's are great, but a pencil and paper always beats every one of them for speed. Disks and filesystems are great, but an organized secretary with a well-laid-out file drawer will kick the PC's ass in knowledge about how all the information fits together, albeit she'll lose from a portability standpoint.
Computers excel at math, are mediocre at presenting the written word, and really really suck at things like knowing your customer and meeting their needs.
And yet, what is the big money stuff in computers? Customer Relationship Management software.
We're another five to seven years from realizing that computers just simply don't do certain things well and they never will. It won't be an ephiphany or a sudden realiziation of these facts, people will just slowly migrate away from computers in areas they don't work well in, over time.
Debian Testing has about 14,000 currently (depending on which architecture, most of which Mandrake doesn't support at all) and Unstable has even more...
That's because apt-get's own documentation points out that it doesn't handle certain types of dependencies and that it shouldn't. Dselect and Aptitude fill that role, and always have.
Orphaned does not mean there's anything wrong with them. Orphaned packages with release-critical bugs are not released into any further stable versions. Pretty simple. As usual, find a bug, report it. If it's release-critical and no one fixes it in the orphaned package in a bug-squashing party -- it won't get released and will drop out of the mainstream distro.
In other words, orphaned only means orphaned -- not bad quality or broken. If they are, they get dropped. No big deal.
I work in a highly specialized sub-set of telecommunications because I stumbled into a Field Engineering job in said industry during the time I was running myself out of money in college. I started at a small company doing phone operator work and worked my way into more and more technical roles until I was travelling 50% of the time and working on things like FAA systems and various large industry-owned systems including the oil industry and the banking industry as customers.
I eventually found I couldn't travel for work and keep up with college coursework and dropped out. That was just under a decade ago.
Instead I worked in the field, and got to know the relatively small group of technicians, managers, and people who work in this industry.
I also applied myself and studied my ass off and continue to do so as the technology changes.
I now am not a rich man, but I make a comfortable living.
Not bad for the kid who started out as a part-time telephone operator while going to college.
I'm currently a Sr. Technical Account Specialist for a multi-national telco equipment manufacturer, and have also been a Product Support Engineer in charge of the first deployment of a new product worth about $1/2 million list-price (each), and also have managed a NOC with ten staff members -- back before I learned that I make a pretty horrible manager. (I don't like babysitting and back then I didn't realize how much of that job truly is just that -- babysitting.)
I have friends in all sorts of related jobs in this industry who are great people and have stood beside me during hard times, and these are also people "that I will know for the rest of my life" -- and I didn't meet them in college.
So your narrow-minded thought that only people that can go to college can also build lifetime friendships and grow as people is complete and utter bullshit. Sorry man, not everyone's life goes that way, nor does it have to.
Would I love to finish a degree and possibly continue with other study? Sure. But at my 30-something age I have no desire to do the "frat boy" thing or party -- I just want to get in and out as fast as I can and back to living my life.
A college degree to me at this point would just mean a checkbox on the resume' that I don't have.
And unfortunately instead of just slamming by way through something boring, I'm leaning more towards returning to a "hard science" and working towards an Engineering degree. Probably an EE.
I'm just not sure I can find enough time in one day to do it all...
But at this point of my life, I could care less about the social aspects of college. Will I meet people and probably make friends? Sure... why not. That's what I've been doing in the work world for 15 years.
Open up that mind there big-shot... and realize that not everyone goes to college. And that there are plenty of highly-intelligent people who have a LOT more work experience than you do out there that don't have sheepskins, but can save your sheepskin when you come in as a manager and screw up the business.
Not true. Shoot whoever taught that course, they're teaching crap and don't do their homework.
But you can lean on your economics teacher for the "why not?" part of this.
Large international telcos have too much money invested in circuit switched devices to change miraculously overnight to packet-switched backbones. They also have massive slow organizational structures designed to create stability and trade off some of the opportunity cost of being first to market with new technologies.
Many large carriers have started seriously switching out gear in some heavily loaded Central Offices to VoIP because they have plenty of redundancy and just need growth NOW, but it'll take another decade or two before all the circuit-switched network devices are fully depreciated.
Add in the fact that many packet-switched routers capable of carrier-class levels of service cost almost as much as a Lucent #5ESS switch, and the people and training necessary to run them at that level are sometimes more expensive right now than the people already trained to work on the older gear and you add another wrinkle.
Further confusing matters is the fact that you CAN go buy a Lucent #5ESS switch with IP cards in it now... and...
Well, you can see it starts to get confusing. But generally, most of the standard day-to-day voice traffic is still on circuit-switched gear. Big, complex, entrenched circuit-switched gear.
Most huge telcos will take at least another two to four years to get heavy VoIP replacement of that gear in place... two years for lab testing and interoperability testing, another two years to work out the various checklists and procedural plans that wrap everything in the telco industry, and then time after that for actual huge deployments.
The only market factor that will push faster adoption of VoIP will be higher traffic loads that push the existing gear to its limits. And the steep part of the upward cell phone curve of additional traffic and calls is over with in most of the advanced countries. We're at the beginning of the slow upward curve (almost a plateau) in those parts of the world with wide cellular deployments, traffic-level wise. There's now time for those who specialize in stability to come back into the market and do their thing... stabilize the standards and technology behind massive VoIP deployments, and room for the vendors to move in and make the massive VoIP backend-equipment necessary for a typical CO.
The small guys are desperately hoping that VoIP takes off at the edge of the network right now, because they need business. Ever-increasing reliability on CPE (customer premesis equipment) gear is hurting them. A company can reasonbly buy an incredibly feature-rich PBX/in-house phone system right now and it will probably not ever fail throughout the entire life of the company. The small guys sell these things and their sales are declining as a result of their own success.
VoIP peering is also in its infancy, and when I say peering, I mean passing off your VoIP traffic to someone else who can carry it to the particular end-point you're looking for. In the circuit-switched world, this was all traditionally handled by SS7 and Tandem switches that kept track at the "peering" point of all the billing information necessary to present the end user with a phone bill at the end of the month -- but the standards are not yet truly set/defined and generally not accepted by the various small-to-medium VoIP only early-adopters yet, even today. As a friend of mine says, "If you can't figure out how to bill for it properly, you might as well start calling it a hobby."
It'll get there, but it'll take time and a lot of hard work. I'm working on the deployment of a massive VoIP installation for a specific telco service in a few months -- you should see the documentation at both the engineering and the operations levels flying around -- people are still debating which voice compression CODEC to use, as a simple example of what's really a mu
I've worked in telco on and off for most of my career and I have a few comments about your drivel...
1 to 1.5 seconds is a lot of delay in an analogue network because the end-points are 2-wire hybrids. They can't do echo-cancellation properly. On a 4 wire E&M or other standard trunking analog circuit where transmit and receive are completely separated, you wouldn't hear the echo at all.
"MOS" isn't used by any major telco carrier that I know of in purchasing decisions or in Operations. Most of my time in telco has been working for a vendor who sells to the AT&T's, MCI's, Spint's, Telia's (Telia/Sonera now), Telus', and NTT's of the world. I've never heard of the term before tonight. If it's used, it's used by suits far away from the procurement, deployment, or operations people, I assure you. That or it's a research project for research sake. Please find me a Fluke MOS meter and prove me wrong, if you like.
Finally -- back to the original topic... please tell me other than a delay in the response time when you ask a question of the person at the far end, how you would know if your audio was delayed by any time amount? Unless you've dialed yourself you simply won't be able to tell any other way in a modern digital network. Call yourself from your cell phone sometime and you'll notice at LEAST 300ms of delay from the time you talk on one phone to the other, but you CAN'T TELL from only one end of the connection.
So I insist that your entire argument is pointless and wrong. Yes, delays are avoided, but not for the reasons you've given. How people notice delay in the modern telco network is in the amount of time the responses of the other human being take or via other non-telco related scenarios like an echoy conference room at the far end where the audio bounces off the wall (one second after it's originally sent) mixes back into the audio coming back the other way on the full-duplex circuit (another 1 sec delay added) and is heard by the originator of that voice 2 seconds later. But if both parties are holding handsets up to their heads, this can't happen if the network is engineered correctly.
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They already have. They're called DSL, Cable, and Wireless ISP's.
And they're being deployed everywhere they're economically feasible. It just takes some time.
Someone in the Bush administration has a good-old-boy somewhere paying them a lot of money to push BPL. Guaranteed. FCC Commissioners don't say things in public meetings like "BPL will be Broadband Nirvana" without someone promising some bling bling in return.
Art Bell is a Ham and from my one telephone conversation with him (not on his radio show), he's also a reasonable and civil person.
Art is a true "radio-man" who enjoys 75 Meter AM and Sideband when he's not on the air entertaining people via AM Broadcast.
Amen.
Add in the fact that in order to receive distant stations over BPL noise would probably require good sized antennas on high structures (towers) and that most neighborhood's pseudo-environmental "I'm on the homeowner's board" soccer moms gasp in horror at the thought that someone's hobby might include a large metal tower in their yard, because of some stupid perception that they're "ugly" (even though her 1 MPG SUV does more harm to the environment than anyone's tower ever did) and the FACT that over 95% of all new home construction in the U.S over the last five years had coventant contracts attached to those homes stating they can never have antenna structures attached to them....
Ham Radio's already one of the hardest hobbies to enjoy in this country. And yet we still keep doing community service.
Perhaps the answer is for all hams to stage a walkout weekend. Perhaps the weekend of the NY Marathon? (I bet you didn't know a large piece of the communications of that world-renowned event is provided by Ham operators, did you?)
Of course, we're all much too good to do that. We'll just die a slow painful death in our hobby trying to enjoy it until the day they ruin all of our spectrum and tear down all of our antennas. And the world will be a worse place for it.
But all city-dwellers will have broadband over powerlines so they can receive e-mail and porn 24/7. (I say city-dwellers because an informal but direct survey of all of the rural power companies in my state shows that they have neither the networking expertise or the desire to support BPL... and BPL's biggest proponents say it's going to bring broadband to the farmers. Most farmers I know are busy on their damn farms from sun up to sundown. They have a dial-up connection for weather, crop prices, and a few notes to their families on e-mail and wouldn't spend $40-$60/month on broadband no matter how it got to them.
Every agency you mentioned eventually answers to someone in the Bush administration. The FCC is run by Colin Powell's kid.
Think about it.
I only disagree with one of your statements. BPL as it's implemented today is not "good technology".
It's shoddy engineering that will cause interference to all HF users. These users are not the intended recipients of the signal in the slightest, therefore, it's an application of a technology to power lines that doesn't belong there.
I'd love to see my power lines bring broadband to my home faster and cheaper than my DSL or Cable connections. But not at the cost of trashing the radio spectrum. Find another way. Wireless ISP's using much higher frequencies and Part 15 devices are doing a much better job of engineering. 2.4 GHz, 5.3 GHz, and 5.8 GHz are all bands where a lot less people are inconvenienced by additional usage, and the use of spread-spectrum technology and the need at those frequencies for directional antennas alleviates many of the problems that plague BPL.
So far both Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (the folks that allocate spectrum for most government agencies) have both turned in official comments to the FCC about BPL saying that it would greatly disrupt their communications also.
This is not just a Ham Radio thing. BPL is bad engineering, pure and simple. It's placing RF on huge spans of unbalanced feedline and somehow expecting it not to radiate. Any college student in engineering with an RF background can see that it's wrong.
The only thing pushing it is deep pockets and Bush administration backers. The administration is pushing on the most non-technical of FCC Commissions we've ever had in this country to embrace new technologies, whether they're sanely engineered or not.
Meanwhile, in the real world, thousands of mom and pop Wireless ISP services (WISP's) have sprung up whereever there is broadband demand in only two years. These people also operate as Part 15 devices but in portions of the spectrum that are high enough in frequency that they're much more useful with directional antennas, and with much lower effective power.
An example: A friend of mine helped build a large WISP that has over 2000 subscribers and is still growing. The adoption of BPL by a large power company in the area would kill him off. Is that the administration's plan? Allow small business to flourish only long enough to give that business to the power line companies who pay their campaign funding?
Let alone the fact that most of the BPL trials are failing -- not because of technology reasons, but because it's not financially feasible. There are a number of failed BPL businesses already.
Let the market regulate itself is a good option for quite a few things, but when it comes to bad engineering practices and interference, the FCC needs to start listening to their field engineers and less to politicians -- and realize that BPL is a spectrum nightmare. Not just for Hams, but for anyone attempting to use HF communications systems.
Let the WISP's and the folks doing community broadband projects and hotspots do their thing for a while and back off on the push for this bad technology.
If you don't want the job, don't do it. The company will find other people. There's plenty of good people out there if they're willing to hunt hard for them and pay for them.
Don't feel like you have to be a victim of their inability (emphasis on the word ABILITY) to find good people. Make them go do it if you don't want the job.
Working any job you don't really want to do is never in your best interests if you already had a job you enjoyed. You'll burn out and corporate politics will steamroller you. I've seen it before.
At least tell them the situation is temporary and get them to say that out loud. You act like you're obligated to do a job you don't want, which is ludicrous.
Haupauge are well-known as having high quality cards, perhaps it's your choice of operating systems?
In many places it's illegal to ask that question. Next.
Morally obligated... snort... that's the best one I've read in a long time.
I'm sure the company at the highest levels always looks at their "moral responsibility" before the bottom-line, too.
And monkeys might fly out of my butt.
Actually now that I think about it, they would feel morally obligated to their shareholders to lay your ass off in a heartbeat if times get tough.
Don't be a rube. You either want the damn job or you don't. (Or you want the money and don't want the job, but will grimace and bear it all the way to the bank.)
Get real. You'll suck at any job you took for the wrong reasons, every time.
Yeah, buy the right RJ45's for the job. Amphenol and others make both solid and stranded core RJ45's, and having been through the hell of cleaning up a telecommunications project where some jackass used stranded ones on T1 (solid) cables, I've been there, done that.
Just buy the right tools for the job. If the connectors aren't specifically labeled for one use or another, the manufacturer is clueless.
Buy Amphenol or one of the big brands that has a clue and labels their boxes.
Don't get suckered into buying a cheesy-assed plastic crimp tool either if you're doing more than about 20-40 connections. Buy a high-quality tool just like you would for your garage workshop or any other tool you plan on using for a lifetime. (Amp also makes the best crimp tools out there... you push the cable in from the front of the tool instead of from the side so the tool crimps all the connector pins evenly as you compress it.)
Oh for god's sake... buy a handful of bridge clips!!!
What is with all you morons that don't know that bridge clips for 66 blocks exist exactly for this purpose?
This is like the fourth post I've seen where someone recommends "jury-rigging" a 66-block when at any reasonable store there's a box full of bridge clips right next to the damn 66-blocks on the shelf.
Proper dressing of cables *includes* a little "slack". It's called a service loop and it's there for when you find out one of those cable ends is screwed up and you'd like to attempt to repair it without pulling out the entire damn bundle.
100BaseT only uses 4 wires also... so much for your grand-plan of convincing him to lower his bandwidth. In case you hadn't noticed he already has his cables installed too... RTFA.
Sigh...
Or you could just plug a damn laptop in and go through the cables one at a time plugging them into a $5 hub. You guys make everything too difficult...
Look into a device called a "bridge clip" for you 66-blocks... no more "jury rigging" at all when you actually know how to use the damn block correctly.
Aww, c'mon. Go old-school and use 12-cord. (Waxy string for you young'uns.) Learn to lace in the cables all pretty with the string and fiber paper... make it look like a 1960's Central Office in your basement!
Or maybe we just haven't learned yet to only use computers for the things they're good at and to drop the hype about them being good for everything in life. PDA's are great, but a pencil and paper always beats every one of them for speed. Disks and filesystems are great, but an organized secretary with a well-laid-out file drawer will kick the PC's ass in knowledge about how all the information fits together, albeit she'll lose from a portability standpoint.
Computers excel at math, are mediocre at presenting the written word, and really really suck at things like knowing your customer and meeting their needs.
And yet, what is the big money stuff in computers? Customer Relationship Management software.
We're another five to seven years from realizing that computers just simply don't do certain things well and they never will. It won't be an ephiphany or a sudden realiziation of these facts, people will just slowly migrate away from computers in areas they don't work well in, over time.
Only 8000?
Debian Testing has about 14,000 currently (depending on which architecture, most of which Mandrake doesn't support at all) and Unstable has even more...
Yawn.
That's because apt-get's own documentation points out that it doesn't handle certain types of dependencies and that it shouldn't. Dselect and Aptitude fill that role, and always have.
Orphaned does not mean there's anything wrong with them. Orphaned packages with release-critical bugs are not released into any further stable versions. Pretty simple. As usual, find a bug, report it. If it's release-critical and no one fixes it in the orphaned package in a bug-squashing party -- it won't get released and will drop out of the mainstream distro.
In other words, orphaned only means orphaned -- not bad quality or broken. If they are, they get dropped. No big deal.
Scintillating.
Ahh, the smell of /. bullshit in the morning.
I work in a highly specialized sub-set of telecommunications because I stumbled into a Field Engineering job in said industry during the time I was running myself out of money in college. I started at a small company doing phone operator work and worked my way into more and more technical roles until I was travelling 50% of the time and working on things like FAA systems and various large industry-owned systems including the oil industry and the banking industry as customers.
I eventually found I couldn't travel for work and keep up with college coursework and dropped out. That was just under a decade ago.
Instead I worked in the field, and got to know the relatively small group of technicians, managers, and people who work in this industry.
I also applied myself and studied my ass off and continue to do so as the technology changes.
I now am not a rich man, but I make a comfortable living.
Not bad for the kid who started out as a part-time telephone operator while going to college.
I'm currently a Sr. Technical Account Specialist for a multi-national telco equipment manufacturer, and have also been a Product Support Engineer in charge of the first deployment of a new product worth about $1/2 million list-price (each), and also have managed a NOC with ten staff members -- back before I learned that I make a pretty horrible manager. (I don't like babysitting and back then I didn't realize how much of that job truly is just that -- babysitting.)
I have friends in all sorts of related jobs in this industry who are great people and have stood beside me during hard times, and these are also people "that I will know for the rest of my life" -- and I didn't meet them in college.
So your narrow-minded thought that only people that can go to college can also build lifetime friendships and grow as people is complete and utter bullshit. Sorry man, not everyone's life goes that way, nor does it have to.
Would I love to finish a degree and possibly continue with other study? Sure. But at my 30-something age I have no desire to do the "frat boy" thing or party -- I just want to get in and out as fast as I can and back to living my life.
A college degree to me at this point would just mean a checkbox on the resume' that I don't have.
And unfortunately instead of just slamming by way through something boring, I'm leaning more towards returning to a "hard science" and working towards an Engineering degree. Probably an EE.
I'm just not sure I can find enough time in one day to do it all...
But at this point of my life, I could care less about the social aspects of college. Will I meet people and probably make friends? Sure... why not. That's what I've been doing in the work world for 15 years.
Open up that mind there big-shot... and realize that not everyone goes to college. And that there are plenty of highly-intelligent people who have a LOT more work experience than you do out there that don't have sheepskins, but can save your sheepskin when you come in as a manager and screw up the business.
Because they've seen it before...
Not true. Shoot whoever taught that course, they're teaching crap and don't do their homework.
But you can lean on your economics teacher for the "why not?" part of this.
Large international telcos have too much money invested in circuit switched devices to change miraculously overnight to packet-switched backbones. They also have massive slow organizational structures designed to create stability and trade off some of the opportunity cost of being first to market with new technologies.
Many large carriers have started seriously switching out gear in some heavily loaded Central Offices to VoIP because they have plenty of redundancy and just need growth NOW, but it'll take another decade or two before all the circuit-switched network devices are fully depreciated.
Add in the fact that many packet-switched routers capable of carrier-class levels of service cost almost as much as a Lucent #5ESS switch, and the people and training necessary to run them at that level are sometimes more expensive right now than the people already trained to work on the older gear and you add another wrinkle.
Further confusing matters is the fact that you CAN go buy a Lucent #5ESS switch with IP cards in it now... and...
Well, you can see it starts to get confusing. But generally, most of the standard day-to-day voice traffic is still on circuit-switched gear. Big, complex, entrenched circuit-switched gear.
Most huge telcos will take at least another two to four years to get heavy VoIP replacement of that gear in place... two years for lab testing and interoperability testing, another two years to work out the various checklists and procedural plans that wrap everything in the telco industry, and then time after that for actual huge deployments.
The only market factor that will push faster adoption of VoIP will be higher traffic loads that push the existing gear to its limits. And the steep part of the upward cell phone curve of additional traffic and calls is over with in most of the advanced countries. We're at the beginning of the slow upward curve (almost a plateau) in those parts of the world with wide cellular deployments, traffic-level wise. There's now time for those who specialize in stability to come back into the market and do their thing... stabilize the standards and technology behind massive VoIP deployments, and room for the vendors to move in and make the massive VoIP backend-equipment necessary for a typical CO.
The small guys are desperately hoping that VoIP takes off at the edge of the network right now, because they need business. Ever-increasing reliability on CPE (customer premesis equipment) gear is hurting them. A company can reasonbly buy an incredibly feature-rich PBX/in-house phone system right now and it will probably not ever fail throughout the entire life of the company. The small guys sell these things and their sales are declining as a result of their own success.
VoIP peering is also in its infancy, and when I say peering, I mean passing off your VoIP traffic to someone else who can carry it to the particular end-point you're looking for. In the circuit-switched world, this was all traditionally handled by SS7 and Tandem switches that kept track at the "peering" point of all the billing information necessary to present the end user with a phone bill at the end of the month -- but the standards are not yet truly set/defined and generally not accepted by the various small-to-medium VoIP only early-adopters yet, even today. As a friend of mine says, "If you can't figure out how to bill for it properly, you might as well start calling it a hobby."
It'll get there, but it'll take time and a lot of hard work. I'm working on the deployment of a massive VoIP installation for a specific telco service in a few months -- you should see the documentation at both the engineering and the operations levels flying around -- people are still debating which voice compression CODEC to use, as a simple example of what's really a mu
I've worked in telco on and off for most of my career and I have a few comments about your drivel...
1 to 1.5 seconds is a lot of delay in an analogue network because the end-points are 2-wire hybrids. They can't do echo-cancellation properly. On a 4 wire E&M or other standard trunking analog circuit where transmit and receive are completely separated, you wouldn't hear the echo at all.
"MOS" isn't used by any major telco carrier that I know of in purchasing decisions or in Operations. Most of my time in telco has been working for a vendor who sells to the AT&T's, MCI's, Spint's, Telia's (Telia/Sonera now), Telus', and NTT's of the world. I've never heard of the term before tonight. If it's used, it's used by suits far away from the procurement, deployment, or operations people, I assure you. That or it's a research project for research sake. Please find me a Fluke MOS meter and prove me wrong, if you like.
Finally -- back to the original topic... please tell me other than a delay in the response time when you ask a question of the person at the far end, how you would know if your audio was delayed by any time amount? Unless you've dialed yourself you simply won't be able to tell any other way in a modern digital network. Call yourself from your cell phone sometime and you'll notice at LEAST 300ms of delay from the time you talk on one phone to the other, but you CAN'T TELL from only one end of the connection.
So I insist that your entire argument is pointless and wrong. Yes, delays are avoided, but not for the reasons you've given. How people notice delay in the modern telco network is in the amount of time the responses of the other human being take or via other non-telco related scenarios like an echoy conference room at the far end where the audio bounces off the wall (one second after it's originally sent) mixes back into the audio coming back the other way on the full-duplex circuit (another 1 sec delay added) and is heard by the originator of that voice 2 seconds later. But if both parties are holding handsets up to their heads, this can't happen if the network is engineered correctly.