That was really the point of my article - not that we necessarily need 99.999% uptime, but that we are letting providers tell us that this is the best they can do, and we aren't demanding any better. As rmerry72 points out, there is therefore no incentive to provide better.
And companies like Comcast tell you that they have to block P2P traffic to provide bandwidth, which is ridiculous. They just choose not to provide the bandwidth. They want to be able to charge us even more to provide the bare bones service that we already thought we were paying for.
It is possible to build something just good enough, and still make it reliable. The phone system was just good enough, but redundancy was build into the system to make it reliable.
Actually as I recall, SMS messages are sent as the payload in SS7 protocol messages that are used for normal call setup and teardown, so they are essentially free since the protocol is there either way.
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Indeed. If software engineers had to live up to the requirements of any other engineering discipline, the software would never ship.
That was really the point of my article - not that we necessarily need 99.999% uptime, but that we are letting providers tell us that this is the best they can do, and we aren't demanding any better. As rmerry72 points out, there is therefore no incentive to provide better. And companies like Comcast tell you that they have to block P2P traffic to provide bandwidth, which is ridiculous. They just choose not to provide the bandwidth. They want to be able to charge us even more to provide the bare bones service that we already thought we were paying for.
It is possible to build something just good enough, and still make it reliable. The phone system was just good enough, but redundancy was build into the system to make it reliable.
Actually as I recall, SMS messages are sent as the payload in SS7 protocol messages that are used for normal call setup and teardown, so they are essentially free since the protocol is there either way.