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AT&T Migrating Phone Network to IP 167

Posted by CowboyNeal from the keeping-up-with-the-jones dept.
prostoalex writes "Following the lead of Sprint and Telus, who are moving their telephone networks to IP, AT&T will spend $3 billion to migrate to an IP-based network. By the end of 2005 about 270 legacy systems will be retired." The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1.
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AT&T Migrating Phone Network to IP More

AT&T Migrating Phone Network to IP

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  • Better be IPv6 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Thinkit3 ( 671998 ) * on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:09PM (#6937537)
    Well I suppose they're smart enough to go to something much more expandable. Just wonder how much legacy (ick) will still be stuck there.

    • Re:Better be IPv6 (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "The battleground in the 21st century is about who has got the best network from the edge-to-edge of network," Eslambolchi said. "To be able to access directly to customers is a fundamental strategy for AT&T."

      I'd take anything spewed by Eslambolchi with a grain of salt. He's correct about the migration to edge-to-edge (e.g. doing away with old technology) but at the same time he's the champion of the "concept of zero" (e.g. lay everybody off) which doesn't exactly sit very well with the people who

  • What about VOIP (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rock_climbing_guy ( 630276 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:12PM (#6937554) Journal
    Is this any indication that with the proliferation of IP technology, even the phone companies will eventually start working with VOIP instead of trying so hard to kill it?

    If so, maybe they should spread the good word to our frinds at the RIAA. ::/me wakes up::

    • Re:What about VOIP (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:26PM (#6937685) Homepage
      Not a chance.

      Phone companies want to itemize and per-minute and allocation and whatnot anything to death. They will stop working with VOIP when they are forced to, not a second before.

      • Re:What about VOIP (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tmack ( 593755 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @08:32PM (#6938157) Homepage Journal
        And how does VOIP change this??

        VOIP is just another protocol. Most people seem to not realize that by the time their phoneline reaches the edge of their neighborhood, it has become a digital signal. The transition to VOIP is just natural progression. It allows more flexability, but will still require routers and switchtes to operate. Through these switches and routers is how the phone companies will keep track of calls. VOIP does NOT mean an end to phone numbers, providers, etc... Remember that most of the internet is carried by the ILEC networks on the same loops used to carry voice, just reonfigured slightly to allow pure data traffic. VOIP providers merely use these loops in the data configuration with routers that convert the analog voice signals to packets closer to the customer end than normal voice lines. VOIP merely abstracts the traffic type from the physical layer more than current SS7 and other protocols. VOIP is not simply PC-PC calls placed by IP address. VOIP is only a different protocol, central switches are still used to route calls and keep track of things, they just run more efficently (ie: 1 VOIP switch about the size of a 10k cisco can handle the entire call volume for a decent sized city (or 2) where currently several switches are required by the ILECs). Per-minute rates and such will still be acounted for. Phone providers will switch to VOIP mainly due to the relative simplicity and flexability of its stucture. VOIP is NOT what alot of people percieve, it is simply a new method of routing voice traffic that does not eliminate the need for routers/switches/etc...

        TM

        • Aye. I think the discussion about the phone companies not trying kill VoIP was more referring to the VoIP long distance and local phone services. So perhaps we were talking about Vo-the-internet. The phone companies, of course, will do VoIP behind the covers if it works for them.

          • Re:What about VOIP (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Tmack ( 593755 )
            Exactly my point. Most true VOIP solutions will still probably run over the existing physical infrastructure, which will most likely use prvate/unrouteable subnets ala 192.168./10./172.16.128. as does the VOIP company I happen to be employed by. Not only does this make it alot more difficult to breach from the outside net (besides being firewalled specifically among other things), it allows building custom neworks to handle the low-latency required for VOIP. I do see the end of interstate long-distance bein
        • you didn't live through networking 'revolutions' like ATM. at that time we were told repeatedly that IP may have been a nice playground, but the telcos, who really know how to run a service, were going to take over now. IP and TCP were never going to be suitable for large scale business deployment.

          'at&t moves voice service to ip' would have been a hilarious gag article 10 years ago, now no one even blinks.

      • Re:What about VOIP (Score:3, Interesting)

        by PatJensen ( 170806 )
        Try again. Even with the proliferation of Centrex [sbc.com] adoption for most Gov/Ed and small commercial customers, and those that can't afford to deploy a PBX or KSU - IP Telephony is being deployed at breakneck speeds, by your favorite local exchange carrier's [sbc.com]. Breakthrough new products like Cisco ITS [cisco.com] make this even easier and much more cost effective, within a year you will see even smaller border routers handling voice calls end-to-end with voice messaging integration and fax relay. This is all over the same

    • Re:What about VOIP (Score:5, Informative)

      by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:40PM (#6937800) Journal
      Depends on which phone companies you're talking about. The incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) make their money by charging customers outrageous monthly fees, and by charging long distance companies for terminating their calls at the local subscriber's telephone. They hate VOIP.

      Carriers like AT&T, which sell primarily long distance, like VOIP since it saves them money, and could eventually allow them to bypass the ILECs entirely, since it turns voice calls into another internet data stream. They like VOIP.

  • Bandwidth? (Score:5, Informative)

    by lord_paladine ( 568885 ) <wdnm91q02@sneakemail.com> on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:13PM (#6937565)
    As this [nwfusion.com] article states, the bandwidth required for VoIP can be huge. I would seriously hope to see some more advanced algorithms or better yet, more bandwidth installed, before these systems become more heavily adopted.

    • Re:Bandwidth? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:30PM (#6937719) Homepage
      Too bad your link refers to corporations using VoIP on their LAN/WAN as an alternative to traditional telephony. What we're talking about here is telephone operators using IP as a backbone transport (as opposed to voice over ATM VCs, etc). For telephone providers, VoIP has some excellent advantages, the most notable being consolidation of existing infrastructure (ie, being able to use the same lines for both voice and data).

    • Re:Bandwidth? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AustinTSmith ( 148316 )
      This is quite true, I hope the national networks are ready to lay the fiber to compensate for their $3billion dollar investment or upgrade their existing network.

      A possibility is to convert the current fiber framework to support fiberoptic dense wave division multiplexing which takes light, bends it through a prism to split it into 32 seperate colors and alternate the sequence of flashes to produce a on/off 1/0. This is technology that can be applied to current fiber lines, and can expand their bandwidth

    • Re:Bandwidth? (Score:5, Informative)

      by phliar ( 87116 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:34PM (#6937759) Homepage
      I used to work at a VoIP added-services provider. Received wisdom was that packet telephony was definitely the future, but 50-50 on whether or not IP was the right protocol for packet voice networks. One thing for sure is, in H.323 there's no point in using G.711 for voice -- a decent 10-12kbps codec will sound fine compared to the 64kbps that G.711 uses. I think that H.323 is sensitive to all kinds of parameters like comfort noise and silence suppression, you need to tune it to your network. In practice, it looks like well-tuned VoIP does take more bandwidth that good ol' PSTN, but the difference is not significant enough to justify running two kinds of networks.

      However I worked at the software end, not VoIP network operations -- what do I know?

      • Re:Bandwidth? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by secolactico ( 519805 )
        a decent 10-12kbps codec will sound fine compared to the 64kbps that G.711 uses

        Indeed. However, the services that will suffer the most are legacy data over voice lines, such as fax and modems.
        • [a decent 10-12kbps codec will sound fine]

          However, the services that will suffer the most are legacy data over voice lines, such as fax and modems.

          That could be seen as a feature: the crappier the modem and fax quality is, the sooner people will move off them! (Although real-time fax with H.323 doesn't seem to be there yet, and apparently faxed documents are legally OK but scanned and emailed documents are not.)

      • I thought everyone was settled on G.729a since that's what all the cell networks tend to use and the IP cores and whatnot are there, refined, tested and debugged thoroughly.

    • Re:Bandwidth? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by doogles ( 103478 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @08:14PM (#6938066)
      As this article states, the bandwidth required for VoIP can be huge. I would seriously hope to see some more advanced algorithms or better yet, more bandwidth installed, before these systems become more heavily adopted.

      Ah, but with packet telephony, we are only "burning up" bandwidth for active calls:

      Take a traditional circuit-switch T1 carrying 24 DS0, sitting idle making no calls, and you still have a T1 that can be used for nothing else.

      Take the same scenario in a packet-switched world, and you have a T1 100% usable for other data until such time as the circuit is needed. QoS (LLQ, or PQ/CBWFQ in Cisco-speak) ensures that when there IS a voice call it gets priority treatment.

      Last note, on IP overhead: Enterprises with smaller links can leverage compressed RTP headers (cRTP) to reduce the 40 byte IP/UDP/RTP penalty down to 2 bytes across point-to-point links (Frame Relay PVC, leased lines, BRIs, etc). This concept doesn't really apply to a carrier because of the CPU impact header compression costs, but considering all carrier networks are currently severly underutilized I do not think this should be a reason to shy away from packet telephony.
      • Another thing is that you theoretically can use high compression on the calls, when it's needed, like when another skyscraper is blown up or another state loses electricity. It's not like people would complain about quality then. And it would also help with benign events, like New Year or something, when people want to make a lot of calls, since you can do with less extra capacity. Lower costs for telecoms, lower prices for customers.

    • Re:Bandwidth? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Ziviyr ( 95582 )
      How about all the stuff the Xiph, umm, org, is working on.

      Ogg Speex is actively developed last I checked.

  • You know (Score:5, Funny)

    by loraksus ( 171574 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:14PM (#6937571) Homepage
    I . . . loveusin. . . gIPtelephony. . . . Lagis . . . notreallyanissue.
    • I . . . loveusin. . . gIPtelephony. . . . Lagis . . . notreallyanissue.

      Yeah, and c3ll.....u....lar phone co......nvers....ations over that liiiiii.....neare going to be great!!!!!!

      I wonder how my USR Courier v.Everything will handle the line? Will hardware and Xon/Xoff flow control flake out enroute to my ISP? Hmmmm
    • How would an IP based network cause greater latency than existing legacy networks? Ever try talking to someone oversees with current technology? Last time I spoke to someone in Germany there was a noticeable 4 to 5 second delay. I'd be willing to bet that the latency oversees would be vastly improved, as well as just across the US. I'm speculating, but I highly doubt that an IP based network would be anything other than an improvement.

      Just a thought.
      • It's not so much the latency that's bad, but the variance of latency.

      • Re:You know (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ericman31 ( 596268 )

        Well, here's an example based on one person's experience. My organization is converting its TDM PBX system to IP Telephony and VOIP. We are completely packet switched IP for voice from the phone across our entire WAN to the PSTN circuits connecting us to our ILEC. We have not implemented QoS at all at this point. My phone is separated from the PSTN circuits by a T-1 point to point circuit that also carries the traffic of about 65 developers, sys admins and DBA's back to the main data center. We have about 1

      • it was meant as a joke, and if you are using something other than your home dsl line it will probably be ok. OTOH, I know a bunch of fax machines have issues sending stuff over ip based services like net2phone. . .

  • Things can evolve (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:14PM (#6937575)
    The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1

    The day the RIAA will be such a threat to peaceful P2P that people will start reading aloud file hex printouts byte by byte over the phone to share data, I think the trend will reverse. But I might be wrong ...

    • How fast of a modem is that? Hmm, maybe around 20 to 30 bit/s? How many times can you say EF or A7 a second? Or will people resort to moving to a larger base to say it faster? I'm sure someone could match a 300 baud modem eventually.

  • The IP attorneys will have a field day. (Score:1, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder if this means that all phone conversations will become the intellectual property of the phone company.
    • "I wonder if this means that all phone conversations will become the intellectual property of the phone company."

      I wonder if this means I'll be able to set the copy protection bit on my phone convos.

      *Sticks his tongue out at the local law enforcement HQ*

  • an easier way (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:16PM (#6937599)
    i've found a much easier way to do this. just set up the text-to-speech component of your favorite IM program. now all my friends sound like stephen hawking!!! : p

  • Phreaking (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pro_Piracy_Guy ( 699942 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:17PM (#6937601)
    Does this mean I am going to have to adjust the frequency of my Kaptain Krunch whisle when I use the pay phone?

  • This brings back memories (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sevn ( 12012 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:19PM (#6937628) Homepage Journal
    A few years ago I was involved in a startup company. We had talked to qwest about buying a bunch of dark fiber. We had secured an insane amount of capital from Phoenix, E-Street, and MSDW surprisingly as they normally wouldn't be interested in a startup as they don't normally cater to incubator or angel type projects. So what were we selling? We had sat down and figured out that with some very expensive sycamore or juniper routers and DWDM and a bunch of dark fiber, we could roll out a nationwide flat rate VoIP long distance service for about 250 million dollars. We had an awesome business plan. A solid year of work. All the right buzzwords and an executive summary that would make the most hardened VC blush. We were a few months from starting. Qwest was excited. Everyone was excited. Then *poof*. All gone in an instant. It seems that AT&T had issued a statement to their stock holders that they would not be paying out dividends that year to anyone because they wanted to warchest that money in case someone like us came along. So the business plan was instantly invalidated. If things had gone the other way, I'd more than likely be selling a lot of you unlimited long distance service for 30 bucks a month, and expanding worldwide.
    • Gee, $30 a month? AT&T sells unlimited long distance for $20 a month. Looks like your little company would have gone belly-up fast.
      • Sure, if at the time everyone had the option of hopping in a time machine and going 3 or 4 years in the future to use that 20 dollar a month long distance. As things were, we would have been the first kids on the block.
    • If things had gone the other way, I'd more than likely be selling a lot of you unlimited long distance service for 30 bucks a month, and expanding worldwide.


      Just as well you didn't then; for $30 a month I get all the local and long distance I need on my cell phone. Sounds like the company would have failed anyway (not that it didn't sound like a good idea).

      • Re:This brings back memories (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Sevn ( 12012 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @08:06PM (#6938013) Homepage Journal
        You are overlooking the benefits of being first to market with something. That and the phone in the home isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Who is to say that we wouldn't have eventually been able to offer transport on our network to a t-mobile or similar company? That and advances in the past 3-4 years with fiber technology would have meant we could have easily doubled the traffic we would have been able to push across our fiber. It wouldn't have been hard at all to stay ahead. Granted, a great deal of our profit would have ended up going towards FCC lobby and other legal expenses because we knew the telcos would not take something like this sitting down. That's why we had provisions for such things in our business plan.

        • Certainly didn't help MS to be number 2 to Lotus, Novell, Apple.... etc...
          • Ok, I'll give you an example. MindSpring Enterprises was the first ISP in history to purchase customers outright from another ISP. They paid $499 per customer to buy all of PSInet's dialup customers. Because of that, from that moment forward all ISP's were valued by the number of customers they had times 499. If the startup I was involved with had succeeded, things right now would be very different. You couldn't be sure that 20 dollars flat rate is what someone could get for long distance. The market would

          • No it didn't. MS got by in spite of it. Partly because B.G. is paranoid (i.e., he's always looking for the next threat so he saw these coming), and partly because they already had quite a bit of money built up then thanks to good ol' DOS licensing.

            Don't even bother with a Netscape / IE comparison either--same thing--MS didn't have "First Mover" advantage (B.G. terminology I believe) but it did have 1E50 lb. Gorrilia advantage, which, generally speaking, is enough to crush First Movers into itty bitty li

        • Phone in the home is going away. Gone, going, outta here. Once cellular carriers start to provide adequate service, it's gone over there too in few years.
          • Possibly. But what about the phone(s) in the business? Don't assume that the phone on the desk in the cubicle is going anywhere anytime soon. Don't assume that the enormous infrastructure in place to provide phone service for the business market will go away for a very long time. That would have been a very viable market for the startup I was involved with. I think you are being slightly naive about how quickly the phone in the home will disappear also. Until such time as reliable and fast Internet service
            • the companies are indeed a place to see them in use, but even there it's getting phased out in places where you don't just sit around answering the phone.

              **Until such time as reliable and fast Internet service can be provided wireless for people that can't even get broadband. Until it is feasable to send faxes over a cellphone** that is already here too, covering the are that gsm covers(whole finland basically, gprs ain't bad compared to dialup hell, when there's no free local calls dialup gets pretty expe
    • Well, if you figure your local service costs 20 bucks with all the features turned on (caller id, call waiting, 3-way, etc) then yes, you can get unlimited long distance for 30 bucks a month right now, in 46 states. Check out this site [fortunecalling.com].

  • IP telephone service has come a long way (Score:5, Interesting)

    by joel8x ( 324102 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:22PM (#6937652) Homepage
    A few years ago I was part of a deployment of an all IP Siemens phone system at this place I used to work at. The voicemeail was actually part of an MS exchange server, and you recieved all of your voicemail in you inbox in Outlook. I loved it because I could set up a PST and easily archive phone messages on my hard drive. Unfortunately the system suffered from horible sound quality (there was a lag when you talked to people and it echoed like crazy) and was just not ready for prime time. I got a great taste of the future of business IP phone systems, though.

  • Outdated infrastructure? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RobertB-DC ( 622190 ) * on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:26PM (#6937684) Homepage Journal
    From the article:
    AT&T plans to retire 270 legacy systems across the world by the end of 2005. Approximately 130 legacy systems were retired over the past 18 months, with another 140 systems slated for phase out over the next two years.

    The article didn't define exactly what "legacy systems" were (switches? entire local networks?), but that sure sounds like a lot of high technology that's heading for the dustbin. We're talking technology that's currently in use creating a mobile communications system that would have been unimaginable just 15 years ago.

    Will it all be scrapped out? Will barges full of misc parts be shipped to third-world scavenging companies to recover the precious metals? Or is there some way to move the equipment to areas that need it -- Afghanistan [bbc.co.uk] and Iraq [usatoday.com] come to mind right away, but I'd think that under-served (and under-reported) countries like Somalia [indymedia.org.uk] and the rest of Africa could make use of this supposedly outdated hardware.

    Of course, we're back to the same old question -- when it costs more to recycle than to dump, how do you justify doing the Right Thing to shareholders whose only interest is in doing the Profitable Thing?

    • Re:Outdated infrastructure? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kallahar ( 227430 ) <kallahar@quickwired.com> on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:58PM (#6937948) Homepage
      The problem with POTS systems is that you have to have the entire country wired with copper. A place that doesn't have the same huge investment in infrastructure that the US has is probably better off buying a used cell phone system and just running fiber between the towers. We may think of cell phones as being a luxury but that's only because we have 70 years of investment into copper to every home.
      • nack

        The problem with your statements is that you only look to telephony. I want to be able to do alot, alot more at home (like reading Slashdot and watching movies) all that should come over a nice line. Fiber is the fourth utility...

    • countries like Somalia and the rest of Africa could make use of this supposedly outdated hardware.

      They could....except for that fact that no copper wiring exists in these countries. It is much more economical to use wireless solutions for almost everything then to try and run wiring in these war torn countries.

  • I hope this doesn't mean what I think it will (Score:5, Interesting)

    by donutello ( 88309 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:26PM (#6937686) Homepage
    I make a lot of international calls and I've experimented with Sprint, MCI, AT&T and a whole bunch of phone card providers.

    Without question, AT&T has been miles better than the rest. The other providers obviously use packet switching as evidenced by the intermittent delays as much as a couple of seconds. Sometimes you can get half-way through a sentence when you hear the other guy starting a sentence that he did when there was silence - it gets very annoying because both of you have to practice random backoff which can either result in empty silence or both of you speaking over each other.

    I hope AT&Ts service doesn't go that way.

  • Dumb Dialup Question (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:28PM (#6937698) Homepage Journal
    Does the conversion to IP on the backend help or hurt the poor dialup, and direct point to point analog modem ( read: old style bbs courier ) users out there.

    It may effect nothing, just wondering.
    • If the bandwidth for good VoIP is available at my house, I'd be dammed pissed if I had to use dial up 'net service.

      As far as dialup to bbs, etc. it should be possible. We recently put 2 buildings on a VoIP system at work, and they still have the old fax machines, etc. Whether the Big Carrier would keep those lines maintained, etc. is a different story.
    • It should be transparent to you. There should still be a 64 kbps full-duplex pipe between the end-points of the connection. The difference is how the bits get transported.
    • It's IP, but it's not the Internet.
      • I know we are talking protocol here.. Im not a newbie..

        My only concern was if the effective analog bandwidth at the wall jack would be enough to get decent speed via analog modem.

        Ive never actually tried doing analog data transfer across an IP voice network..

        From what others say, it wont be any less bandwdith then we have now.. So I'm not too worried.

        I can see a day soon when broadband is under too much restriction ( and surveillance ) to be useful for some of us old-timers, and a slow migration back to

    • Re:Dumb Dialup Question (Score:4, Interesting)

      by cfulmer ( 3166 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @10:53PM (#6939178) Journal
      This is actually one of the funny problems with VoIP. If you just take a standard phone call, you can packetize it and if you haven't tried to gather too much audio into one packet, the additional latency won't even be noticable on the other end. Heck, you can even drop an occasional packet and chances are nobody will notice.

      Modems, however, do not handle either latency or packet loss well -- part of the initial V.(90??) standards take a latency measurement at the beginning, expecting it to be some small number that doesn't change. In VoIP, not only isn't the number small (closer to 100ms than 20ms), but it can vary over the life of the call.

      So, what ends up happening is that your local gateway (the thing that converts between traditional phone and packet communications) listens for your modem tones and kicks in a V./G.whatever codec to convert it into packet. Then, at the far end, the same thing happens.
  • with millions of American households running Telephone equipment, you'd have to almost sweep house by house to pull out all the old Analog equipment. I shudder to think of the cost...

  • Will IP telephony work during a blackout? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IP telephony may be cheaper, but there are other considerations to be taken into account here.
    At least the phones did function during the recent blackout. Can you say the same for IP-based telephony?
  • UnixWare? Ha ha ha...

  • Dialup Users (Score:4, Funny)

    by jasontwarnock ( 196139 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:34PM (#6937755) Homepage
    Hmm, I wonder what this will do to dialup users. TCP/IP over PPP over VOIP.
    • Ummm....I think that would be VOIP (Voice OVER IP) over IP over PPP.

    • Re:Dialup Users (Score:3, Informative)

      by porky_pig_jr ( 129948 )
      Amen, bro. That was my first thought as well.

      On the other hand, if other comments are correct and VoIP takes in fact HIGHER bandwidth than the 64Kbps POTS, things aren't that bad after all. Of course it sounds funny - with potential compression of about 8-10Kbps, how come it takes higher bandwidth overall? Apparently, some protocol overhead. AT least this is what Tolly group claims, and I know Tolly quite well, their tests and conclusions are normally well founded.

      So the best case scenario - nothing will
      • assuming, of course, that lazy ILECs even want to roll out new DSL service. My neigborhood - the dslam is full and no plans for expansion until 2008. What can I say, people want it, but it just isn't available. Cable just came into the neigborhood, so I got it. Faster downstream AND upstream (verizon will give you 15k and nothing more in my area, paying more wont help here). . . People want it, verizon says, sorry, we can't help you. . . .
        • Yes, cable is faster, no doubt. ADSL is really two tin cans and a wire. BUT ADLS is being sold cheaper as well. Also - this is fairly important point - IEEE is currently working on defining DLS version 2, for twice higher distances and of course much lower rates -- but this should give fairly decent coverage to most of the users, don't remember all the details, so the article in EETimes (they have a web site).

          So one of the possible scenarios is that when the switch from 64Kbps POTS to VoIP takes place, pro
    • TCP/IP over PPP over VOIP.

      Heh. I already have a situation like this in my pocket. I have a cell phone (kyocera 6035) that runs PalmOS, and has a real web browser. To do something on the Web, what it does is makes a phone call and brings up a PPP connection on the "line".

      This means that I have IP implemented on PPP over a voice line, which is emulated over a digital packet network. The resulting IP network probably runs at least 1000 times slower than just doing IP on the low-level packet network woul
    • Hmm, I wonder what this will do to dialup users. TCP/IP over PPP over VOIP.

      It means they'll probably be lucky if they can get a CONNECT 9600.

      Our national telephone service already pulled this crap over 15 years ago. When you complained about the low connect rate, they'd either say "speeds are not guaranteed over 2400" or "oh, sorry, we didn't know you were going to use this for a modem line" and they'd give you a dedicated line (what you paid for in the first place!).
    • RTFA, they plan to retire all 270 dialup users by 2005 :)
    • Nah... The big change will be that you will have to get a new modem. This modem will send a signal to the telco POP that says not to do the VoIP compression thing, and instead, allow the endpoints to send raw packets.

      This has two distinct advantages.

      1. It allows Modems to use the full bandwidth available, and doesn't waste processing power at the POP doing something that is unnecessary, and unwanted.

      2. It would allow more aadvanced things to go on. If the phones at each end support a newer VoIP code

  • Oh, great. (Score:5, Funny)

    by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:37PM (#6937781) Homepage
    Now when the next sobig.f or whatever hits, we'll lose the phone service as well as the electicity.

    • I think the next sobig will be .g, because .f already happened. At least, that's how the naming scheme has gone so far, but I could be wrong. Who knows, maybe they'll try to throw us off by using the same name as last time...

  • Good!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by moehoward ( 668736 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:43PM (#6937821)
    I, for one, welcome our new packet-based overlords.

    Now. About this encryption thing...
    • Encryption? Hell, come 2005 I'm buyin' my own 5ess from ebay at a bargain. Wanna talk to me? Gotta interface to my private POTS network!

      Now I just need a few hundred more amps and 5 tonnes of air conditioning in my basement...

  • Does AT&T get to avoid regulations now? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by geekee ( 591277 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @07:48PM (#6937868)
    According to this slashdot post [slashdot.org] VoIP should remain unregulated. Now that AT&T is using VoIP, do they get the same treatment?
    • As a long-distance service, they should be unregulated. As a local telephone service, who still uses public lands to lay their lines, they should continue to be regulated.

      Vonage, who uses no public lands for lines, should be completely unregulated (although I do think they should have to pay their share for 911 services).

  • Hopefully this means AT&T will really upgrade their bandwidth capabilities, such as bettering that "last-mile problem"
    With luck Verizon will upgrade theirs too, which _may_ benifit EVERYBODY.

    (By the way, at school they use Cisco ip phones over the 100Mbps network, which seems to work fine.)

    So, hopefully they'll upgrade their bandwidth capabilities (use that fiber optic already laid!), if not, they're smoking crack, and should be run outta town,

  • Skype (Score:3, Informative)

    by westlake ( 615356 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @08:35PM (#6938174)
    CNET has posted a Sept 11 newsmakers interview with Kazaa's Janus Friis promoting his P2P telephony app, Skype: Why VoIP is music to Kazaa's ear. [com.com] The download (for Windows 2000 and XP only) can be found here: Skype beta. [com.com]

    • Re:Skype (Score:3, Funny)

      by suss ( 158993 )
      CNET has posted a Sept 11 newsmakers interview with Kazaa's Janus Friis promoting his P2P telephony app, Skype

      Hmm, i wonder if we can expect spyware/gator crap with that...

      "Hi, mom, i'm ready to move, i'll just have to call *[WHEN-U]* to ask them when they'll be here"

      "But i thought you were going to use U-HAUL?"

      "That's what' i said, *[WHEN-U]*!"

      "aaaaaaarghhh!!!"
  • The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1.
    I wonder how much of the packet traffic in that ratio is accounted for by spam?

  • A=1/V=8 (Score:3, Funny)

    by Citizen of Earth ( 569446 ) on Thursday September 11, 2003 @08:51PM (#6938283)
    The article also notes how the current ratio of packet traffic to voice is already 8:1.

    That's because video porn takes so much more bandwidth than audio porn.
  • Has any actually successfully deployed VOIP in a campus setting? (I realize the article is about long-haul backbone stuff, so I'm a little OT.)

    If you've been successfull, describe your topology. Do you have trusted end-nodes? I don't. So I need to either VLAN or run a separate physical network, right? Even w/ VLAN, that means separate wires for phone vs. data from the room to the closet. Yes this is conservative. Do you trust you can call the police/fire department etc. on an IP phone on a campus net

  • Cold day in hell... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by neBelcnU ( 663059 )
    ...when all the banks, law firms, hospitals, and other multi-site businesses will toss their 5ESS's for IP telephony.

    Remember, we heard this before, and my then-employers couldn't have sold a VoIP GATEWAY with a gun. But we employed FULL TIME three retired and semi-retired switch-wizards to take care of all those AT&T^H^H^H^HLucent^H^H^H^H^H^HAvaya switches.

    We've got to wait for a LOT of retirements (human) before we will see wide adoption of packet-telephony. It's homo sapiens sitting at the very e

    • Re:Cold day in hell... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sentry21 ( 8183 )
      On the contrary, a lot of companies nowadays, especially those with branch offices and the like, are moving to VOIP. In Canada, for example, many Ontario (or Vancouver) call-centres are realizing that all they need is an internet connection to be able to route all 'Poussez 2 pour service en Francais' to a smaller French-only call centre in Montreal. Other companies are finding that they can (relatively) seamlessly integrate branch offices into their extension system ('324 for Joan in accounting in Toronto,
  • What about their investment in ATM?
    Can you run IP over ATM reliably?

    Chip H.

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